Esthar Menu

Esthar menu refers to the section of the game where the party must wait for Lunatic Pandora to be in a certain spot to be able to enter it. The mission starts with 20 minutes on the timer and the first time the party is able to attempt to enter Lunatic Pandora is after 5 minutes, with 15 minutes on the timer. Generally, the Esthar menu is separated into 6 sections:

1. First menu
2. Battles
3. Shopping
4. Long menu
5. Boarding fight
6. Lunatic Pandora menu

Depending on the route, the battles and shopping may be in different order but the idea stays the same: setup the party for the battles in the first menu, do the battles to gain AP, shop for necessary items, do the long menu to setup the party for the rest of the speedrun, fight the boarding fight to enter Lunatic Pandora, do a quick menu inside Lunatic Pandora.

First menu

The first menu focuses on getting junctions on the correct characters, usually Edea and Zell, so they are able to kill the enemies in the following battles efficiently. It is also recommended to equip Edea with Darkside in this menu for benefits that will be explained later. This first menu can also be used to setup convenient item placements for shopping and the long menu. Necessary cards, such as Tonberry and Buel, are refined in this menu.

Battles

Since we have an excess amount of time in this section of the game, we can utilize some of it to gain a critical amount of AP in order to learn Initiative on Pandemona before we have to face the Propagators on the Ragnarok. With the usual routes this means 7 AP is required in order to learn Initiative after the boarding fight, or 10 AP to learn it before the boarding fight. Some, mostly PC routes, also require AP for Diablos to learn ST Mag-RF and use these battles to do so. These battles also offer a decent bit of experience which can help guarantee Ifrit getting to level 10 and unlock the crucial Ammo-RF ability.

There are two main benefits to equipping Edea with Darkside. It makes her deal enough damage to kill the enemies in one hit and it also helps reduce her HP for the boarding fight, giving you a chance of having all three characters in critical HP or dead.

Often people select Selphie as the third party members to bring to Esthar. This enables you to KO her in these battles and if you do not resurrect her, she will still be KO'd in the Mobile Type 8 battle increasing your odds of getting a higher crisis level on Irvine. This doesn't work with Quistis because she will be automatically resurrected once you gain control of the Ragnarok.

Shopping

Esthar offers a wide selection of shops and items that have not been available before. To afford all the items we require, we sell the 8 Mega-Potions that Seifer 3 dropped at the end of Disc 3. They sell for 8 000 gil each, giving us an extra 40 000 gil to work with. There are differences between routes and some of it is also runner preference, but the items bought in the first shop are roughly as follows: 15x Amnesia Greens, 3x Str-J scroll and 1x HP-J scroll. Some routes also have to enter the 2nd shop to buy some Tents providing a good opportunity to buy some Fire Ammo. Buying Fire Ammo in the Esthar menu means you do not need to refine Fuels for Fire ammo later in the run.

The last shop offers a Rosetta stone if you attempt to enter it, which allows you to teach Ability x4 on a GF. This is obviously very powerful and should not be forgotten. Note that sometimes the shop might give you a potion of some kind as you attempt to enter it instead of the Rosetta stone and you will have to attempt to enter it again to get the Rosetta stone.

Long menu

This is the meat and potatoes of Esthar menu. This is where the items gotten from card refining and the items bought in the shops will be used. The general idea is to do these 5 things:

1. Refine magics
2. Make GFs learn abilities
3. Split and rearrange magics
4. Use and rearrange items
5. Junction characters

Most important magics to refine are Stops from the Wizard stones, Demis for all your characters, the Hastes and/or Berserks from Magic stone and the Firagas/Fires that will be needed for Tri-Point.

As for GF abilities, the most important thing is to make Ifrit learn Ammo-RF. If you got 10 AP from the battles earlier, you can make Pandemona learn Spd-J here. You can also make some GFs stop learning anything in order to save a bit of time from not having the learned abilities pop up after battles.

Most routes opt to play around with the Triple balancing as well as splitting Hastes/Berserks onto two characters here. It is also crucial to handle the spells for Tri-Point here. Notably Blizzagas and Waters may case issues if they are left on the wrong character. Some routes make use of these spells, but most can just delete them. Magic rearrangement is technically optional, but definitely recommended at least in some capacity for all routes. Magic rearrangement refers to the action of putting useless spells on the final page of the magic list and useful spells on the 2nd or 3rd page of the magic list. This is done in order to manipulate which spells get blown away in the final fight against Ultimecia. Griever also draws spells based on the same rules.

On top of using the Amnesia Greens, HP-J and Str-J scrolls and the Rosetta Stone on specific GFs, we use two Str Ups on Irvine and/or Squall. Different routes can choose to use these Str Ups in different ways. Sometimes Irvine's level also plays into the decision. Item rearrangement can save time later in the game as it will be easier to find the used items if you empty the 1st and 2nd pages of the item list. Items used for ammo refining and the Megalixir can also be moved to the top of the first or last page for quick access. Depending on the route you may also rearrange battle items for quick access to Aura stone and Hero/Holy War for the final fight.

Boarding fight

The boarding fight is the fight that triggers at 15:00 minutes left on the clock at the earliest if you are in the correct screen. The fight is always against one Elite soldier and one G-soldier. This is one of the few battles you DO NOT want to escape. If you do flee this encounter, that specific landing zone will not be accessible anymore and you will have to move onto the next landing zone. Usually this means a multiple minute time loss, or more realistically, a dead run. In order to trigger the fight as soon as possible, it is possible to enter the screen with 15:02 on the clock and the scene will start playing a couple seconds earlier than if you just waited in the correct screen.

Lunatic Pandora menu

The final small bit of the Esthar menu is to setup Squall and Rinoa for the Propagator fights. As Edea will no longer be available to our party, her junctions are generally switched onto Squall. Depending on the route used, you may have learned Initiative in the Boarding fight and can equip it now for the Propagators. Battle speed can also be reduced to 0 % as Propagators are really fast and Initiative lets us start with full ATB anyway.