Ginormosia FAQ - Part 1 - Basics

What is Ginormosia and How Does It Work?

It is essentially an "eternal grinding" zone to keep players busy and a way for the developers to continue to add DLC content without messing with the core game. So if you hate it, don't worry about it, you don't have to do any of this to experience the story and have fun. However it does make your Life easier in a lot of ways.

Ginormosia is made up of 15 areas each of which starts out covered by clouds on your map until you find the tower with the eye at the top. You can then unlock the map of the area and also unlock the ability to change the rank of the area. Each area starts at a certain level range, usually associated with a certain phase of the story. It will contain certain monsters and gathering nodes and materials that would be appropriate for that level and match the biome (desert, forest, mountain, etc).

By doing things in the area such as killing monsters, doing events, finding temples, opening chests, chopping trees, mining, farming, or fishing you can gain Rank Up Points which will eventually unlock a new rank for that area. Once you have enough points you will see a message alert and must return to the tower to manually unlock the next new rank.

At each rank above 1 everything in the area will increase its level about 5-10 levels, some new monsters will spawn, new boss monsters will appear, new ore deposits, new types of trees, new fish, and sometimes new events. Once you have increased an area's rank you can always move it back down to whatever previous rank you want whenever you want.

Once you have found a tower, you can probably see the next nearest tower from that spot. If you can't, find a high up spot and look around. The base level of each area increases approximately counter-clockwise and the further away you are from the starting area in the bottom left the more dangerous it may be.

Each area will have at least one shrine and at least one hidden Leafe. Both the total and how many you have found are listed in the little pop-up that appears when you put your cursor over the tower on the map. Shrines are generally easy to see, but some are more hidden – make sure to check in caves or isolated spots. Leafe can be very hard to find, find the ones you can find naturally, but I honestly recommend just looking up a map. Some Strangelings can also be found just randomly around in the world, so if you see a suspicious looking island or hill go take a look.

Shrines all have either a small memory game, combat, timed gathering, or target practise. It will tell you what the suggested level you should have when you go in. There can be multiple rounds, but you can attempt it as many times as you want if you fail. Once you finish the mini-game you will be able to collect the Strangeling contained inside and take them back to your base to revive them.

Why Should I Care?

More Story

I only started really doing Ginormosia once I had almost finished the story in Chapter 7. You are never required to do any of it to complete the story except for the brief first time where you are sent there. However, there is quite a bit of backstory that only becomes unlocked as you complete the temples in Ginormosia. As you complete more shrines you will see a series of flashback cutscenes and when enough are completed the seal on the central dungeon becomes unlocked. Finishing that dungeon and making a certain choice alters the ending such that the final boss is significantly easier and explains quite a lot of what has actually been going on. If you still want the challenge of the final boss at max strength you can re-do it after running credits whenever you want by talking to a NPC.

Strangelings & Buddies

While you get a few Strangelings from the story and will get a few from random green chest drops, most of the Strangelings are either randomly found in the overworld of Ginormosia or locked in temples. Having a full set of 3 Buddies for each Life, especially the Crafting and Gathering Lives, really makes your Life a lot easier as each one can add +50% or more to your crafting/gathering skill. If you have a crafting skill of 400 with your best equipment you might not be able to do a recipe that requires skill level 600, but with another Buddy adding 200 you now have a combined skill level of 600 and that recipe is now doable. This allows you to make better equipment and gather better materials earlier with much less grinding. Late game equipment is very difficult to craft without at least one Buddy and since they all have different skills some are more help than others in certain tasks.

Levelling and Ranking Up

If you work on unlocking Ginormosia areas along with the story (which I didn't do) it can make ranking up easier as you have easier access to the monsters necessary to finish quests. Instead of having to run into a long dungeon repeatedly to respawn enemies, they are just in the overworld where you can see them on the map and run up to them. You also get extra EXP from completing Events.

Levelling Buddies and Raising Affection

If you bring a crafting or gathering Buddy around with you to Ginormosia while you work on other things they can passively increase their level and affection quite quickly without actually grinding at crafting and gathering. Increasing their Affection is almost more important than their level because their passive skills once unlocked can be very helpful. Combat Buddies' special skills can be quite powerful and carry you through fights you wouldn't otherwise win. Just don't forget to put good equipment on them!

More Gathering and More Materials

Some of the Gathering Lives require collecting certain rare drops or getting Excellent finishes on specific types of nodes. There may only be 2-3 of those nodes in the regular story maps and you have to constantly be leaving and coming back to reload the area. There are many more nodes in Ginormosia depending on the area and you can even access nodes that you "shouldn't" be able to yet based on where you are in the story. Once you get the areas to certain ranks (3-4) the gold crown fish, the elemental ores, and elemental trees will all start to appear in more easily accessible areas so you don't need to keep going through dungeons just to farm them. Some of the monsters and materials that are listed in the Encyclopedia as only appearing in Treasure Groves also appear in Ginormosia at higher ranks.

Unique Recipes and Shops

Some of the areas have villages of friendly monster NPCs. Each village has a shop that will sell materials, equipment, furniture, and recipes that cannot be bought anywhere else. Some of these recipes are necessary to complete other NPC side-quests and some materials they sell are annoying to farm. However, the shop only unlocks more items as you rank up the area. There are also two wandering bear Merchants both named The Don who sell a random assortment of materials and recipes that changes each day. Their stock depends on the rank of the area you speak to them in, so you can get access to very rare materials that are hard to farm if you are lucky. There are also red and bronze chests all around the island, some of which contain recipes that cannot be found anywhere else.

More Dosh

Completing Events, killing Mimics, and generally killing and gathering as much as possible will cause you to collect quite a lot of dosh relatively quickly. You will also get a lot of equipment and tools dropping and what you don't need you can sell for dosh or remake cubes.

General Tips

This is slow

It is going to take a really really long time (in IRL hours) to get all the areas up to Rank 6. Don't get discouraged if it feels like it's taking forever. It's supposed to take forever. Don't push yourself to do it for hours and hours every day like a chore, just pick away at it when you feel like it and you will get there eventually.

Leafe are hard to find

Even if you're someone like me who likes to wander around and look in nooks and crannies you are probably still going to have a hard time finding all the hidden Leafe. In general once you have a couple you can kind of guess where they might be based on the fact that they will be roughly distributed evenly around an area and usually there are more around the outer edges of an area than the middle. There is some rumours online that gathering all of them has an effect on ranking up areas, I haven't seen anything personally. However when you gather all of them in the area, the next time you talk to a tower they will give you 10 extra cashnuts as thanks. There are maps of Leafe locations in the Links page.

Save ranking up all Combat Lives for later

It is tempting to try to rank up all your Combat Lives while doing this, especially when you're still in the middle of progressing the story. However I will say that it is a lot faster to rank up Combat Lives when you have very high level equipment, your buddies are also already much higher level than the enemies you're going up against, and you already have unlocked all the areas to Rank 5 so most of the monsters you need to get to Master are available.

Be aware of enemy elements

If you are working on a certain area there will be one rather dominant element that most of the enemies will be. When you are grinding I would recommend paying attention to that and swapping in a weapon that will make your life easier. Also use Buddies that have appropriate elemental attacks. Trying to hit an earth enemy with an earth weapon is going to be excruciatingly slow compared to hitting it with a fire weapon. Your Buddies elemental attacks can completely delete enemies once their affection is maxed out and if they are equipped with an appropriate weapon. Making your defensive equipment have the correct element resistance is much less important, only consider it if you are going up against a big boss that is much higher level than you.

Your mount can sprint and double-jump

The sprint button is the same as when you are running on the ground. To double jump press jump and then press jump again while you're still in the air.

Run away

If you run into something too dangerous to handle you can run away, but make sure you watch for the purple and black danger icon in the top left to see when you're actually safe because some enemies will chase you a shockingly far distance.

Quick menu items

Make sure you have healing items and foods for both combat and gathering on your quick access menu so you don't need to pause and go into the Item menu in the middle of combat every time. Powders for healing your party members are especially helpful.

Kill Mimics if you want ignore them if you don't

Mimics are silver crown enemies that look like red chests, but are quite obviously not chests. As you approach them, or if you hit them at range, they will start running away. Usually they run in the direction of the nearest other group of enemies and sometimes they will start hovering in the air and self-destruct. They can drop valuable and rare loot like bags of treasure and Treasure Grove saplings, but often aren't worth the effort of chasing unless you really need to, imo. If you can paralyze it or put it to sleep you can save yourself some effort chasing it. At Rank 6 a few higher level mimics called Pandora's Boxes will start appearing.

Some events are multi-phase

Some events will start with a gathering task, but then an enemy will spawn after you finish gathering, or you will start with some enemies and then more will spawn. There are only ever two phases, but don't let your guard down until you see the Complete banner. You can run away to escape an enemy and change formation/gear if you have to, that won't end the event, but the timer on the event will keep running (effecting your final score).

There's no rush to get to events

Events refresh when you leave Ginormosia, rank up an area, go in/out of a cave or building, or the time switches from Day to Night or vice versa. So you don't have to worry about an event disappearing before you get there unless you are very close to the time of day changing over.

"It's not there though?!"

Only monsters within a certain area around your character will be shown on the map. So if you are looking for a particular enemy, you may need to ride around a bit to see it. Some enemies also only appear during the day or night. And some are only inside caves/dungeons and won't be visible on the map until you enter that specific cave/dungeon.

Sleep at campfires to pass time

If you need it to be day or night for a specific monster to spawn, or you just want to reset the area, you can rest at any campfire. There is one in most areas, either in a village or a campsite.