Ginormosia FAQ - Part 3 - Ranking Up

Starting Out

Your priority when you first arrive in Ginormosia is to find the first Tower in West Dryridge Desert to open up the map for that area. Then you should find and talk to the friendly King Cobra snake to get the ability to ride your mount up walls. You will need to hand him a few cashnuts in exchange, but you can get enough through doing a couple events and finding a couple Leafe.

Next prioritize finding the village of friendly monster NPCs and the Shrines. You don't have to complete them, but just walking up close to them gives you a nice number of Rank Up Points.

Some of this area is marked on your map in a darker brown colour and in the overworld as dark red-brown sand. You need to be mounted in that area or you will start Burning continuously taking damage quite quickly. Any mount can keep you from burning while on that sand, not just the starter camel. This is the only area that has a type of ground that can damage you.

You should be able to get enough Rank Up Points to get this area to Rank 2 quite quickly just by exploring, so you will able to try going back to the tower and unlocking a new rank to see how it works for yourself.

You should be able to see the general outline of the next area to the east and then you will need to proceed north to the third area from there.

Efficiency

I'm not a min-maxer and won't do the same thing for hours just because it's the most optimal way to do something. The best way to grind and level is the way that you enjoy the most. However, I do have a few general ideas.

Try to get to all of the towers as early as you can, then you can go back and explore once you can see things on your map. If you are quick about sprinting on your mount you can even open up areas that are too high level for you to safely explore.

When grinding an area you want to be able to kill regular enemies in 2-3 hits at most or this will feel like even more of a slog than it is. Having weapons that are at the highest rank possible and Perfect quality for you and all your favourite Buddies is extremely beneficial. Getting newer and better equipment should always be a high priority because it makes everything else easier.

Farming is a very time-efficient way to level multiple things at once. Each individual vegetable you farm gives EXP and affection points as well as area rank up points. As you can "kill" 9 of them at once with a couple hits of your area attack skill it's much faster than trying to kill equivalent level monsters. The third area you will reach naturally in Ginormosia is called Viridia Plateau. It has 9 farm plots with varying numbers and types of vegetables in them quite close to the tower. An event will spawn there pretty often that has you farm some veggies and then some weak veggie enemies will spawn that you will have to kill.

If you toggle the tower up and down a rank repeatedly to respawn Viridia Plateau, or just visit regularly, you will soon have a ton of vegetables to sell on the vegetable stalls, rank that area up really fast, and build up EXP and Affection for your Buddies. Once you hit Rank 5 on Viridia Plateau Shadow Carrots will start spawning there sometimes, especially during the farming event, allowing you to potentially get more Shadow Carrot seeds than the 9 you can buy per day from Marco's Shop back at home base.

Going from Rank 1 to 2

200 Points

It is likely that if you are exploring while trying to open up new areas of the map and find more towers you will hit Rank 2 in an area just by accident.

Rank 2 to 3

1000 Points

The best way to get the areas up the first three ranks is to simply ride from one event to another while wandering around looking for Leafe and Shrines. Be sure to also keep an eye out for treasure chests, Strangelings, Legendary Recipes (glowing stone plinths, you can't miss them) and caves. For each event you get rank up points for every enemy you kill or node you harvest, but also a completion bonus that is a significant number of points.

The faster you complete an event the better the reward. You will either get a Gold crown on the Complete banner, a silver one, or a bronze one. How many points each event gives at max is listed in the table.

Rank 3 to 4

3000 Points

At this point just doing events isn't going to be enough, you should also start killing any enemies that stand between you and the next event. Especially if there are any conveniently placed silver crown boss enemies. Do whatever gathering you need and can do quickly, especially Great trees and Great, Superior, or Amazing ores, but killing is faster.

At this level you should have all the areas opened up even if some of them are a bit too high level for you to easily do. You should also have been keeping an eye out for Legendary weapon/tool/shield recipes on glowing plinths around each of the areas and at least marking all the Shrines because going close enough to them will cause you to get some more rank up points for that area.

Legendary Events Start Appearing

Once you have gotten certain areas up to Rank 3 then Legendary events will start to spawn. They may spawn in areas that are still under Rank 3, however, so that is why you at least want to have unlocked all the areas by this point.

Legendary Events are indicated by a glowing blue !!! mark on your map. If it is too far away it won't be shown on your mini-map so be sure to check your main map and zoom out periodically. If the event is south of you sometimes the marker is hidden by the map UI so scroll around. Also sometimes it seems like they take a minute or two to spawn after you finish loading into Ginormosia.

Pay attention and check your map often because you do not want to miss these. Not only do they provide essential materials for Legendary equipment they provide a ton of points and EXP.

However, at rank 5 they spawn at level 60 and they can appear at up to level 100. If you want to clear them when they are 10+ levels higher than you I would recommend having all the skills you can from the skill tree, at least two Buddies of the appropriate Lives at full affection, the best equipment possible, and the best Gathering food possible. You will have to be very efficient with SP usage because they have a lot of HP. I found the Legendary fish a particular PITA because if you don't find it's weak spots fast enough you can break the line. However, the fish will still be there so you can refill your SP and try again.

And whatever you do, try to get an Excellent on every Legendary you harvest so you get the maximum drops from it. Working really hard to gather something before you run out of SP and then getting like… one log… is super depressing.

Rank 4 to 5

8000 Points

Clear every event in the area. Clear every random mob enemy you see. Clear every silver to gold crown enemy you see. Clear every harvestable node. This is where progress starts getting really slow. But Rank 5 is the rank that really provides the most rewards here so you have to persist.

Mimics can provide some good rank up points, especially if you can convince them to self-destruct right away, but personally I think they're more effort than they're worth.

Rank 5 to 6

20,000 Points

If you thought going from Rank 4 to 5 was slow, this is really going to take forever. Rank 5 is definitely the most important rank to hit because it spawns nearly all the Boss enemies you need to hit Master rank in your combat lives and the materials you need for your Gathering and Crafting lives. It also means monsters and materials that were previously exclusive to the Treasure Grove will spawn, usually as either gold monster icons on the map or new special events. However, there are a few things that still only spawn at Rank 6 and above, including a few monsters necessary for rank up.

Killing and gathering high value targets will give you the most bang for your buck in terms of rank up points and materials dropped. Going between events and the gold crown enemies/nodes while killing everything in between and then moving to another area to repeat was my main strategy.

Rank 6 to 7

150,000 Points

So far as I can tell, very few new things spawn at Rank 6 and nothing at all changes when you unlock Rank 7 other than the usual increase in level. However, I am suspicious that the higher rank all your areas are unlocked to the more frequently rare events spawn, especially Legendary events. In any case this is a very long-term goal and takes quite a while to get to, especially in the areas that don't have Legendary events spawn there or many gold crown high-value targets.

I have found it to be more efficient to keep areas at Rank 5 after unlocking Rank 6 to keep enemies at a level that is quicker to kill. You get the same amount of points per event completion regardless of Rank, although fewer points per kill/node. So you will have to decide for yourself which to prioritize.