So this is what people mean when they say "levels don't matter in Octopath; it's all about your gear and team setup"! As many of you already know, my characters are level 99 on my videos, and I've had several people either state that it "only works because I'm 99" or ask if it's because I'm 99. I decided I wanted to demonstrate that the level, while certainly making things smoother, is less important than subclasses/gear, so I did a little challenge run of the boss with level 1 characters. Luckily since I'm on PC, I'm able to alter my levels manually via the save file, so I dropped everyone to level 1, did some tests, and got my first kill. I definitely don't recommend doing this obviously, but I wanted to show it can be done. There's also a bit more "thinking time" in this particular video since there's a lot less room for error, but hopefully you can forgive me. Anytime you see those long pauses that's me going "well I could do this, which would let me do that, but then I couldn't do this, but then I could do that..."
Here is the post on reddit that will contain the build for all characters for this challenge:
www.reddit.com/r/octopathtrav...
For those that may be wondering why I shot up to 99 (except for poor Paritio) at the end with only 50k XP gained, it's due to the fact that if you reset your levels, it only takes 1 XP to get to each level if you've already obtained it, so since I was already 99, my characters only needed 99 XP to get to level 99. You can see on my build post that the stats are indeed level 1 stats + however many nuts I invested into the characters over the course of the game (I seriously gave Hikari WAY too much HP haha).
If anyone would like direct assistance with this boss in terms of setting up your team and talking you through the fight via discord, feel free to message me.