My suggestions for FF2 Pixel Remaster Players:

[Keytee Tamira]

1) Don't be afraid to waste MP. The more you spend, the more higher your MP stat will be. And more intelligence and spirit, which means stronger Black and White Magicks.

2) Always use Cure in battle. It can potentially raise Spirit, Magic and MP stats.

3) Don't be afraid to lose all MP while in dungeon. Simply go back to the inn and rest, you will be stronger, thus it will be easier to go further into the dungeon, and you don't need to sidetrack for treausres.

4) Always swap weapons if you feel like your weapon stat doesn't grow. This will make your character profinent in many weapons without needing for extra grind.

5) Always check the world map once you close to finishing the dungeon, or you feel like you're finishing it: It will show the number of treausres you collected and trasures overall in the dungeons, thus you may know if you missed some. Some dungeons may be one-time only. Also make a quick save and check if you have all the monsters from the dungeon.

6) Before sailing to a certain tower to get a certain spell, check if you have those monsters in your bestiary, they're missable.
~At Sea => 40:Killer Fish. 42:Helldiver. 45:Buccaneer. 52:Sea Snake.
~Palamecia Desert => 31:Antlion. 54:Land Ray.
~Land between Fynn & Palamecia Desert => 11:Phorusracos.

7) Always check all the keywords on any person that you can tell them. They might teach you a special keywords for some bonus items.

8) Don't bother leveling up the fourth character in the party.

9) At the start of the game, fight using two shields, and remove some armor so you can have 99% evasion. This way you can raise your agility and strength, as you evade most of the attacks, and raise the level of not only the shields, but also the fists, as your characters fight using them when they're armed with two shields.

10) Level up the Swap spell. If you use it on low-level enemies, you get critically low amounts of HP and MP on your character, but after the battle they'll get HP, MP, Vitality and Magic stats levelup. Make sure you have enough money to rest at the inn, or if inn costs more than 2000 gil, buy a Cottage in item shop.

[三Akiyama]

Fyi the cost is the inn is the amount of HP and MP you've lost x1. So it's always a good idea to heal yourself by using Cure before going to the inn, this way you'll save a good amount of gils.

[SC_Nikki]

Great tips, especially checking the bestiary during one-time dungeons. I missed Vampire Lady in FF2 and something in Hein's Castle in FF3 (whatever is right before him on the list). :(

[spoonygundam]

I think best practice might actually be to straight up kill off your rotating guest member rather than simply not putting much effort into leveling them.

Evasion XP is at a premium in this version because the change to the row mechanics means there's no way to direct enemy attacks to specific party members, and the fourth character will be sucking up a lot of hits over the course of the game. Killing them would probably end up getting you an extra level of Evasion on everyone by the end, which is good because that's the most important stat in the game.

[archer92]

Originally posted by fangisboss:

Are you certain #10 works on raising the magic stat? It hasn't moved since leveling up Swap and usage.

Magic stat in older ports used to grow by losing good chunk of MP in battle. So if this port didn't do too drastic changes it should still be the case. However I notice that raw Evesion number gains are stingier than they used to be.

[AH-1 Cobra]

You can massively boost evasion number by having a character defend on auto battle against enemies that can't damage them. Go AFK for a bit while auto battle continues, come back, finish the fight and you'll have gained an evasion # most likely. You could literally get it to 8x really fast. And 8x is enough to not get hit by melee attacks, if you're 8x 99%.

For leveling spells, and this requires a decent MP pool, you target your whole party with a spell like "fire", and then have another party member cast aoe cure. Auto battle against weak enemies, and when one of your characters casting on auto depletes their MP, they will auto attack the enemies and end the battle. You can rest up, and repeat. Literally do this AFK.

For non-damaging spells, this is even easier. Just auto battle repeat cast barrier, berserk, whatever.

For instant death spells like teleport/break/warp/mini, etc, find an enemy that's immune to those, like ghosts or slimes, and repeat cast using auto battle, and walk away for a bit.

For leveling up weapon levels. Use the weakest weapon you can, against the tankiest enemies you can that can't damage you (having enough evasion # and %), and auto battle attack. Black Flans work particularly good for getting high weapon levels using this strategy. All the way up to level 16.

Ultima, a spell a lot of people think is trash, its damage scales with your # of weapon levels, and even getting all weapon levels up to level 8 makes this spell do a lot more damage, like more damage than any other damaging spell.

I boosted Ultima to 16 using auto battle, and the spell did so much damage to my party, that I needed 3 people using AOE cure to heal the damage, and even then, it wasn't 100%. And that was after going out of my way to nerf ultima's damage by getting gear penalties. So, this spell did extreme damage. My Firion had level 16 in fists, and level 8 or so in the other weapons, and still did big damage with Ultima. He also had 2 swords equipped, gauntlet, and heavy armor too. My party was getting hit for 1200-1400 damage each from ultima sometimes.

[Ostarion]

If you don't want to take the time to exploit the mechanics to the extreme (which is perfectly valid) then you should always do your best to delay battles as much as possible without outright defending every round.

Also you should cycle through your spells, as the first time you cast a spell you get more experience, but each subsequent time you cast a spell in the same battle, it gives you less.

Be careful with getting too much HP, if you can help it, as drain attacks, which are fairly common, work by taking away a percentage of your hp, so the higher it is, the more hp you will lose. Try to do your grinding as you go, rather than specifically grinding

Intelligence and Spirit are a bit difficult to level unless you are constantly casting spells of the appropriate type, so you should generally have a dedicated user of each type of spell in your party, i.e. a black mage and a white mage. Utility spells (used only for their utility), and spells that are purely buff aren't really affected by equipment as much, so you may want them on your dedicated fighter to spread out the mp usage.

I would generally recommend that you save extreme grinding until after you get the final 4th party member (trust me you will know when this happens), since you will actually want to grind the 4th member who will be permanent as well.

Int/soul penalty is a problem, but you may still want shields on your casters as they can still get agility increases in battle while only casting spells, and the sooner you can do this, the better. Don't worry too much about your spell damage, and if you really need a spell to land, you can take off the shield in the middle of battle. Eventually your agility should be high enough, that even without the shield, you should have high evasion. The Main Gauche Dagger can also be used as a "shield" for one character without tanking their magic damage, so consider leveling daggers on one of your mages.

Magic Defense isn't as useful in this version as in the NES, but it still helps in certain situation, and raises as a combination of the magic and stamina stats, Stamina should be raising naturally on its own as long as you are getting hit. Magic also raises on your mages easily, but any dedicated fighter might have difficulty raising magic. Employ the sap spell on someone to intentionally damage mp, so that you can raise your magic stats.