A "Level 1 Snail", as said by an Ass (Critique, Essay, Read Description)
1https://ko-fi.com/mf217
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQkLe77Pvdk
According to a certain Ass on YouTube, this is the exact encounter in Octopath Traveler from which an alleged "Level 1 Snail" can be fought early on. After having purchased the game for myself as part of the holidays at the end of 2023, and having sunk 10 hours into the game as of uploading...
How about we put the misinfo to bed, shall we?
Except it was not early on since the character he started with was Olberic apparently, and in doing so, by the time he recorded his encounter with a Level 1 Snail, he had accumulated 4 of the 8 characters at minimum, causing the Danger Level of the location he was in to scale to Level 11. As a result, more enemies appear in a single encounter regardless of if you put all of your other party members to hang out in the Tavern while your original choice of character to begin a save with remains.
For the record, this battle takes place in the starting region of the character Alfyn. Olberic's starting region is located about 2 regions over East from where this battle takes place. Assuming you started the file with Alfyn instead, this would've been a Danger Level 1 encounter. However, that was not the case as shown in Dunkey's video, in which Dunkey had fought in the region at Danger Level 11, and proceeded to face off against 2 Warrior Wasps and 2 Giant Slugs.
To get the exact same results in terms of Money, Experience, and JP that Dunkey did, I would've needed to have broken an enemy's guard at least once during the battle; Dunkey did indeed get the Break Bonus, since the Giant Slugs aren't weak to any Warrior Skills, but the Warrior Hornets on the other hand *are* weak to Warrior Skills, meaning he scored the Break Bonus against those, and then singled out one of the Giant Slugs until he had one remaining to record the last few moments of the battle with and claim it was "just" a "Level 1 Snail".
As I wasn't going for a complete replication, obviously I didn't get the same item drop he did, and you'll also notice Olberic's attire is different, because I have the Alchemist Secondary Job equipped to him, and my attempts to initiate this encounter caused me to go through other encounters, which allowed me to discover more of the weaknesses of the Warrior Hornets and Giant Slugs than Olberic with just his original Job would've been able to pull off.
As for how I discovered the Giant Slug's weakness to Daggers? Primrose's main weapon as a Dancer is one, which is one of the characters Dunkey did show he managed to play her Chapter 1 for, and is incidentally located in a region of the game directly east of Alfyn's region shown here, and *also* west of Olberic's region.
So to wrap things up? This battle encounter with a "Level 1 Snail" yields 180 Leaf, 32 Exp (+3 BREAK), and 36 JP/Job Points. How is that possible? It's because Dunkey outright never fought "a" Snail, he fought 2 of them, in addition to 2 Wasps he didn't even acknowledge. As a result, it was the only way he scored the exact same battle yields I did barring any item drops. The "1" next to its weaknesses? That's the amount of hits it takes from those weaknesses until its guard breaks. The Wasps had 2 in their guard values, hence why I scored the Break once I hit both of them twice.