CH1 - PREPARATIONS

Figure 1: Accepting a Quest

Before we do anything at all, head back to the home screen by tapping the "Home" button at the bottom of your screen (first option in the menu bar), and let's pick up some quests, shall we? You can do this by clicking on the Dr. Mog icon; he will probably have a red speech bubble with a number on it. This represents how many quests are available for you to do at any given time.

Let's pick "Mako Reactor No.5", "Weapon Upgrade", "Armor Upgrade", "Common Relic Draw" and "Rare Relic Draw". We can only do 5 at a time in FFRK, and these are great to get us started.

-TIP!- Finishing quests is a great way to get mythril early, but they can only be completed *AFTER* you accept them. Keep this in mind before heading out to new dungeons *OR* crafting/honing new abilities!

After this, click on the "Relic Draw" option (Altar looking icon at the far right of the menu bar) and you'll get a screen that may look similar to Figure 2.

Figure 2: Relic Banner Screen

These "Banners", as they are called, represent featured relics from any current events the game may be going through. At the time of writing, the FF7 event which introduces Yuffie as a playable character, "Hidden Resolve" is currently underway, hence why we see the associated Banners displayed here.

• Different banners have different drop rates for different items, although it is still possible to get items not featured in them. The featured items simply enjoy a slightly boosted chance to be drawn from that particular banner versus any other banner. 

• To put this into perspective, you have about a 1% chance to draw any of the featured 5* relics over regular relics of the same rarity. So, it's more likely you'll draw the 4-point Shuriken from the banner that features it than, say, a Genji Shield (IV) which isn't featured on any of the banners currently on display (ignore the free relic draw picture, it's static, and the shield is no longer "featured" there).

• It goes without saying that you'll more often than not receive items of lesser rarity than those featured in any Banner. In the Common Relic draw, it is normal for you to get 1* or 2* items, occasionally a 3* item, rarely a 4*, and a statistical anomaly -yet- a possibility for you to get a 5* item from it.This is mostly due to the fact that it's free, but also because of the large item pool that it must select from. That said, it happens, and quite a bit it seems! Just not to you, or me, heh.

Figure 3: Relic Draw Options

• Rare relic draws will always net you an item of 3* rarity or higher. You'll have about a 65% chance to get a 3* on every draw (henceforth affectionately called a "pull") , around 25% to get a 4* and 10% to get a 5*, but the caveat is that they cost you 5 mythril, the in-game premium currency of FFRK. Don't worry though, the game hands these out like candy for almost anything you do, so it's a matter of patience and time before you're raking in the mythril.

• If you don't have a lot of patience or may want a particular relic right away, but you do have some deep pockets, you may want to consider purchasing "gems" with real world money and proceed to pull at your own leisure. Take note that this game is not cheap compared to other F2P's and it will cost you USD$2.99 for just 1 relic pull. There is however, one special occasion at the launch of any new banner, where your first draw with gems will only cost you USD$0.99 (100 gems), as can be appreciated in Figure 3.

• Lastly, you have 3 Relic Draw options to choose from. You can either pull 1 for 5 mythril (or 100 gems), 3 for 15 mythril  (or 900 gems), or 11 for 50 mythril (3000 gems). 

• It goes without saying, and is my strongly biased opinion, that the 11x pull is by far the best choice in most situations, as you always get 1 free draw out of it for the price of 10. There may be some convenient situations where you may consider drawing 1 or 3 sometimes, say, if you're lacking RS for an event realm that's coming up and you only have 20 mythril. You may want to spend them on the featured banners from that event to chance upon pulling some decent synergy gear.

Alright! With all of that relic mumbo-jumbo out of the way, go ahead and do your first "Free Relic Draw" and claim the rewards. Any item at this point in the game is helpful, even those 1* ones! Once the draw is finished, you may see a pop-up screen saying "Quest complete!" and a button that will lead you to your rewards page so you can claim your prize.

Figure 4: Creating Abilities

Proceed with your Rare Relic draw and the same will happen. Good luck on these!

After the quests have been completed, we now have 2 empty quest slots which means we can pick 2 new ones to replace the ones we just completed. I highly recommend choosing the quests "Create Blizzard" and "Create Boost". We're picking Blizzard for the free mythril, but Boost is possibly the only very early game ability you'll be using throughout the entirety of the game, even in high level dungeons. It increases the physical attack power of the target by 25% for 25 seconds.

As you can see from Figure 4, I still don't have enough orbs to craft Boost, but we'll get those in no time. Orbs and Abilities have rarity stars just like items do. The higher the stars, the rarer the item/orb/ability is, and the harder it is to obtain them.

Well then, time to proceed to our first couple of classic story missions!

Post Tutorial Recap

So, you just finished the tutorial and are ready to take on the rest of the game! Well, allow me to be your guiding hand in doing so. For the sake of continuity, I'll highlight the things that you should now have after finishing the tutorial mission:

• A random 5* relic from a pre-selected pool consisting of: Zantetsuken (VI), Danjuro (XII) or Blitz Sword (VIII).

• Regardless of which one you get, they all have unique advantages. The Danjuro can be equipped by nearly every character in the game (if not all of them), the Blitz Sword enjoys the hard-to-find FF (Final Fantasy) 8 synergy, and the Zantetsuken has a 3% chance to inflict "Death" status on an enemy (instantly killing them) per hit with the sword.

• I received the Zantetsuken as my draw, so keep this in mind when reviewing any suggested strategies.

• You received the White Mage (WM) and Black Mage (BM) Core characters. It would be in your best interest to keep these two characters moderately leveled (not more than 5-6 levels behind your party average), unless you want to apply Growth Eggs (EXP giving items used to level up characters) on them later for a couple of specific fights. 

• A note on Core Characters: These are essentially "Job" classes from the various Final Fantasy games. We will be benching these guys out as soon as we get more named characters to fill in our party slots. As of the time of this writing, Core characters can't compete with other named characters mainly due to the following factors:

1. Overall bad stats.
2. Very limited skill selections.
3. No RS (Realm Synergy) stat bonuses, with the exception of the Monday Daily Dungeon. 

• To their favor, some Cores enjoy above average SBs (Soul Breaks) and RMs (Record Materias), a passive ability system we will be discussing as we approach level 50. 

• Tyro is also a notable exception to the above, simply for the fact that he can use every piece of equipment and ability in the game. Adding to this insane versatility, he also enjoys game-changing Soul Breaks, should you chance upon drawing his Sentinel's Grimoire or Healing Grimoire relics. The former gives your party a 200% DEF and RES bonus that stacks with other abilities that buff those stats, such as Shell or Protect. The latter gives you a Curaja (most powerful healing spell) level party heal, but costs 2 Soul Break bars to cast. It is still a very decent SB nonetheless.

• A better understanding of the basic mechanics in the game. You know about abilities, RWs (Roaming Warriors), targeting, item and orb drops, SBs, entering realms and overall flow of battle. You may have also completed Mako Reactor No. 5, in which case you also know about RS.

With all of that out of the way, let's take our next step in restoring the Records of the Great Chronicle!

Introduction

Hello and welcome, fellow keepers, to jeftah's Final Fantasy Record Keeper's F2P Guide.

I've been playing this game since the Celes survival event about 3-4 weeks after the game originally came out, and have loved it ever since, to the point I now play in 3 different accounts all with different objectives or challenges.

The goal of this site is to inform, guide and teach every keeper, but specially the newer ones, the ropes around this fantastic game. It's easy to get into, but it takes quite a bit of skill and luck to master, so we'll do our best to make the former easier for you.

I would like to thank the awesome reddit FFRK Community for their fantastic work in keeping all of us up to date, informed and advised on pretty much anything anyone would like to know about the game.

Thus, the purpose of this site is not to compete with any other, but to be an inductive funnel of such information. A general layout of the guide would be as follows:

• If Dr. Mog has a "beginner's tip" page or any other Dr. Mog/Cid page about any mechanic, and it is accurate as it is, I will not comment on it, but assume the player knows this information.

• If Dr. Mog or Cid have a page referring to any mechanic, but the information is vague, or lacking any relevant details, I will note it and clarify on my explanation.

•  The account run/featured in this guide will be purely F2P. No 100gem draws, and in fact, I will not use any relic draws whatsoever, except the free daily one. I will, however, keep anything the game gives me for "free", these being quest rewards, daily login rewards (including relics), and the one relic you get to choose after you draw in the Beginner's Relic banner (I will sell the relics and keep my choice).

• This is done to capitalize on the fact that completing content is possible even if you are unlucky with your relic draws, but are using appropriate setups and strategies.

• There are also many farmable items which this guide will attempt to highlight. They are mostly found in dungeons of difficulty 61 and lower, most notably dungeons before Dungeon Update (DU) 6, and are all of 2 star (2*) rarity except for one item which is 3*, the Black Cowl (IV).

•  If possible, I will always try to set up my strategies based on Realm Synergy (RS) as a priority, however, this may not always be the case, as some realms lack users of certain ability types (For example, none of the Final Fantasy 2 characters can use summons, as of the time of this writing).

 Alright, I think that's enough for preliminaries. Let's get down to business!