first and foremost i am here to amuse myself
~
i love weird and bad video games, speedrunning, professional wrestling, and rodents
~
i hate computers
~
also found on:
discord (indextic)
twitch (indextic)
bluesky for the foreseeable future, i guess
kinda want to start a series going through RPGs where people claim You Have To Grind and show off that no, actually, you almost never have to grind in a well-designed RPG, you're just not paying enough attention to its mechanics
but i'm worried i'm wrong, because all of my experience playing rpgs is trying to Do Everything, and thus i often end up far beyond the expected level for any given boss, so of course i never need to grind. i still do, though. all the time. because i like it
i think oomf was playing ff4 for a long ass time bcz of this
Phantasy Star 1 + 2.
The beginning of 1 appears to require grinding for cash to advance the plot.
2 has a weird beginning difficulty cliff. Note that the release outside of Japan included a hintbook with maps of the dungeons. It is strongly advised to find and use this.
In both cases, the manuals are required reading. This is old school stuff; most of the backstory was homework. Also starting in 2 the series went to using short words borrowed from German(?) for technique names.
Hydlide 3/Super Hydlide has an extremely restrictive weight limit that basically demands that you grind a lot to be able to carry all your endgame equipment and key items.
Also at one point there's a town you need to go to that's gated behind having 50 INT which is especially punishing for thieves who have that as their worst starting stat
I'd argue Dragon Quest here, except that's fixed by doing exactly what you say - the whole point of those games is to get lost and gain levels in that time, and that makes them grindy if you go straight from event to event.
I guess the quintessential grindy RPGs would be Disgaea, but they genuinely do require some amount of grinding imo, just not as much as people insist on.
okay yeah i have definitely heard that disgaea like requires requires it. if i actually knew anything about how to play tactics rpgs i'd absolutely try my hand at never grinding at all but i already get my ass kicked in those games just playing them normally
I did the PC version speedrun for a while (back when the PC version still worked lmao) and, like... it doesn't /grind/ but it does go out of its way to capture monsters waaay above the expected level, which is sort of the same thing
The thing is that grinding is usually an easier choice than trying to beat something without doing it since it's just a time investment. So I feel like a lot of people will default to doing it as a strategy.
That said, if you want to play a game that does a lot of really clever things to nudge players away from grinding then play Parasite Eve. The way it does encounters is basically the first time you show up on a screen that can have an encounter you get one. Then there's a very low chance (like 5~10%) for an encounter triggering on screen transition (which is the only time encounter trigger). Then the XP curve for leveling has built in "walls" that make it so if you do all the guaranteed encounters in an area you'll be at a point where the next level may require x3 to x5 the XP of the previous one. This creates an incentive to push through the game without grinding.
Achieving the good ending in Hyperdimension Neptunia requires unlocking the three optional characters. Each requires raising their nation's "share" bar to 70%. You can only do that by repeating ~5-minute long side-quests over and over again that raise the bar by about ~4% each; and you have to do that for all three of them.
By the time you reach the final boss, you're extremely overleveled. And if you do decide to mess with the game's complex combo system, it's actually pretty easy to find some overkill combos that make whatever's left of the game extremely trivial.
I'm not sure myself, but I'd be curious how someone would fair with .hack GU.
Just a couple levels can make a huge difference with how much damage you're taking and receiving, I'd back out of boss fights sometimes and come back doing multiple times more damage with a little grinding.
