Power Leveling Your Characters
Once you’ve reached the final chapter of the game, you’ll come up against some fairly powerful enemies while completing the last side quests. This is especially true of the Via Infinito, where it’s almost a requirement that your party members be well-leveled and have learned most of the abilities for the Dresspheres they plan to equip.
This section includes some tactics to help you speed up the process. So let’s start with the slowest method, then move to more efficient alternatives.
Random Encounters
The slowest and least efficient method for leveling up your characters is to navigate around Spira and engage in random battles against fiends. You can make this process quicker if you equip one of your party members (or a creature) with a 
Lure Bracer, and you can find high-level enemies in the Via Infinito, but this is a fairly slow method and there are ways to make this process much quicker.
Using Abilities and Items
There are quite a few items and abilities that can help speed things up:
| Ability or Item | Details |
|---|---|
 Double EXP | The  Lady Luck Dressphere has access to the Double EXP auto-ability. This is very useful for helping a character reach a high level, but be careful about gaining too much experience too fast. It gets harder and harder to gain levels once you get up to the 80 or 90 range, and if you plan to develop your creatures in the Creature Creator, you should read up on that process first. The drawbacks here are twofold: you’ll be stuck with one of your party members in the Lady Luck Dressphere, and the doubled experience points only apply to her and not to the whole party. |
 AP Egg | Equipping this accessory can really help expedite the process of learning a Dressphere’s abilities, as it triples the rate of AP earned. This can be extremely helpful if you’re trying to learn all of the sub-abilities for the  Mascot Dressphere or go back and learn  Sentinel/SOS Protect, and it can also help you learn abilities for Dresspheres you haven’t been using regularly. |
| Key to Success | There are two ways to get this, and only one of them is compatible with 100% Story Completion. But if you get it, you can effectively double the AP, EXP, Gil, and Items earned in battle. The first method of obtaining it in Guadosalam involves not getting 100% Story Completion and avoiding certain story elements, which is not recommended. Instead, you can obtain it by completing the Farplane Cup in the Fiend Arena. |
Fiend Arena Battle Simulator
The Fiend Arena allows you to enter tournaments, but you can also select the “Battle Simulator” option to challenge any of the “teams” you’ve come up against in a tournament to a team-versus-team battle. While there are no consequences to losing the battle, there are huge benefits to winning: you get to keep the AP, EXP, and Items from these battles! That means you can keep initiating battles over and over again.
That’s why unlocking Shiva in Creature Creator is so important. To do this, you need to develop creatures with a “Fragment of Fayth”. You can learn more about this process in the Creature Creator section using the link below:
Creature Creator
More information about how to develop and level up creatures, earn Story Levels, release creatures, and unlock Aeons.
Once you unlock Shiva, this is your fastest and cleanest route to building AP. Defeating Shiva will earn you 15 AP each battle, and she’s relatively easy to defeat, once you can get past her high evasion.
