I was there: I needed to make money — lots of it — while Twitch streaming Final Fantasy X-2 (FFX-2), and fast. We were aiming for 100% completion, we were in Chapter 3, and we needed to pay O’aka 100,000 gil.
We didn’t have that kind of dough.
And if you’re in this article, I bet neither do you.
After doing some forum spelunking and through trial and error, I figured out how to hack into riches quickly. There wasn’t a consolidated place that shared this information, so I’m sharing it with you today.
How to Make Money Fast in Chapters 1 and 2
If you want to get rich in FFX-2 during your first two chapters, good luck! You can, but I recommend you don’t even bother. There may be a merchant selling an item in Besaid in Chapter 1 for 900,000 gil, but you can get that item for free in a later chapter. Save yourself the trouble.
But if you’re still interested, let’s keep talking.
Here is the fastest way to earn money in Chapters 1 and 2 of FFX-2:
- Sell all the well-priced accessories that you are never going to use. Note: Many special accessories only cost 10 gil, so keep those!
- If desperate, sell all your well-priced accessories despite wanting to use them; you can get them again later, most likely
- Use the Thief dressphere to Pilfer Gil in every battle you encounter
- Grind Ability Points (AP) on the Thief dressphere to unlock Master Thief, which you can get after you unlock Pilfer Gil, Sticky Fingers, and Pilfer HP, and then use steal every battle and sell the items you earn.
Why Making Money Isn’t Worth It in Chapters 1 and 2
Making money isn’t worth it in chapters 1 and 2. Unless you like the Thief dressphere (which I don’t) and you like to grind — and unless you’re glad selling all your good accessories — making money in Chapters 1 and 2 is not worth it.
That’s because earning money is incredibly slow.
You have better dresspheres to master and better AP to grind.
Doing 100% in FFX-2 already costs over 100 hours. You don’t need to make it worse for yourself when you can save time in Chapter 3, which is the deadline to pay O’aka’s 100,000 gil debt.
How to Make Money Fast in Chapters 3
There is a much more effective way to get rich quick in FFX-2, which earns you tens of thousands of gil each battle. This is the way:
- Unlock the Lady Luck dressphere and use Congrats! with the Random Reel ability
As I was playing in Chapter 3 at the Thunder Plains, one Congrats! got me over 20,000 gil. For comparison, getting 20,000 through Pilfer Gil with the Thief dressphere likely took me over an hour of grinding.
Let’s break this down even further. I’ll tell you how to…
- Unlock the Lady Luck dressphere
- Unlock the Random Reel
- Use Congrats with the Random Reel
- Optionally, you can also unlock Gillionaire with Lady Luck, which doubles gil earned after every battle. This is unnecessary for O’aka, but maybe you just want to make Yuna a sugar momma. I’m not judging.
About Congrats!
The Congrats! ability is getting 7 7 7 on the Random Reel while you use Lady Luck, which bribes monsters with items to flee and also shower you with money.
The animation is extremely satisfying. You’re literally making it rain.
When you use the ability, you’ll lose a few items like Light Curtains, but you’ll be rewarded with upward of 15,000 gil.
How to Unlock the Lady Luck Dressphere
To unlock the Lady Luck dressphere, you need to win the Sphere Break tournament in Chapter 3 at Luca.
As a prerequisite, you need to learn about Sphere Break and how to play it in Chapter 1. In Chapter 1, speak to Rin in the lockers of the Blitzball stadium.
Practicing Sphere Break
To win the Sphere Break tournament, I recommend practicing in Chapter 1 or 2. When you get to Chapter 3, you get thrown right into the tournament. There is no time to practice then. You’ll be doing it live.
Be sure to save between each game. If you have autosave turned on, quit the game before you lose so that your start point will be right at the beginning of the Sphere Break game.
Easy Sphere Break Strategy
Here is an easy strategy that I used to win the tournament. To learn more about this strategy, see my post on Sphere Break.
To win Sphere Break, get the highest coin chain possible by selecting only two coins each turn.
I was losing over and over by getting a lot of coins at once. If you use this strategy, you run out of coins and can more easily get tripped up. My brain may have felt big, but I was losing.
In the end, I beat Shinra with just two coins per turn. You can even use two core coins, as long as you keep your chain. Chains have exponential growth to your points and nearly guarantees a win, so long as you don’t get thrown a one.
Cons to this strategy: If you get a one center number, you lose your streak automatically. That means there is a chance you can lose using this strategy even if you do everything right. If you do lose, just restart the game and try again.
How to Get 777 on Any Reel
There is a hack to get any combination you want on a Lady Luck reel.
Here’s what you do to get 777 on any reel:
- Initiate a ‘reel’ ability using the Lady Luck dressphere. For this exercise, we’re aiming to get three 7’s on the bottom row, which gets us Congrats when choosing the Random Reel.
- Pause the game. See where the 7 icon is at.
- If the center line is on the 7 icon, hold down the action button. On Playstation, it is the circle (O) button.
- Unpause while holding the action button and see the 7 on the bottom row
- Repeat for the other two slots.
The bottom row is the easiest to aim for since you get the most visibility of the icons.
How To Unlock Congrats!
To unlock Congrats! using the Lady Luck dressphere, you need to unlock a few other abilities first.
Here are the abilities you need to unlock Random Reels:
- Magic Reels (70 AP)
- Item Reels (80 AP)
- Random Reels (120 AP)
Important to note: that’s a lot of AP. 270 points, to be exact.
Because you unlock Lady Luck in Chapter 3 and you need to pay O’aka’s debt also in Chapter 3, you will not get the Random Reels through normal enemy encounters. You’ll need to grind.
How to Get Ability Points (AP) Fast
To get ability points fast, see my guide on grinding abilities.
Bonus: Get Gillionaire
You can also grind AP to get the Gillionaire ability with Lady Luck.
To get Gillionaire with Lady Luck, you need the following abilities:
- Double Exp (80 AP)
- Gillionaire (100 AP)
You will need 180 AP total.
Doubling experience and Gillionaire are both great abilities and you may want to learn them first. It’s just a lot of AP to grind.
After O’aka’s Debt
After you pay off O’aka’s debt, a new cheat to earn money is available to you.
O’aka has opened a new shop near the Macalania Woods. You can go there, buy his items for cheap, and then sell them at a premium with Barkeep. This strategy can be tedious, but it is effective.
You may find that the Lady Luck method is more fun and a better use of time.
Know that this option is now available to you.
Join my Stream
If you want to talk more FFX-2 or FFX, which is my favorite game of all time, feel free to pop into my stream at Miranda Lemons on Twitch. I hope this guide was helpful to you and that these hours on a Saturday are helping you with FFX-2. Until next time!
