01 Jul 2019
E3 2019 may be quickly retreating into the distant past, but that doesn’t mean it’s not still on our minds. Specifically for me, I can’t stop thinking about Square Enix’s conference. The Final Fantasy 7 Remake demo was good, of course. But for me, I can’t get over that Final Fantasy Brave Exvius (iOS | Android) had such a significant chunk of time dedicated to it (and its eventual spin off) on a main stage presentation at the biggest American games conference.
Sure, it was maybe five minutes, but five minutes is a lot for a gacha game. The move was a winner for Square. Exvius was a trending search shortly after the presentation. 39 million people worldwide have downloaded it, and there was still room to attract new players. That’s saying something.
If you’ve come to this guide, I can only assume that you are one of those new players. Welcome to the wild world of Brave Exvius, full of pretty sprites and number crunching. It can be incredibly overwhelming to step into it (as any gacha game, really) and try to get your bearings.
There is plenty to learn about BE, but I want to focus on what I consider to be the most important thing in the game: money. More specifically, how to avoid spending any of it on this game.
Earning Lapis
Lapis is the premier currency of Brave Exvius. With it, you can buy attempts at drawing the characters, slots in your various inventories, extra tries if you fail certain missions. Really, it’s the lifeblood of your progress in this game.
You’ll notice that it’s pretty expensive to buy outright. For one US dollar, you can get 120 lapis, which is about enough to buy 5 slots inventory for equipment and materials. For $4, you’ll get 500 lapis, which is enough for one character summon attempt. Lapis is a pretty expensive currency as far as gacha games go. You’ll pay out the nose for any significant amount of it. Good thing there are A LOT of ways to earn it for free.
The easiest way to do this is through world quests. Besides having tons of references to main line Final Fantasy games, FFBE has its own original narrative that’s currently in its second season. If you’re just starting, that means that there is tons of latent lapis just waiting for you to scoop up. All you have to do is hit each location and battle through the scenarios.
Make extra sure that you are completing the missions each stage has. These can require you to kill a specific enemy in a certain time frame or cast a certain type of spell. These rewards seem small, but they add up quickly!
Another task you should add to your routine is completing daily quests. Dailies are 5 (8 on weekends) macro objectives that reward you with Gil, energy, and, of course, lapis. When you complete all of the dailies, which could include tasks like doing a particular vortex quest a number of times for example, you are rewarded with 50 lapis. That’s 350 lapis a week. Not too shabby.
Another pretty simple way to gain some lapis is in the Arena. The Arena pits a team of your making against other people’s AI controlled teams. You battle up the rankings in order to win rewards at the end of each weekly arena period.
You don’t need to rank high to earn lapis, though. All you have to do is participate at least 5 times, and you will 40 lapis. You can do this once a day.
There’s a couple other ways to earn lapis that can sometimes be more difficult to do for new players. Firstly, there are plenty of Vortex quests that provide Lapis as a reward for some of the missions. These can be the limited time event quests or the more static special boss challenges that will also reward you with rare items. These can be tough for an unseasoned party, though.
You can gain lapis less reliably through Trophy Rewards which are meta objectives that can be achieved through just playing the game. These include casting a certain number of spells, or winning a certain amount of battles in the arena. This “certain amount” can sometimes be in the thousands, so take your time with it. You’ll be pretty well rewarded though – 500 lapis awaits you at the “gold” level trophy.
Spending Lapis
So you have this pile of beautiful blue money and need to know the best ways to spend it. We can help you there.
Step-Up Summons are widely considered the best overall bang for your buck when it comes to spending lapis on summoning characters. Step-ups are a gradually scaling banner that allows you to pull for specific high rank characters in waves. The first step up usually costs a lower amount of lapis, then it gets higher each step, with more opportunity for success as you go up. The bonuses you have to draw specific characters gives this a significant edge against just drawing on 10+1’s. This usually requires a pretty big lapis investment to go through all of the steps, though. So make sure there’s something you really want in them before committing.
A good way to get a lot of value out of your lapis, especially for new players, is drawing from the ½ off Featured Summon pool. There’s a bonus to the chances of pulling whatever the featured units are that week, and it costs only 250 lapis instead of 500. The only time spending lapis on a single pull is worth it is for this daily draw.
You shouldn’t spend lapis to retry a battle. It costs 100 to do so, and even though you will return at full life, and full limit burst gauges, you could simply retry the battle for free. Energy is easy to wait for, and you’ll procure energy replenishing items in your day to day grind.
Speaking of energy, if you don’t want to wait it out, you can actually spend lapis to refill your energy bar. How you should go about doing this depends on your rank (which determines your maximum energy). A bundle of items exists that grants you a set of energy replenishment items. One is just 100 flat energy that is used immediately. You also get a pair of NRG Restore 10 potions, which restore 10 energy each. If you have less than 120 total energy, this is the right package for you, because if you can’t actually use the NRG potions right now, you can store them until you can. Once you get over 120 total energy, you’re better off spending that 100 lapis to fully replenish your current energy straight up.
Buying other bundles with lapis can be a tricky proposition. Generally speaking, the ones even worth looking at are the bundles that feature Rare Summon Tickets. These provide one draw per ticket and are common rewards in Vortex quests. It’s difficult to place a hard value on a summon ticket, but seeing as a daily single draw from the ½ off Featured Summon Pool is 250 lapis, we can assume that each ticket is probably worth that too. Spending too much more than that on a ticket is practically being ripped off.
Follow these simple rules, internalize the habits, and you will be sitting on a hoard of Lapis in no time, without spending a single cent.
Anything else you want to know about Brave Exvius? Got any other tips you want to share with the community? Let us know in the comments!
There are a million small quirks and tricks like these, and the fun part is that they can be discovered organically through play. A good game teaches you how to learn its systems, and Wizards Unite does this through more than overly-chummy, voice-acted tutorials. Its interface is clearly delineated into the overworld and resource management portions, for example. A few quality-of-life tips. First, you probably want power saver mode, because this one is a battery guzzler. Secondly, in the interest of conserving data roaming and bypassing asset loading hiccups, go under options and download everything on a fast network. 
