Star Ocean: Till the End of Time has now been ported onto the PS4 and I've logged about 6.5 hours into it. The graphics are much crisper now, and details in the environment that were once blurry are now clear; I've played this game dozens of times, but with the new graphics I'm noticing things I'd never picked up on before.
I'm also more generally focused with the bonus battle gauge this time around. It's amazing how much extra experience you can accumulate if you can maintain the triple exp bonus. Once you activate the bonus battle, it's only a matter of the number of battles you participate in in order to get all the bonuses (including triple exp), rather than the relative difficulty of the battle, which is what determines the rate at which you can charge your bonus battle gauge. Best strategy to go about this is to go into a relatively challenging area first in order to charge your BBG, and as soon as it's activated, go back to a weak area and reap the rewards; it only takes at most a chain of 15 battles in order to get all the bonuses, and once triple exp is going you can start leveling up relatively quickly in any area you go to, so long as you don't lose your bonus. There's a few knights of the Black Brigade in the area after you escape the prison early in the game, and while they're extremely tough they reap extreme amounts of experience if you can defeat them and maintain your bonus battle.
Something to help this out is another trick I picked up on. If you explore at least 99% of any initially unknown field/dungeon map, you're rewarded with a scale bunny which you can sell for insane amounts of money (value varies according to the size of the map completed). You can get at least two of these by the time you make it to the mining town of Kirlsa, just after the royal city of Airyglyph. Airyglyph offers the best weapons and armor shops in the first half of the game, however everything is too expensive during your first visit. If you get these two scale bunnies I mentioned, you'll be able to afford one item (typically either a sword or set of armor for Fayt). I chose the sword, and that boosted his attack power tremendously (again, this weapon is normally not affordable until the last part of the first disc). Go on a little further in the game, and the story will require you to go back to the mining town of Kirlsa just next door to Airyglyph; by then you can potentially get two more of the scale bunnies and enough money to afford one more item from the advanced weapon and armor shops of Airyglyph. This time I chose the armor to complete Fayt's set, and now he's essentially entirely OP for the first half the game.
Take that, combined with the bonus battle Triple Exp trick, and you can get a pretty significant advantage early on in the game.
Can you tell I've played this game a lot?
