I like to train the dragon up quite a bit, Solo mostly likes to just bash through the game from what he’s told me before. Needless to say, we both like trying for 100% completion and zero item usage!
My own battling method is basically to train the dragon five levels at a time - level 5 before fighting the Baldor Queen, 10 before Arachnoth, 15 before Lathum, and so on.
Training before fighting Gigra is about as far as I’ve got recently, but I actually think I’ll have a game today.
Anyone have any tactics or preferred playing methods you want to share?
I usually stay in each area until I’ve got an “Excellent” battle-grade against every new enemy there (which usually makes me inadvertantly level-up a bit) and I generally fight the hidden Sand Mite and Kolba enemies a few times to jump up several levels quickly, as you get comparatively huge amounts of EXP for beating them. Apart from that I don’t find that levelling up is so important though, at least once you’ve worked out the best tactics against the various enemies. When I speed-ran through the game in 4 hours 44 minutes I managed to get an “Excellent” grade against each boss and sub-boss except two (one of them was the Arachnoth), and finished up with a Level 49 dragon at the end; the knock-on effect of getting an Excellent and loads of EXP from one boss seems to put you at a high enough Level to cope with the next area and the next boss, and so on…
But yeah, I don’t use limited-use items like Elixirs and Chips either; the game is so easy anyway that it almost feels like cheating.
I level up to 7 before fighting the Arachnoth, then play through the rest of the game. I typically keep the dragon at normal class (100’s throughout) for the whole game. That way, I get my berserker spells in large clumps when I reach certain levels.