I recently discovered this game and I'm loving it! ^{And, like all games I love, I spreadsheet'd it!}

A screenshot of my average run 🤩

After clearing all the stages, I started wondering about optimizations and grinding. I found a ton posts asking about the best team or the best stage, but there were some uncertainties or conflicting opinions and I ended up trying to piece together bits of info from their comment sections. I decided to start tracking my results to see if I could validate or discover any trends, and this is everything I've gathered from about 500 recorded runs (and counting, since there are a few things I'm still uncertain of.)

This post isn't meant to be a proper guide or anything. A lot of it's probably old news, but I'm adding in my two cents here to reaffirm a few things that people might still be questioning.

New Player Tips:

• Any four random characters with max strength can clear most quests that don't have a conditions like 2.5x boss HP or requiring a elemental damage, status effect, or specific character.
• Characters can go up to lv99 and then gain up to 9 star levels. The star level exp requirement doesn't increase, so it's a pretty casual grind. A maxed stat is 999, and each star level is worth +50 for all stats. Use your +30 stat potions accordingly!
• CollectaCards of a character will increase their stats by a few points depending on the rarity.
• You only lose health when poisoned or failing a trigger, but poison will not drop you below 1 HP.
• Ability scrolls are hard to come by. Think twice before you use them because you could be farming for hours before you get another copy, even with a optimized party.
• Consider maxing out a party first, even using a ton of eggs to do it. Since damage affects how many kills you get, and kills affect how much exp and how many chests you can get, having strong characters will help you raise other characters more quickly.
• 9999 is the most exp you can get per song, and every character gets the full amount. Since eggs are relatively common, I recommend trying to combine exp bonuses and landing right around the 10k mark to make the best use of each egg.
  • Summonstone exp multipliers are additive: 10% + 10% + 30% = 1.5x bonus
  • Other exp multipliers are multiplicative: 1.5x × 200% × 400% = 12x bonus

Farming Tips:

If you plan on farming, these are all the special characters:

• Item Hunter: Faris, Fran, Locke, Paine, Prompto
• Discerning Eye: Paine, Thancred, Yuffie, Zidane
• CollectaCard Magnet: Ace, Balthier, Chocobo, Prompto, Rikku, Yuna #2, Zidane
• Fran and Zidane have unique skills affecting general chest drop rate.
• Payne and Yuffie have unique skills affecting summonstone rarity.
• Balthier and Rikku have unique skills affecting collectacard rarity.
• Rare Summoner (Yuffie) affects summonstone rarity and can be taught to anyone if you have the scroll.
• Rare Collector (Rikku) affects collectacard rarity and can be taught to anyone if you have the scroll.

The opportunity-cost of using abilities that can increase damage output for more kills makes Mug and Steal less desirable, and it's worth considering a character without the abilities listed if they have unique abilities that allow them to do considerably more damage.

Miscellaneous Findings

Things I've either discovered or found supporting evidence for:

• Mug does what it says: steals an item. No kill required. I've occasionally gotten more chests than kills.
• Points, ranks, chains, and crits don't have a direct effect on exp or rewards. The rhythm game aspect is calculated off trigger accuracy, but damage output and, more importantly, battle delay is also affected by trigger accuracy.¹
• Difficulty scales Enemy HP and ATK, but it also scales character damage. More importantly, it changes the number of triggers. More triggers means more trigger damage, which could mean more kills, experience, and chests.
• (These are just tips from the loading screens.) Rainbow triggers with the rainbow ring do 5x as much damage as a rainbow or normal crit on a normal trigger. Slide triggers deal 1.5x damage. All trigger damage is based off STR, and the lane/row of the trigger corresponds to which character attacks. The target is random.²
• Trigger damage doesn't happen if the character isn't ready (they're in the middle of an ability's animation, on cooldown from recently attacking, waiting for or walking to the next wave, coming back from getting kicked off the screen, petrified, etc.)
• Characters don't have an inherent advantage over others. For example, Rikku's First Strike does the same damage as Yuffie's First Strike if they both have the same strength and %+ multiplier.
• Faris' Dual Wield + First Strike is the highest output single character for stages with many targets (at least in my experience so far, testing continues..)
• Noctis' Armiger does nearly 5x the damage of an ability like First Strike, but only activates on targets marked as the "BOSS" of the stage.
• Abilities with long animations are a waste of time and trigger damage if the target dies before they finish.
• "Overkill" damage doesn't carry over to the next target or battle.³
• Enemies are worth different amounts of exp and have different drop rate modifers. Logically, more important named characters (Cloud of Darkness, Ultimecia, Emerald Weapon, etc.) are worth more than less important monsters (Coeurl, Bomb, Flan, etc.)

^{1 - "Battle Delay" is what I call it when battles shift on the timeline due to trigger damage. It's common to either not do enough damage to clear a wave, or do so much damage that you see the next wave early. The result is wasting triggers while waiting for the next wave or not having enough triggers to kill it fast enough. This is a huge issue for stages that have enemies who can blind or petrify, which pretty much guarantees losing out on 2 or more kills. It's the main reason why we might get less experience or fewer kills despite getting higher scores or dealing more damage -- because whatever was slightly different desynced our usual battle pace from the trigger pace. It's extremely difficult to reliably control this inconsistency, so just know that's it's a pain in the ass and accounts for a lot of the variability in our runs.}

^{2 - At least, according to the tooltips. Most apparent when you hit a rainbow crit on a rainbow trigger is that everyone attacks no matter the lane.}

^{3 - I haven't been able to determine if summon damage carries over not, but it at least waits until the next battle if there aren't any targets. I have also seen the attack animation go off as the last enemy is dying, but only hit the next wave with damage numbers. I have not seen damage numbers wipe out a wave and then also appear on the next one, nor have I been able to tell if the next wave is any faster to kill due to some undisplayed amount of excess damage from the previous wave.}

Niche Findings

• Item Hunter, Discerning Eye, and CollectaCard Magnet increase the chances of items, summonstones, or collectacards appearing in chests. However, because chests can only contain one type of reward, these conflict and should only be stack together, not with each other.⁴
• Rare Summoner and Rare Collector increase the rarity of summonstones and collectacards in chests. If we take the in-game descriptions at face value, then they don't conflict and can be stacked with each other, but should probably only be stacked together for a purpose-built farm party.

^{4 - Technically, the description of these abilities say that they increase the chances of those rewards appearing in chests, but testing with a sample size of 200 JENOVA playthroughs says otherwise. Using the party below, removing all 4 Discerning Eyes reduced chest drop by \}1/min; removing Zidane's Thievery lowered chest drop by ~2/min; removing both together lowered it by about ~3/min; using 4 Descerning Eyes, 1 Item Hunter, and 1 CollectaCard Magnet, but not Thievery, brought drop rate back up towards baseline. This suggests that these abilities actually increase chest drop rate for their respective reward type and thus wouldn't conflict with each other since they don't affect chests we would've gotten without them. However, the original 4 Discerning Eyes and Thievery plus an additional 1 Item Hunter did not seem to significantly increase chest drop rate. Chests are also limited by number of kills, but we didn't cap out with a 100% drop rate here. Anyways, there may not be any more to optimize here beyond just using Thievery and 4 of a kind.)

The Summonstone Farm

The results below are from using this setup on simple mode and Ultimate(3) difficulty. I usually only score around 9m +/- 200k, and everyone is at 99✪9 with 999 STR&LUK. Replacing a character with higher damage output led to +0.8 chests/min and -0.4 rare summonstones/minute, which I feel is a net loss for this team's purpose.

These are all the available 2x Physical or 2x Ally Damage stages, minus field stages because of the damage downtime between battles even with 999AGI x4. Other stages weren't considered since item/card/stone hunting characters mostly deal physical damage and chest yield falls off dramatically without double damage. These numbers are based off of my personal experience and will be different from yours, but the ranking should remain roughly the same assuming you play consistent to yourself in all of them.

It's possible to improve these results just by playing better, on a higher difficulty, using a different summonstone, one with different bonuses, or running a party with different abilities, all of which have the potential to adjust battle delay such that trigger damage is at its highest during battles and lets you avoid status like blind and petrification. Keep in mind that enemies have different stats, so kills alone aren't very telling of anything.

The table below is ranked by chests per minute.

The table below contains the same stages ranked by exp per run.

The important take away is not so much which stage is better than the others, but how closely efficient some of them are to each other. If you happen to hit a groove or a sweet spot that lets you kill an extra wave, a stage could move up a rank or two for you.

Conclusion

• Don't farm for the perfect summonstone! Just don't do it! Spend your time and luck elsewhere! (I'm currently at 0/2800 😂)
• Go online and trade proficards to find the summonstone of your dreams!
• If you want to be optimal, max out a farm party before working on your other characters. Optimal isn't usually fun for most people though, so just do what sparks joy!
• The game isn't that deep. You don't need to know any of this. Just do your best and have fun!