I think it's a genre that's notoriously hard to route since it can have many mechanics that can have a widespread influence. For example choosing a weapon, using an item, leveling up and then distributing skill points into stats, learning skills or resistances from enemies or bosses. What are common concepts and tipps that help for routing and can be applied to a wide variety of RPG games? What data should you collect?

It's best to take it one step at a time. You should eventually look at the big picture to tinker with the route, but try to focus on the fastest way to tackle each area as you approach them.

With RPGs, it's easy to think about what is the safest way and not what's necessarily the fastest. Try to reduce the amount of trips you take to shops, reduce the amount of items you buy, and reduce the amount of time you spend in menus. You want to get by each area and battle with the bare minimum if possible. Of course, if an item is on your way and only takes a fraction of a second to grab, it's usually worth it.

It's also worth looking into how enemy encounters work in the game, so you may figure out paths and tricks to avoid as many as possible. Sequence breaks can also be a big part of RPGs, if it helps you skip areas/enemies/bosses.

It's kind of a mix -

1: Check to make sure if the events in the story actually work the way that they are presented to the casual player --- A lot of older games have events that are tied ONLY to a location (such as a late game city or room) and can be triggered early simply by entering that area --- even if you haven't actually did the stuff leading up to it - These sequence breaks are super useful and don't even tricks to pull off (Playstation 2 onward era games tend to be foolproof against this though)

2: What fights can actually kill you? Can they be beaten with the bare minimum of experience points and only the weapons found along the way? Varies wildly, but a lot of RPGs with a Square Enix style Snes/Ps1 esque enemy balance are doable with surprisingly low level gear and have final bosses that don't require doing the sidequests to get the final weapons/summons (or sometimes getting just 1 charathers is enough).

2b: I feel like the majority of RPGs aren't actually routed around fights, but exceptions would be things like Romancing Saga, Etrian Odysseys, Lunar Silver Story (Lunar and certain Saga games being a subtype of all grinding being for the final boss specifically)

2c: if full party building is allowed what works best? -(usually something stacked like 3 damage dealers + 1 healbot, sometimes things like 2 damage dealers + 1 "taunt guy" + 1 healer)

3: What is the best way of avoiding random battles? Some games have a "holy water or Repel" item that you can buy large quantities of for a super low price - Other games have no way of avoiding having them at all, but do feauture a "smoke bomb" item or ability that can be used turn 1 of a fight to immediately escape --- Note that succesfully avoiding random battles sometimes causes a lower total experience to such a level that you have to redo step 2 due to now dying to some bosses that were no problem before!

4: Raw animation - especially in easier games - if you have two ways of killing random encounters/(even bosses) but one has less animation time (even if it takes 1-2 more battle turns) it can be better to go with the simple thing rather than a spell.

As I am slowly routing an RPG game myself, my tips (some would be similar to what @KidKoopa said):

• Define the main objectives of the game, and what you need to do to accomplish them. Which means - which locations to go to, which NPCs to talk with, which mandatory items to collect, etc. Basically, you can set a general "story route" which assumes that boss/enemy fights are not exist.

• Tackle each part of the route one at a time. What level you need to be in each part, which items/skills you should have with you, which characters you need at your party (if you can recruit/replace them).

• If you need to level up to a certain level, can you get enough exp from mandatory fights? or you need to grind fights with normal enemies along the way? If so, you should try to find the fastest/easiest ways to gain exp. Otherwise, avoid unnecessary battles if you can.

• Currency management - sometimes you must have certain amount of coins to purchase story-progression items, or you need to buy weapons/armor/items in shops for each part of the game. You need to make sure you have enough coins when you do that, and also find ways to get that gold fast. You can pick up gold or treasure from chests and sell it later, or you can get gold loot from enemies if you already need to fight them for exp.

• Healing items - getting/buying them might cost time and money in the short term, but if you don't have enough of them you can get stuck or lose time later. So it's a trade-off between being fast and being safe, with RNG having a role here.

• How to determine which skills/items/stats you should have for each scenario - I think this heavily depends on the game itself, and to answer that you either need game knowledge about how everything works, or do trial-and-error to see what works and what doesn't. For example, if you have a choice between buying a weaker sword, or a stronger (but more expensive) sword; would the stronger sword worth the extra gold and time required to get it)? Or is the weaker sword enough to get you through battles until you can get a stronger weapon later? Or for another example, which skills are good/effective in battles, and which are complete garbage?

Note that for the popular RPG games out there (like Pokemon, Dark Souls, Chrono Trigger), top runs are not the work of only one runner, but a usage of collective knowledge about the game from several runners in the community. It took me about 40-50 hours so far to route my game, and I didn't even finished optimizing it yet, and I am only one person.

1.) What core items are needed to progress in the game (not make it easier, just what is straight up required to make it to the end) ex: LoZ games (see step 2) 2.) Are there any glitches that allow you to skip these items good ex: LoZ games (I know they aren't RPGs, but the same principles apply) 3.) If you need to level for combat, how could you do that with the lowest number of fights (or if fights take awhile, the shortest amount of time spent on fights), good ex: pokemon (has tons of routing done over the years to minimize encounters while keeping a high enough level to win) 4.) Are there any items that allow you to skip/minimize what you do in step 3? Ex: (Pokemon's X-Accuracy or X-Attack) 5.) Are there any items that allow you to simply move faster throughout the run that end up saving time in longer runs? (Ex: running shoes in pokemon) These steps honestly kind of apply to every game for finding routing, but they very much do apply to RPGs. The hardest part is writing all this down and then finding a route based on that, since especially in RPGs, there's a lot of paths that someone can take.