Octopath H'aanit FAQ

Why H'aanit?
Each character is a different category (see https://www.speedrun.com/octopath#Single_Story). H'aanit is my favourite and I chose her on my first playthrough, so I'm starting out with this game doing runs with her.

Why do you get other characters if you just need to complete H'aanit's story?
The bosses later on would be very hard without the other characters and would require having to grind exp, making it slower not to get them.

How are you not getting encounters?
The way encounters work is when you enter a new area / reload a save / enter a fight (eg provoking), the number of steps to the next encounter is reset. With the evasive manoeuvre support skill the number of steps is high enough to get through a lot of areas without any encounters (or a low chance of one). So we want this skill as soon as possible. To unlock it you need to unlock 2 scholar skills which cost 130 JP. There are two ways of getting the required JP: killing an encounter in Whistlewood forest or killing a cait. Caits are very rare (we think about 3%) and you can't always kill them since they flee a lot. However, caits save a lot of time over the whistlewood method and since I got one in my PB, to beat it I will be trying to get one. This will mean there are a lot of resets in the first 10 minutes of the run.