How to do the Don Tonberry AP Trick

This guide is to help those who want to level up quickly, or to those who may be unsure of the method.

What is the Don Tonberry AP Trick?

The Don Tonberry AP Trick is a way to quickly level up your party, getting you 50 or more AP spheres in 10 minutes or less. Performing this trick will make you complete the sphere grids for all party members really fast and will unlock the 'Perfect Sphere Master' Steam achievement. It may seem hard to perform through all this text but believe me, Once you got the hang of it, you'll find it extremely easy to do. Before you begin, you'll have to complete a few pre-requirements. Continue to read on in the Preparations section of this guide.

Preparations

These preparations are mandatory and they must all be done, otherwise this trick will not work.


1. Unlock the Species Creation One Eye for the Monster Arena - To unlock One Eye in the Monster Arena, you will need to capture 5 of every floating eye ball monster found in certain areas of the game. To capture a monster you'll need a weapon with the Capture ability which you can buy weapons with the Capture ability from the Monster Arena man. Once you have a few weapons with the Capture ability, equip the weapons and go catch the following:

1) Floating Eye - Found in Mi'ihen Highroad
2) Evil Eye - Found in Macalania
3) Ahriman - Found in Gagazet
4) Floating Death - Found in Omega Ruins
5) Beur - Found in the Thunder Plains



2. Unlock Don Tonberry – To unlock Don Tonberry you must capture at least one of each monster from the Cavern of the Stolen Fayth which is the place where you got Yojimbo if you got him. These monsters are: Epaaj, Imp, Yowie, Thorn, Dark Element, Nidhogg, Valaha, Ghost, and Tonberry. Imp, Nidhogg and Valaha also appear on Mt. Gagazet and, if you capture them there, they count towards meeting the Cavern of the Stolen Fayth requirement.



3. Battle One Eye until you get one (or more) Triple AP weapon(s) with two empty slots - One Eye will drop weapons for everyone whether they were in the battle or not. Although whoever deals the final killing blow to One Eye slightly increases the chance they will get a Triple AP weapon. Or if you use an Aeon, than everyone gets an equal chance. One Eye may be difficult to defeat. If you cannot defeat him, Get Yuna to send out Anima and use Anima's overdrive Oblivion and Anima's normal attack.



4. Customize the Triple AP weapon(s) by adding Overdrive -> AP to each weapon - Customize with 10 Doors to Tomorrow. You can get x99 of these by capturing 1 of every fiend in at least 6 different areas.



5. Customize the Triple AP weapon(s) further, by adding Double Overdrive or Triple Overdrive -

Double Overdrive - 30x Underdog's Secret (Airship - All Al Bhed Primes = 99) (Al Bhed Home - Chimera: bribe 180,000 = 15)
Triple Overdrive - 30x Winning Formula (Sandworm: bribe 900,000 = 15)



6. Kill random weak monsters – Don Tonberry’s Karma counter-attack deals damage based on the amount of fiends a character has killed. His formula is [amount of kills] x100. So the closer to 999kills the better as the more kills each party member has, the more AP they'll earn against Don Tonberry.

The Method

Note: For my example, I'll be using the team of Tidus, Yuna and Wakka.


Wakka will be my “sacrifice” character. He has 999kills. He will be on Stoic overdrive mode.
Tidus & Yuna will be on Comrade Overdrive mode. Make sure all 3 have their Overdrive > AP weapons equip.


1. Fight Don Tonberry in the Area Conquest in the Monster Arena.

2. Have Tidus and Yuna defend.

3. Have Wakka attack. Don Tonberry will counter attack with Karma and K.O Wakka.

4. Revive him, and keep attacking while the other two continue to defend and revive Wakka.

5. When Don Tonberry gets close into range, he will stop counter attacking and start stabbing your party. Make sure everyone is alive, and flee the battle. You will receive a big amount of sphere levels.

Other Information

You will run out of stat spheres pretty quickly. So you'll need to run around and farm them.

Overdrive builds faster the lower your max hp is. this does NOT mean you should purposefully avoid levelling up HP.
Stoic = Damage received x 30 / Max HP
Comrade = Damage received x 20 / Target's Max HP

If you want to know how many fiends a character has killed, have them attack Don Tonberry and take note of the damage he deals. Divide this number by 100. The result is your kill count.

If you are having trouble trying to kill One-Eye, make sure Yuna is levelled up and grand-summon Anima and use Oblivion.
another easy way is to use Wakka and Tidus with full overdrives.
- Have Wakka use a 12hit Attack Reels.
- Have Tidus use Slice & Dice.



Thank you for reading my guide! I hope that it worked out for you all. If you have any questions regarding regarding to this, leave a comment below with your questions and I'll get back to you below in the comments as soon as I can.

As always, take care!

[Jamesu]

pretty good explained, i done this 11 years ago in my ps2, i forgot most of the items, thanks for the guide. In addition, you can equip auto-haste and auto-phoenix armor. This can make even more quickly.

[SouR™]

Fuck tryna get attack reels tho that damn blitzball is solid like it is no joke of a conquest to get its brings me pain, suffering and PTSD

[Rolling Stone]

@vermin supreme Try using the magus sisters. If you can get Sandy to use razzia ~3 times before they die, you'll kill him. People tend to underestimate how massively strong the magus sisters are.

[Vermin Supreme]

Right now my characters are too low level to fight one eye to get triple AP weapons. Max physical damage is around 8k from auron. I search up how to level up my characters quickly, and they all involve either master tonberry trick, or triple ap weapons. Since I can't do either of these, I was wondering if anyone knows a good way to level my characters up from relatively low level, so I can take on some of these monsters in the arena?

[Rao]

3 auto phoenix armors and this same weapon trick works GREAT against king cactaur, too. With the added benefit of not having to farm tons of weak mobs first.

[Bonanca]

For those who cant kill One Eye:
Just farm juggernaut first. You have to farm him anyway and he is no threat even for a weak team. His only multi-target attack is announced by his charged and can be nullified by NulBlaze.

[Bonanca]

For those interested (as I didnt found the number anywhere):
The Conversion Rate of Overdrive->AP is 220AP for every commenced % of your OD gauge.

Example: If your character would get 6.5% of its OD Gauge filled, it gets 220 * 7 = 1540 AP.
Times 3 for Triple AP or Triple OD and times 9 if you have both.

[babytiny5]

If you can't beat One-Eye, don't worry too much about getting triple AP at all. Overdrive > AP is the only necessity for gear. What good is 99 sphere levels in a single battle if you can only hold a certain amount of spheres to fill in the grid? With only OD>AP active, you can net 10-15 levels per battle, and if you have double AP you can get around 25-30

Certainly does help having all of the buffs active, but it makes me question if it's worth it since there's more prep than there is doing the actual battle with Don Tonberry

[blue]

Since I was way too weak for One Eye, I just cheesed him with Yuna Overdrive -> Yojimbo Zanmato and got 1-2 Weapons that way (I reset alot), then farmed in Sin real quick, can def recommend

[TimKurkjianESPN]

I don't understand the point of this when I can't even beat One Eye since he one-shots my entire party. I get that this helps level up, but apparently you have to already be at a super high level to do this in the first place...