Trying to make heads or tails of my FF8 file. Looks like I played up to around the Timber part of the game (probably for access to certain cards). Squall's attack power is super high and the rest of his stats are normal.
I do seem to have about 80-90% of all the GF abilities for the first 3 GFs (too bad I didn't get to Diabolos for Encounter None) while still having low levels, not sure how I did that because I don't remember this game well enough. Seems like everyone is under level 10 except Squall at level 11.
Lot of spells are at 100, including Double which is pretty huge this early. I'm certain I refined that from cards. Looks like that's most of what I did, won card battles and refined spells from cards. Not sure how I got GF abilities and levels so high while also not gaining character levels.
Here's FFX-2. This file is way later than the other early-game files I've shown and is probably about halfway through the game. Which is fine because the first half of this is fun enough and easy enough to replay normally before switching tracks to this file to plow the rest. I have a basically unkillable party here between 2x Darkness and an Alchemist (3x DK is even more OP, but Alchemist ensures they won't run into problems with any bosses)
Aside from Darkness being incredibly OP in this, DKs are also pretty much immune to all statuses. Looks like I didn't really do a ton with any other classes so I just focused on the most OP ones rather than doing a full max-out.
Lastly we have FF12 Zodiac Age. This save file is the earliest out of all of them, pretty much right at the beginning. Maybe like 30 minutes into the game. I thought I had Danjuros but what I actually have are Karkatas, which is still a top-tier weapon damagewise and inflicts Confuse (even on a lot of bosses). Look how much higher the damage output is than the other stats.
Also have a ton of the License Boards done on Vaan and Penelo, which means future characters will join with a ton of LP and be able to do the same.
The important thing was getting enough LP on the Knight board to be able to actually equip Karkata, just farming them wasn't enough. It's in the southeast area of the board. I farmed 3 of the weapon (for a 3 person party) which took a couple hours of farming the first 3 fights of the Trial Mode. This also got me a boatload of money (from selling Diamond Armlets from the first TM fight).
All in all it took 6 and a half hours to get 3 Karkatas, 35,000 Gil, the needed LP, and level 20, which is all pretty huge for being 30 minutes into the game.
That's all I've got for super-files. Though I did also do some pumped-up early game files for a few others.
FF2 NES - Have a file at the very beginning where everyone has around 2000 HP and significantly built-up stats, which makes it a snap if I ever need to play FF2 NES again.
FF3 NES - Have a file right after the first dungeon/boss with four level 13 Monks (since Monks get the biggest HP increase of the early classes). This one took a while and was super grindy because FF3 early game enemies give paltry rewards, so I don't recommend it. Level 13 will basically just give me a leg up for like the next 20% of the game, if that.
FF10 - Have a save in Luca (which is fairly early) where I built up a decent amount of Sphere Levels and, more importantly, farmed 99 of the various sphere orbs at Besaid Island. Getting more sphere levels is easy and gets easier as the game goes on, but I never had enough sphere orbs to spend them without going back and farming. So this file negates the need for that.
Whew, I think that's everything. PrimalLiquid on Youtube did some good "get overpowered early" videos that helped me figure a lot of this out, so check that out if there's a particular game you want to maximize. Some of the stuff he does takes like a hundred hours though. I spent like 5-12 on most of these OP files, think FF7 at 17 hours was the longest (unless you count X-2 at 18 but that was with me playing half the game).
I never did this kind of early-game super file stuff for any other series (probably because you usually can't). Closest thing I can think of is that Dragon Quest 6 has a specific area about halfway through the game, a tower, where you can max out classes way before you're supposed to be able to (as most areas have caps on when class points stop being gained). Endgame areas let you max classes but not before that except this one tower, so I maxed out a bunch of classes there and could have maxed all of them. This was in 2021 or so and I was spending a lot of time on airplanes, so grinding in DQ6 on a phone was a good way to relax.
Rajaah
