Hi. I started testing a few things to see what the best way is to beat the game with low investment in leveling and and items. My main issues is that we are limited in damage output in the beginning and it takes a long time to test different combinations with weapons and skills without a puppet dummy to attack.

Key notes from my routing (hard run, full offline mode):

• getting the main mission available is very tedious but has to be done as long as there is no way to skip it
• replaying missions to to get a better weapon might be worth it, but takes a while (I don't do it)
• I use the weapons with the highest attack stat available for free to raise the damage (speer and gun)
• buying the drink to remove all cool-downs is a key strat as it makes every level easy (stays for the whole main missions as long as you don't change your equipment or die)
• skilling few points in Vitality is worth it as you need to make sure to survive attacks to keep the drink effect up or else you need to exit the mission, buy the drink again and start from the last checkpoint
• you can use checkpoints if you die and have to buy a drink again
• you need to setup for a perfect evade on the first attack of the boss; if you miss it you have to fight and survive for the next opportunity
• perfect evade -> spam Shadow Step: it makes you invincible for any enemy attack (hold the button down or use a turbo controller as it is allowed per rules)
• use Oblitaration to kill weak enemies with 1 hit
• Attack Up passives > def pen > crit damage in the beginning (as far as my testing goes)
• I use the Assasin class and take every skill that gives bonus to back-attack (Assasin left tree, Dagger right tree, Physique all attack nodes first then crit rate)
• for overdrive I went with Ruler as you can activate it during Shadow Step (with other skills you have a delay and might have to set up perfect evade again), they deal a bit of extra damage (activate stage 3 -> stage 2 -> stage 1 to have 3 extra shadows during the fight)
• I ended up on level 38 on the last boss
• not getting any additional Hunters or Shadows
• I might be worth to check the shop for a random C weapon before the last few missions to get a bonus to attack
• I have no idea if framerate does anything to the damage caclulation (I haven't seen any differences and play on 60)

Overall it seems to be quite a long run as long as we don't find a way to deal more damage or get out of bounce in some areas (I'm no glitch hunter). Some of the main missions take like 40 min even if you 1-hit kill all the trash mobs with Oblitaration.

In case someone else is looking for the link

https://discord.gg/0tjIC3eQA7VFd6Qw (all Final Fantasy Games)

https://discord.gg/X3qXHWG (FFX and FFX-2)