Rule of thumb for maxing out stats; it's a lot harder if you need special items in the overworld to do so as is.
Context is in Quest 64(and well, all N64 versions) there's 98 Rare Candy-like spirits floating around you need to get. These are separate from 98 battle spirits. It's easy to miss any of the first set of spirits, especially as they're in asinine places that are hard to find. Many are easy to spot(so a casual playthrough is super easy outside of Dungeons being difficult to traverse sometimes).
So I'm missing one spirit, out of 98 floating ones. And searching around the overworld twice didn't find it. I know I didn't manipulate my stats beforehand to make my Elements different whatsoever,(with codes, I mean) so it means I definitely missed one. Once I finished my 98 battle spirits, I was missing one. Oyyyyyyy. Now that's tedious. Albeit, since it takes forever to search 98 spots, and I've 100% it without using codes, I don't mind throwing on No Random Battles while I search. XD
I did find one I missed, which considering how often I play the game, is a derp moment. But that was spirit 97. So what could I be missing? ._.; The good news is Wireframe Rendering on my emulator can somewhat help, since it shows floating frames and all. Which, of course, I haven't seen yet. It's how I identified one literally in a desert that isn't close by any landmarks(and it's not even the literal middle of the desert part of the map to make it easy, but a bit closer to the bottom left. I have it memorized now, but that took years to do so. I never found it in my first few playthroughs either).