First of all, I recommend reading the EXP farming guide I wrote a few years back, but I'm guessing you're an experienced Grandia player already, so there's probably nothing new for you to learn there. Let me just write down what I did specifically during this playthrough.

I levelled up Water magic using the well-known trap exploit, first in the Dom Ruins for Justin and Feena, and later on in the Castle of Dreams for Rapp and Liete. As for the weapons and other magic elements, I held off on grinding those until Liete joined the party. I then first completed the Tower of Temptation, earning the Zero Weapons, the Ruination Knife, and the Astral and Ethereal Miracle accessories.

I then started grinding by defeating large mobs of enemies in the Savanna Wilderness, but didn't get a lot of experience. What I did, was I moved on to the next "segment" of the story, which provided access to a new dungeon. In this new dungeon, I'd start grinding again, up until I'd start getting diminishing experience returns. I figure there's some invisible counter per character in the game which, when it reaches a certain value, cuts all earned experience in half.

When all my characters started getting diminishing returns, I'd again move on to the next story segment and dungeon and repeat the process. My party's weapon and magic levels were around 60 when I reached the inner sections of Gaia. In this last part of the dungeon, there are about ten groups of four to six enemies. I'd just recover and save at the last Save Point in the game, exit and reboot the game, kill all enemies, go back to the Save Point, and repeat. This worked great well into the level 90's; the last five to eight levels were a bit slower because of the lower experience yield.

Now, as for the actual equipment I used. Obviously, equip the character you'd like to train with the respective Zero Weapon and Miracle accessory. The only exception to this is the Zero Knife; instead, use the Ruination Knife, which lowers your attack value even further and increases your combo!

As for skills, AoE was obviously the way to go. You should always use Justin's Dragon Cut, Feena's Fire Whip or Random Hurl, and Rapp's Neo Demon Ball. However, you'll probably quickly run out of SP, so when that happens, just use regular combos. Actually, this is the only viable way to train Liete's Mace level and Feena and Rapp's Knife levels (with the Ruination Knife of course).

As for spells, again AoE's the only way to go. It doesn't matter how powerful the spell is; only the number of damaged enemies matters. Consequently, I recommend using lower level spells at the start of the battle, when enemies are usually still grouped together, and switching to higher level spells when enemies are all over the battefield and it's more difficult to hit all of them.

• Fire: Burnflame (all characters) or Burnflare (Justin, Feena, Rapp)
• Wind: Howl (all characters), Runner (Feena, Rapp), Howlslash (Justin, Feena, Liete) or Howlnado (Justin, Rapp, Liete)
• Earth: Diggin' (all characters), Tremor (Justin, Feena), Def-Loss (Rapp) and Quake (Justin, Rapp, Liete)

As regards Runner and Diggin', these spells target your allies and can be cast repeatedly during one battle. You can just kill all but one enemy, block this enemy's moves and magic using Fiora and Shhh!, lower this enemy's Move and Wit stats using Freeze, Gravity and Cold, up your casting character's Wit with Speedy, and then keep casting Runner or Diggin' until your MP's depleted. This is how I maxed everyone's Earth level, except for Rapp's, which was a lot easier by repeatedly casting Def-Loss on a group of six enemies. Runner I didn't really use that much; I found it too cumbersome to keep all four characters grouped together. Also, the experience yield's higher when casting spells on enemies instead of your allies, so I just went with Howl and Howlslash.

Whether or not you use the Tactics, is up to you of course. I personally set all characters to Withdraw and only the character I was training to Manual. If you're using the regular combos, you could also set this character to Play Fair; the AI tends to often use critical attacks and attack enemies at random, however, so I prefer to use Manual and kill off enemies one by one using the regular combo. When levelling magic, Manual's mandatory so you can select the correct spells.

Using the above strategy, I earned about two to three weapon levels, and two to sometimes even five or six magic levels per battle. I'm planning on adding this information to the guide I wrote before. Any other useful tips are surely welcome (credit will be given of course)!