For everyone having issues with progressing between Normal and Hard with the underleveled start with this save, who want a challenge with Hard/Legend but find Normal too easy, this is what I did to get "Hard-mode (lvl 55+ recommended) Ready" before going to Hawai'i at the beginning of Chapter 2:
1) When you are fighting alone as Ichiban, keep the difficulty at Normal. The tutorial fights won't proc correctly when you're underleveled at Hard/Legend.
2) When you start fighting in a group with Kasuga, Homeless Guy Nanba, and Detective Adachi, switch to Legend mode and fight for your actual survival. The priority is to keep Ichiban alive as long as possible, so his death won't auto-lose the fight for you. Always start the fight with him using Hero's Guts so he can survive getting KO'd once. Keeping Adachi alive, or using Ichiban's "ressurect a KO'd party member" skill to keep him revived, is priority number 2. Nanba needs to "Guard" and become a punching bag that sponges all the damage and jumps into the middle of the enemies' way so that the aggro stays on him. Don't worry if he gets KO'd, Nanba won't be the priority here. Now, survive enough rounds (usually 3, but you can get unlucky with some fight configurations) until you finally get to Adachi's turn and "Arrest" one of the enemies. Rinse and repeat until all enemies are gone or Kasuga got KO'd (good way to kinda heal the party for free). You'll gain massive amounts of exp for winning Legend battles, and after a few battles you'll easily skyrocket from lvl 20s/30s in the party to lvl 56, which is where I stopped. Hard mode battles became doable at that point.
3) (Optional) you can probably power-level this way before the first chapter's boss dungeon, but I happened to do it afterward. It was difficult to get through the dungeon under-leveled because you can't use Adachi's "Arrest" power on a few of the enemies, meanwhile your other teammates hit them for 1s. So I fought the Arrest-able fights in Legend and switched to Normal for the couple of non-Arrestable fights and the dungeon's final boss battle where Arrest doesn't work anyways.
This style of survival battle got pretty fun after a while. You won't get tired of the grind so much because every fight is life-or-death stakes haha. And now Hard Mode is not impossible, and Hawai'i awaits! Legend is still impossible. But I wouldn't advise doing this Chapter 1 grinding to go from the 50s to the 70s. By the time I hit lvl 56 with Kasuga and Nanba (Adachi was lvl 58), 1-2 Legend battles were no longer insta-leveling the party.
Stick to one or two-person enemy gangs. Your chance of victory is almost guaranteed if you can simply survive their three rounds of attacks. Victory goes down to nearly zero as soon as a third enemy is added to the mix, let alone more (I never won a 4+ gang fight). Sometimes you might get lucky with 3-enemy fights but it's a gamble.
I'm not sure tbh. If you need more of a challenge then try playing on Legend difficulty. Warning: It's brutal! Especially with the character being around level 45 with this save file.
Dunno I'm only in chapter 3. For now my damage multiplier is 0.5 (half the vanilla damage) and it makes the game a bit more interesting (especially versus elite/boss npcs). If you want more challenge you can also lower your defense to 0.5 (taking double damage, might be very punishing against strong npcs)).
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1) When you are fighting alone as Ichiban, keep the difficulty at Normal. The tutorial fights won't proc correctly when you're underleveled at Hard/Legend.
2) When you start fighting in a group with Kasuga, Homeless Guy Nanba, and Detective Adachi, switch to Legend mode and fight for your actual survival. The priority is to keep Ichiban alive as long as possible, so his death won't auto-lose the fight for you. Always start the fight with him using Hero's Guts so he can survive getting KO'd once. Keeping Adachi alive, or using Ichiban's "ressurect a KO'd party member" skill to keep him revived, is priority number 2. Nanba needs to "Guard" and become a punching bag that sponges all the damage and jumps into the middle of the enemies' way so that the aggro stays on him. Don't worry if he gets KO'd, Nanba won't be the priority here. Now, survive enough rounds (usually 3, but you can get unlucky with some fight configurations) until you finally get to Adachi's turn and "Arrest" one of the enemies.
Rinse and repeat until all enemies are gone or Kasuga got KO'd (good way to kinda heal the party for free). You'll gain massive amounts of exp for winning Legend battles, and after a few battles you'll easily skyrocket from lvl 20s/30s in the party to lvl 56, which is where I stopped. Hard mode battles became doable at that point.
3) (Optional) you can probably power-level this way before the first chapter's boss dungeon, but I happened to do it afterward. It was difficult to get through the dungeon under-leveled because you can't use Adachi's "Arrest" power on a few of the enemies, meanwhile your other teammates hit them for 1s. So I fought the Arrest-able fights in Legend and switched to Normal for the couple of non-Arrestable fights and the dungeon's final boss battle where Arrest doesn't work anyways.
This style of survival battle got pretty fun after a while. You won't get tired of the grind so much because every fight is life-or-death stakes haha. And now Hard Mode is not impossible, and Hawai'i awaits!
Legend is still impossible. But I wouldn't advise doing this Chapter 1 grinding to go from the 50s to the 70s. By the time I hit lvl 56 with Kasuga and Nanba (Adachi was lvl 58), 1-2 Legend battles were no longer insta-leveling the party.
Stick to one or two-person enemy gangs. Your chance of victory is almost guaranteed if you can simply survive their three rounds of attacks. Victory goes down to nearly zero as soon as a third enemy is added to the mix, let alone more (I never won a 4+ gang fight). Sometimes you might get lucky with 3-enemy fights but it's a gamble.
This might be a stretch, but is there any chance of having a NG+ file right before the final boss? The Giant Shark and Kraken battle.