Your characters level. Your weapons level. Your materia levels. If that’s not enough, even your party levels up in Final Fantasy VII Rebirth! Party Level is an odd category that doesn’t reflect the strength of your individual characters, but rather the cohesiveness and reputation your party has earned via various means. While your Party Level doesn’t directly affect the strength of your characters (your stats don’t directly increase when your Party Level does), Party Level does have some knock-on effects that will directly affect your party’s combat performance. This page will discuss how to increase your Party Level in Final Fantasy VII Rebirth and what your Party Level unlocks.
(1 of 3) While you’ll occasionally get lumps of Party XP during story events,
How to Increase Party Level - Final Fantasy VII Rebirth¶
The in-game tutorial regarding Party Level isn’t terribly helpful, merely stating that Overcoming challenges, helping people in need, and exploring the world will deepen your bonds, thereby increasing your party level. You may get a mistaken impression when 
Red XIII formally joins the party at the start of Chapter 2, netting you 100 Party XP, but this is something of a one-off. A welcome one-off, to be sure, but the vast majority of your Party XP won’t come from such windfalls, the odd story boss notwithstanding.
Instead, you’ll largely earn Party XP from two sources: completing World Intel events and Side Quests. World Intel events are basically all your standard open world busywork - monster hunts, towers, etc., flavored with a bit of Final Fantasy VII seasoning. These will generally net you 5 Party XP each, which doesn’t seem like a lot, but there can be dozens of them in a region, and it adds up to some serious Party XP. Side Quests tend to offer more (10+ Party XP), but they’re significantly fewer in number than World Intel. Collectively you should be able to earn a significant amount of Party XP if you fully complete a region - enough that players just running through the story will likely have a substantially lower Party Level than completionists.
Increasing your Party Level will allow you to unlock more skill cores in each character’s Folio.
What Does Party Level Do? - Final Fantasy VII Rebirth¶
The more side content you do, the higher your Party Level will be… but what does your Party Level actually do? It doesn’t boost your stats or give you any other advantage in traditional RPG mechanics, instead, it serves as a prerequisite for unlocking those mechanics for another gameplay element. Folios - skill trees by another name - consist of various “skill cores” that you can unlock by spending Skill Points (SP), which are earned by finding Manuscripts and leveling up your characters. In addition to these prerequisites, some skill cores also require your Weapon Level to be sufficiently advanced and, of course, your Party Level. Most skill cores in each character’s Folio are gated by your Party Level - a fact that’s somewhat obfuscated by how many of these skill cores don’t even appear in the Folio menu until you increase your Party Level (you can generally only see skill cores that are one level higher than your current Party Level). Skill cores yield many of the Synergy Abilities and Synergy Skills your characters can learn as well as other boons like free casting for certain elemental magics and passive stat bonuses, making them useful aspects of party development, ones that should encourage you to clear out side content.
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