After just a few hours of playing Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin, you'll find that you have more equipment than you know what to do with. In addition to that, you'll have quite a lot of weapons that are almost perfect, if only their special effects were a little bit stronger.
The Smithy is the answer to all of your problems. It's where you can go to upgrade your less-than-perfect pieces of equipment, take a look at all the possible special effects that you can mess around with, and even dismantle a ton of the useless junk cluttering up your inventory.
Updated April 10, 2023: With the recent Steam release for Stranger of Paradise, we've taken another look at this guide and made sure all the info is totally up to date.
How To Access The Smithy
Once have unlocked the Smithy, you can access it anytime you're on the world map. To do this, open the main menu and navigate over to the Cornelia menu by pressing R1.
Here, you can open the Smithy - this is where you can upgrade the special effects of your weapons and armor and also dismantle the equipment you've already collected.
How To Unlock More Options At The Smithy
At first, you will only have a limited range of options at the Smithy - you can only upgrade certain pieces of equipment. The good news is that there are three items that you can collect in order to increase the ability of the smith:
- Smith's Hammer I, which allows you to upgrade the special effects of five-star weapons and armor. Prior to this, you are prevented from even opening the upgrade menu for such pieces of equipment.
- Smith's Hammer II, which allows you to change the special effects of a piece of equipment at the Smithy.
- Smith's Hammer III, which allows you to upgrade your weapons and armors' Job Affinities at the Smithy.
The details of each Side Mission are below:
|
Item |
Side Mission |
Mission Location |
Mission Level |
Prerequisites |
|---|---|---|---|---|
|
Smith's Hammer I |
Indigo Memories: The Damned |
Refrin Wetlands |
29 |
This mission is unlocked by completing the Story Mission Natural Distortion. |
|
Smith's Hammer II |
Indigo Memories: The Trapped |
Mount Gulg |
54 |
This mission is unlocked by completing the Story Mission Memories of Fire. |
|
Smith's Hammer III |
Indigo Memories: The Stabbed |
Ancients' Tower |
120 |
This mission is unlocked by collecting a purple orb during The Suffering of Fools. |
Each of these Side Missions involves you defeating a number of Master Tonberries. You must slay three in The Damned and The Trapped, and then five of them in The Stabbed.
Master Tonberries are very tough enemies to deal with as they are quite difficult to stagger, pump out large, fast-moving projectiles, and can deal a ton of damage with Master's Knife.
You'll want to have lots of Potions handy, so consider ignoring extraneous monsters during these Side Missions to conserve resources.
A good way to take them down is to use a class that can cast Aeroga - such as Black Mage or Sage - and use it in quick succession against each Master Tonberry. This spell will not only deal with their stagger bars quickly, but it will also interrupt their movement.
Three successive casts of Aeroga should be enough to fully deplete a Master Tonberry's stagger bar and leave it open for a Soul Break.
How To Upgrade Weapons And Armor
You'll notice that when you open up the Smithy menu, the upgrade system in Stranger of Paradise only extends to the special effects that a piece of equipment bears. This means that the Smithy is useless for equipment without special effects.
The only effects you can upgrade are those that boost certain statistics - Strength, Fire Resistance, Strike Damage Dealt - and so on. Special Effects that unlock new abilities cannot be upgraded.
Every special effect can be upgraded a number of times and costs a certain amount of materials to do so, and this amount is very high. You will have to do a lot of material collecting if you want to fully upgrade even a single special effect - though doing so will get you the True Potential achievement.
Once you have the second Smith's Hammer item, you will be able to change an item's special effects. This mechanic swaps one of the item's existing special effects for another - you cannot add a new one.
Doing this costs a few of the same items that you'd have to spend to upgrade the effect, and you can choose from a very long list of special effects. This is a great way to customize almost-perfect weapons and armor to your liking.
Like normal upgrades, you can only change the special effects of a five-star weapon if you have the first Smith's Hammer.
How To Upgrade Job Affinity
Once you have the third Smith's Hammer item, you can upgrade the Job Affinity that a piece of equipment grants. Every level that an item's Job Affinity is boosted will increase the affinity by three percent, and you can do this a maximum of five times. This means you can boost an item's Job Affinity by a maximum of 15 percent.
An item's Job Affinity is set and cannot be changed like special effects are.
Upgrading Job Affinity costs Job Crests. These are obtained by defeating enemies during missions but only after you have beaten the game once already. Thankfully, you will only receive Job Crests for the two Jobs you currently have equipped, so you don't have to worry about random chance.
The amount of Job Crests you will need to improve an item's affinity depends on the base affinity. At the highest levels, you'll need a huge amount of crests.
How To Get Upgrade Materials
Unlike most games, the materials that you use for upgrading equipment in Stranger of Paradise can only be acquired by dismantling equipment. You can do this from the Smithy menu.
Dismantling an item will give you some upgrade materials of the same rank as the item being dismantled.
It is possible to mass-dismantle items using the options found in the Disassembly sub-menu. Here, you can narrow down your filters to include only the items you want to display in the Disassembly menu and then easily click a button to select them all. From here, you can dismantle the whole lot with one press of a button.
As the only way to get upgrade materials is through weapon disassembly and the weapons you get from enemies are very randomly dropped, the best way to go about this system is not to worry about it. Just play the game normally and defeat as many enemies as you can as you go. Pick up everything you find and dismantle the equipment you don't need liberally and often.
You will quickly come to learn that the materials you gain for dismantling a piece of equipment are tied to the special effects that it has. These materials are the ones that are used to upgrade that special effect or swap to it when changing an effect.
This means that you will want lots of the same special effects on your items if you want to upgrade one item's effects to the highest levels - and you'll need a ton of those items to do so.