Yup! All you do is press down on the left stick and your character will just keep running up and down the stairs and each time it will re-load all the spawns in the area and auto save.

I managed to get to the required rank for the Greninja Mega Stone probably within a few days of casually playing ranked. All I used were 3 Pokémon that were on my playthrough team that could Mega Evolve. So you should be able to get it quite easily 🙂

I think the one-on-one, turn based battles get a little complicated for me with strategies, but this being real time battling between four players, I'm just running in and trying to hit something, so I feel less pressure to 'do well' lol

It annoyed me every time I wanted to go exploring in the beginning and Urbain was like 'NOPE! We need to go this way!"

Just let me explore!!

I'm not really all that far in the game. I'm mostly taking my time, exploring the city and catching a bunch of Pokémon lol