Eiyuden Chronicle Hundred Heroes Easy Leveling and Money Grinding Guide: tons of level-ups & baqua in minutes
With the massive roster of playable characters in Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes, it's natural to find a quick, efficient method to grinding up new recruits. Thankfully, the Suikoden successor has a rubberband EXP acquisition curve, so lower-leveled party members will gain levels rapidly if they survive battle encounters against higher-leveled foes.
There's a specific way to severely accelerate your experience and money income, though. This requires building the Mysterious Room in your Town Development tree first. Be aware that even doing a smidge of grinding this way will trivialize the intended difficulty of the campaign.
A series of three battles make up a single Floor in the Hero's Trial Ground within the Mysterious Room; these three battles are two waves of common enemies that lead to a rematch with a previous boss you've fought. All of the enemies you fight are much higher level than when you initially encountered them in the story, so they are a great source of EXP and the baqua payouts are quite decent
With how the level scaling works and where it begins to drop off severely, I'll break up this guide into two parts: the method to grind before beating the story that gets your characters to around level 60 very fast and the post-game grinding method to push everyone to level 99 which requires a bit more time investment.
The Method to Grind before Beating the Story
Getting multiple characters to level 60 can be done just by repeatedly running Floor 1 in Normal Mode of the Mysterious Room. Since it cycles between a small pool of random bosses, we'll want to aim for enemies that have a high base level. Do not start until you get Kogen as the Boss of Floor 1 because the enemy waves before your rematch with him, Yuthus, and Zabi yield a tremendous amount of experience.
Note that whether you win or lose on the Floor 1 for the very first time, Selbineth will join your party. Learn more about all the other characters you can recruit around the time you can get her in our all characters guide to acquiring every single character in Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes.
Your first few runs may be on the slower side, since all your characters might be around 15-20 levels below the enemy mobs. I personally stumbled into the Mysterious Room when my main party was around level 40. To accelerate the process, consider taking 2-3 capable mage characters that can slot in the Rune of Inferno to repeatedly cast Crimson Nova, a powerful fire spell that hits all enemies.
To further amplify a mage's power, find a character that can equip the Rune of the Mage's Pinnacle; one of these can be found in a treasure chest during the recruitment quest of Dijkstra when he takes you to The Chelonian Goliath, Vilashnu dungeon. I personally relied on Isha and Momo as my two mages to blast through the enemy waves as fast as possible. For the rematch with Kogen, Yuthus, and Zabi, drain all your MP on Crimson Novas to take down all of their health as fast as possible.
While the Ascent Badge and Growth Badge accessories to raise the amount of EXP you receive can help, everyone will generally still end up either almost or around level 60 by the time you're done with Floor 1 regardless.
Equipping Janquis as your Support character and having two characters equip the Earning & Wealth badges to raise baqua income after a fight will skyrocket your baqua income as you continually grind more characters' levels through this method. This is a very fast way to unlock everyone's Rune Slots, so you can customize them to your liking immediately.
The Post-Game Grinding Method
The road to level 99 relatively takes a bit more time than the method to immediately shoot up to level 60. It requires you to have beaten the main story first because you'll need to finish all 26 floors in Normal Mode of the Hero's Trial Ground. Since this involves refighting all the bosses you've encountered in the campaign, this will include all of the fights at the end of the game, as well as some later enemies that can only be seen in here.
If you can't finish Normal Mode all in one go, it makes a checkpoint in 5 Floor increments meaning that you can start Normal Mode at higher floors if you want to take a break from the gauntlet. Once you've beaten all of the floors in Normal Mode, Endless Mode is unlocked.
As its name implies, Endless Mode allows you to simply go through the 3-battle structure established in Normal Mode... endlessly! Enemies receive a level boost once more and the pool of potential bosses that can show up in Floor 1 has been vastly expanded to include every single main story boss.
The new setup I used involved Nowa in the front row and Momo right behind him at the back row. Nowa had the Rune of the Warrior's Pinnacle & Ascent Bangle and Momo had the Rune of the Mage's Pinnacle & Growth Bangle equipped, so both of their damage output were immensely buffed at the start of each battle along with greatly increased EXP gains after battle. For even more EXP, have Yulin as your Support character.
When starting up Endless Mode, shuffle it a few times to get Prometheus as the Boss. This is because the first wave of enemies in the fights leading up to Prometheus always consists of six cathead enemies that yield tons of EXP. After this fight is done, you can choose to back out after the Prometheus fight or continue going, but it won't be as time efficient obviously. Another alternative boss you can aim for is the 2nd form of Alca Dracare because the average level of common enemies leading up to its fight is high, as well.
Your main goal is to get Nowa and Momo to level 99 as fast as possible because this will allow you to bring a few more extra characters to funnel EXP, now unacquired by Nowa and Momo because they're maxed out, into them. Additionally, there seems to be an overall leveling scaling mechanic applied to the entire roster where several unused party members will be ramped up automatically based on the overall average level of your entire roster.
Do this method for roughly a couple of hours and all your battle characters should be easily above level 90. You'll be earning a lot of baqua naturally, so you won't have to worry about the cost of maxing out everyone's weapon levels, as well!