The easiest way to level up in Star Ocean The Second Story R is by fighting enemies and winning battles. After a battle is complete, the total XP earned for the fight will be displayed along the left side of the menu and then split equally between all active members of the party.
As players get more party members, it will be more difficult to level up as XP is split in more ways, requiring much more XP to continue leveling up easily. Luckily, there are multiple tricks to helping characters level up faster than just grinding fights, as usual.
How To Earn More XP
The most straightforward way to earn XP is by fighting enemies. The stronger the enemy, the more XP earned, requiring players to progress through the story to unlock new areas with stronger enemies to fight. Another way of earning XP is by investigating “Unique Spots,” which appear as golden beams of light either in the open world or in towns. Unique Spots only take a few seconds to investigate and reward large sums of XP for investigating.
One way to boost the amount of XP earned in combat is by completing multiple battles in a chain. A chain battle is when multiple enemies are close by in the open world when players engage in battle. Once two or more enemies are close enough together, a red line will connect all enemies in that chain, and engaging with any of those enemies will begin the chain of battles. Completing all battles in a chain will reward players with much more XP than completing those battles individually. This method is even more effective when using party members with powerful area-of-effect spells to quickly clear waves of enemies.
Skills & Specialties To Unlock
The most important Specialty Skill that all characters need to fully upgrade is the “Effort” skill, which costs SP to upgrade. This skill lowers the total cost of XP to level up that specific character and should be fully upgraded on all active party members early into the game. Another useful skill is the Train skill, which lowers the overall stats of that character to give them a 50% boost to XP and can be toggled on and off through the skills menu.
For those wanting to grind in the open world for a bit, the Scouting Skill can also be toggled to “Look For Enemies,” which will make more enemies appear on the map to chain them together for larger boosts to XP. Grinding long chain battles through Scouting with Train active with a full party with a maxed-out Effort skill will see massive boosts on XP and have characters leveling up incredibly quickly.