So, as soon as I got my hands on my third party slot, I went nuts on the event zone. I didn't have 25k on hand as soon as the option was available, so this wound up being right around the start of the Enigmatic Grotto...which, as I said, got abandoned for the event for a couple days. I was poking in the event zone this evening and realized my party was approaching level 50, and figured I should go back and advance my quests. After discovering to my dismay that, when that overleveled, I didn't even get AP for the battles, I started hitting the 'retreat' button when the battles popped up, figuring to rush through that section so I could get to a part of the storyline where the battles were worth doing.

Here's the problem. Over an hour of rapidly skipping past battles later, the only story progression I've seen was in the first couple minutes, before I started skipping the random fights. Plenty of random chests, the healer's popped up three times, the peddler twice, the whole backing-away-thing-stopped-moving thing even more often than chests, but since it always seems to mean another useless battle, I've been skipping those past quickly too.

So, the question is, does skipping battles mean the steps for progression don't occur? Or are there seriously thousands of steps to this quest? I would think there'd be more of a level range if that were the case...

You have to win so many battles to progress. I Cant recall how many though.

A good example is the dungeon is roughly 20 to 25 battles to get to the boss.

Ah. Ok. Thanks! Well, since I learned that not all pets start with equivalent stats, I'd been planning to eventually start a new party with a set with better starting stats - might as well do that now as any time, then. At least that way the battles will feel like progress, since the new team would be earning experience.