Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles lets you train a group of newb Squires into an ultra-efficient death squad of hybrid specialists. There are so many neat Jobs and abilities to unlock in this strategy RPG that, in no time at all, you’ll be wondering what the fastest way is to obtain all of them. While there are many time-honored traditions when it comes to min-maxing the grind in Square Enix’s classic, some are more effective than others. And frogs are one of the best (technically they’re toads, but frogs is funnier to say and write).
Every action you take in combat that accomplishes something nets your character XP (experience points) and JP (job points). The first raises your regular level and the second raises your Job level and are spent to unlock abilities. You get more XP for performing actions on characters that are a higher level, and more JP the higher your overall Job level is, with bonuses for having the Double JP abilities equipped (more on that here).
There are roughly three tiers of grinding in Final Fantasy Tactics. The first is going to a place like the Mandalia Plains, killing everything but the enemy Chocobo, and then cornering it so that it keeps healing itself as your characters keep attacking it. The second is unlocking Focus from the Squire Job on every character, keeping one enemy alive in a battle, and then just spending the rest of the time having everyone keep using this ability over and over again. It’s boring and tedious, but it gets results and is easy to implement. The third is having everyone learn a dance or Bard song have them perform it on repeat. It’s similar to the Focus version but requires fewer button presses and neutralizes enemies without killing them.
None of these, however, is as elegant and foolproof as the “Berserker Frog” method. In this version you bring someone along who can cast both the Black Mage’s Toad spell and the Mystic’s Fervor (Berserk) and Induration (Petrify) spells. You then have them turn a single remaining enemy and the rest of your party into frogs so they deal as little damage as possible. They then cast Fervor to give all of the frogs Berserk so they just keep attacking the nearest enemy. They then cast Induration on themselves to turn themselves into stone so you don’t have to keep controlling them. Your party will proceed to auto-grind for a good long while.
Why not just use the actual auto-battle AI controls in Final Fantasy Tactics? Well, they aren’t always reliable in The Ivalice Chronicles remaster. Set characters with Focus to run away from battle and they just won’t use any abilities. Set someone to just heal allies and they’ll eventually still go and start killing stuff. AI control is fine for breezing through an encounter while you go make a sandwich but it won’t be nearly as effective over the same period of time as the Frog method. If you want to go above and beyond, you can keep multiple enemies alive and bring someone with the Arts of War ability to reduce the enemy’s power and speed before turning them into a frog so there’s no chance of anyone dying.
Some fans still maintain that the Focus method is simpler and faster. You send everyone to a corner of the map, set their AI to run away, and then hope they use Focus a bunch of times before killing the one enemy that’s left. But I find with the streamlined AI in the remaster, that’s just not as reliable anymore. Frogs are the way.
