You can fight in any area at any time.
But that doesn’t mean you won’t be steamrolled.
In most games you can theoretically avoid almost all the foes, but that doesn’t mean that you won’t be weak enough that the boss can annihilate you by sneezing.
Yeah came to say something similar. Quite of the few JRPGs I’ve played had the classic “Kill a ton of these things and maybe it’ll drop the thing you’re looking for!” or “Do this task over and over again and eventually you’ll get a reward!” But then again those were usually optional and off the top of my head I can’t think of a time you really needed to super grind something just to defeat the final story bosses, so it is very possible that she might’ve enjoyed those games that way and that’s a fine way to play those… Read more »
Final Fantasy 1 and the Dragon Warrior(Quest) NES games required a good amount of walk in circles fighting imps and slimes just to level enough that you won’t be slaughtered in the next area or by the next boss.
The strategy guides even pointed out areas where this could be done as efficiently as possible, like getting the Giant Sword and going to the (optional) Giant Hallway where you’d fight a group of Giants after every step.
The modern remakes rebalanced this to be a lot better and more in line with modern game-flow.
Ahaha, I remember looking at the Peninsula of Power and thinking “who needs this?”
Marsh Cave was a piece of cake, Lich was nothing to me, Kraken MIGHT have almost beaten me, and Chaos was a notable challenge but fell fairly quickly.
All because I grinded in Corneria to have enough money for plenty of tents.
Grinding is only important in poorly made RPGs. The good ones don’t make you kill enemies that drop 2xp for hours upon hours upon hours just to progress through the game. The bad ones? They can take a hike, I have other games I could play that are fun. Grinding = padding. Make a fun game, not a needlessly long game.
Sure he did. The original Everquest back in ’99. The days and days I spent camped along the beaches of Oasis, grinding crocodiles for XP to inch through the levels… XD Back before games introduced the idea of leveling through questing, grinding was the only way to progress.
Though I can’t recall a single-player title that I’ve ever felt required grinding like that.
Oh I was referring to “An RPG where grinding isn’t important”, all RPGs I’ve played have required grinding to some degree.
Even Final Fantasy Lightning Returns which very specifically made grinding useless with and put all your stat increases into filling out requests required grinding out those quests and killing monsters to optimize your abilities.
That aside:
I actually dove back in to EQ Original since private legacy servers are still a thing and man, still pretty fun. Particularly as a Druid who can rocket across maps and teleport and socialize and group.
It depends on what you consider grinding. There are lots of games where you don’t need to specifically stop and grind an area. Though in a lot of those games you do often see things like random encounters and that is grinding in a sense. You don’t need to specifically grind but going through the map ends up with a certain amount of grind by default.
Also there are many games where you don’t grind monsters but grind quests. If you have to do all the quests including things like random fetch quests, that can be considered grinding too.
Oh, good God, you poor bastard. I quit the original Everquest because of that. Grinding spiders as a solo warrior in the Common Lands/desert of Ro, what a tedious slog. I finally made it to level 16 and got dual wield only to find it was dual wielding a long sword and a short sword, which would less damage than the two handed tarnished longsword i was wielding at the time. I stopped playing almost immediately afterwards.
Your first mistake was being a solo warrior, warriors needed to group just like wizards did.Unfortunately warriors were kind of mechanically boring in EQ.
Oh Ever-crack, how many an hour of my life you devoured. I remember spending days and days in BB. “Train to Zone”. Good times. Another life time killing treants in South Karana. 🙂 Once I went to a guild mates “wedding” in a good town (I was necro) and died enough times to lose 2 levels. Back when getting to the maximum level in a MMORPG was a massive achievement (rather than the inevitability of modern RPGs). But if you want another game that took grinding to impressive levels – Legends of Kesmai, my first ever MMORPG. Had separate leveling… Read more »
Oh God not the Furbogs x.x now im going to have the nightmares again x.x
While not an MMO, ES Morrorwind was fun to level every little thing. Right from the get go you are jumping around like a moron to bring up the acrobat skill, swing weapon, etc just so you can level up x.x
Yes. Exactly why 99% of games with an “XP points” or similar system should be avoided imo. Go for games where the only reason to replay a level if for *yourself* to become better at it, not for your stats upgrading when you do the exact same thing.
Many games use experience, and many of them are fun.
Disregarding them just because of a VERY widely used feature basically means that you are shutting yourself off from several genres, which is not a good or fun idea.
My rule of thumb is that if a JRPG forces me to grind levels just to be able to proceed, I’m either not playing it right (i.e. not exploring enough or trying to avoid battles) or the game is just not balanced properly and isn’t worth my time. Not all JRPG fans are in it for the turn-based menu-based active math formula that is a JRPG battle. For some, it’s a necessary evil in order to get to the other things – dialogue, plot, music, exploration. Random encounters and such are palatable to me because you get little rewards along… Read more »
This is exactly how I see a lot of JRPGs. Thanks to earlier games in the genre (and gaming in general, really) doing it people have gotten to the point where they think grinding is the only way to play them. It irks me when people just say “you need to grind more” when referring to harder parts of a game. An option, yes, but often not even close to the best one. Many games specifically discourage grinding by lowering experience gains when you hit higher levels or even making experience near worthless. Your strategy and character builds being the… Read more »
Any RPG? I don’t remember grinding in Dragon Age Origins, or absolutely classic Baldur’s Gate. When you clear an area, it stays clear.
James Rye
6 years ago
Oh boy, I can’t wait for Ethan to play JRPG and after a page of being all “this sucks, this is stupid, this is repetitive”, the next one we see Lukas walk into the room, Ethan still playing obviously played through the entire night and repeating the mantra “this is not fun, this is not fun, this is not fun” over and over again while Lukas rolls his eyes. XD
Most JRPGs don’t involve serious grinding on the scale that Emily is being told that MH involves. You do wander around in a cave for an hour beating everything up, but that’s an hour. In MH, most fights are 15-40 minutes, and Ethan is talking about DOING TWELVE FORTY MINUTE FIGHTS. That is much more than all but the grindiest of games.
Which FF? Once you get to the double digits you have some really drastically different gameplay in comparison to the older ones, so saying “FF XIII” and “FF VI” are like saying “Pokemon” and “Breath of Fire”. Similar, but two different sides of the genre. In the earlier FFs, most fights take 2 minutes at most unless 1. you are in an area that you are not equipped for or 2. It’s a boss fight. This is doing 60 minute long fights, as opposed to 12 easily lost fights that are half an hour long each. You could become strong… Read more »
Actually those are like saying “Pokemon Conquest” and “Eternal Eyes” (PS1 was so long ago…)
Raven
6 years ago
I was a pretty big jrpg fan growing up. Grinding was one thing the dev could force me to do that would put me off their title completely. In fact the only game I remember doing it in was star ocean 2. Combat in that game was so much fun as to make it not a chore.
As an aside I don’t see them working out long term if Ethan can’t respect her different tastes in games.
On the note of any Star Ocean though you can play any one of them without ever having to grind. Either through item creation or general exploration you’ll get more than enough equipment to make up for any lacking stats. You’ll get more than enough skill points to put into your passive skills through natural play to make grinding pointless. I’ve heard tell that you have to be at least level 180-200 to beat the unlimited final boss but you can absolutely do it as low as level 120 just by going through the Maze of Tribulations. The equipment you… Read more »
Brent
6 years ago
Oddly enough, this same communications spike happens whenever Lucas tries to call him him about picking up groceries or paying rent. In all honesty, though, this is pretty much the same argument I’ve had with a couple of my friends in regards to the Telltale Games. I like to view them as interactive movies with well-written or at least entertaining characters and occasionally branching paths that you can explore for curiosity sake, but then my friend will go, “You just sit there and watch!” and then I’ll go, “Story!” and he’ll go, “Boring!” and then we fling each other off… Read more »
Yeah, Telltale Games are movies except you can yell at someone “No don’t do that!” and they sometimes listen.
Urazz
6 years ago
My guess is that she just grinds enough in JRPGs to get by which probably makes it more fun for her since it does ramp up the difficulty a bit.
Kai
6 years ago
I think this was actually pretty generous on Ethan’s part when you think about it. She has no interest in Post Apocalyptic games and is a JRPG fan, so what did Ethan do? He introduces her to Post Apocalyptic settings in the most JRPG out there.
If anyone says Monster Hunter isn’t Post Apocalyptic, look up the lore, it makes the events of Fallout look childish in comparison.
“There was once an ancient civilization that did some fucked up stuff and then got wiped out and you can literally ONLY learn this through reading material outside of the game” does not make MH a “post-apocalyptic game” XD
Here I was thinking you went out of your way to be subtle with Ethan trying to ease her into the genre 😛 As for only being able to learn things from outside material, I (like everyone else) hated the underwater combat of the older games, but the final fight with Ceadeus and Goldbeard was my favorite stage (loved the nod they gave to it in Kulve Torath’s second area) and it did give a pretty good hint. Now though I’m trying to remember the lore behind the Charge Blade, Switch Axe and Gunlance, where it was mentioned they are… Read more »
I always imagined that the Charge Blade was the “weapon no one has ever seen” that the MH3 Wyverian Artisan kept on saying he wanted to make. The Switchaxe and the Gunlance are probably the result of the da Vinci equivalent of that time period or place being inventive with the crazy aspects of the body parts of all of these animals. I mean, Iodrome, Great Baggis, etc all have a small and compact body part that is used to store potent liquids. You could easily repurpose that to be a storage container for phials (assuming phials are not holding… Read more »
A post-apocalyptic game has to have a little more than just a past apocalypse. I mean, heck, Pikmin could be considered a post-apocalyptic game under that definition. Technically, GTA could be considered post-apocalyptic. The apocalypse might have happened 65 million years ago, but ‘post’ is ‘post’.
It’s not grinding if its fun?
I mean when you are on the 15th round of Rathy to get a Ruby, you are bored. But when you have cleared Jargas for the first time and need to go back and do a second round, it’s still fun.
It’s the “dozen” part that isn’t fun, not the doing the same fight again part.
For me, I have a problem with grinding when it doesn’t fit the environment or the game. Case and point, if you are in the middle of a large scale battle, or traveling through an area explicitly stated as being filled with dangerous creatures etc
Getting attacked by bandits every ten feet on a road, yeah that’s BS, but constantly attacked by critters while in a cave is believable and sensible.
Nothing wrong with VGA, and even still, that might just be an unusually-colored DVI or HDMI cable. Never seen one in blue, but I’ve got a couple dark-gray DVI cables, and an orange HDMI cable, so, I suppose it could be a blue DVI or HDMI, or DisplayPort connector.
Or, maybe he’s going old-school and using VGA. Nothing wrong with good old analog, after all.
I’ve always felt like grinding can be either a cop-out excuse to pad play time, or a legitimate mechanism to help you improve by repeating fights to learn the tricks and improve your skills, making each progressively more difficult enemy, proportionately (in theory) less difficult. Except for games where a quest you missed or didn’t take early on, that you now want for that 100% completion, requires you to smite enemies that would have been difficult in the beginning but now basically make you feel bad for spending mana on. “My weakest spell/attack is still OP and excessive overkill crowd… Read more »
Tim P.
6 years ago
Most amount of grinding I’ve ever experienced in a game (not counting when I was younger, and didn’t quite get the minutiae of some) was/is self-imposed. Resonance of Fate. Trying to grind out map tiles of a certain type so I can chain bonuses further throughout all the levels. (I may be a bit of a masochist with any game that has grindable elements… xD )
BakaGrappler
6 years ago
Huh. With all the problems with the PC release, I totally believe it would interfere with VOIP to boot.
Joystick
6 years ago
I can’t say much, since I don’t play many RPGs. Subnautica is a RPG if you think about it. But what I do predict:
Beginning of the falling-out!
24
For a JRPG fan she should be used to doing the same fight over and over. Grinding is very important in any RPG.
Some JRPG’s break the rule. For instance, Octopath traveler only has Recommended level’s. You can fight in any area at almost anytime.
You can fight in any area at any time.
But that doesn’t mean you won’t be steamrolled.
In most games you can theoretically avoid almost all the foes, but that doesn’t mean that you won’t be weak enough that the boss can annihilate you by sneezing.
Yeah came to say something similar. Quite of the few JRPGs I’ve played had the classic “Kill a ton of these things and maybe it’ll drop the thing you’re looking for!” or “Do this task over and over again and eventually you’ll get a reward!” But then again those were usually optional and off the top of my head I can’t think of a time you really needed to super grind something just to defeat the final story bosses, so it is very possible that she might’ve enjoyed those games that way and that’s a fine way to play those… Read more »
Final Fantasy 1 and the Dragon Warrior(Quest) NES games required a good amount of walk in circles fighting imps and slimes just to level enough that you won’t be slaughtered in the next area or by the next boss.
The strategy guides even pointed out areas where this could be done as efficiently as possible, like getting the Giant Sword and going to the (optional) Giant Hallway where you’d fight a group of Giants after every step.
The modern remakes rebalanced this to be a lot better and more in line with modern game-flow.
Ahaha, I remember looking at the Peninsula of Power and thinking “who needs this?”
Marsh Cave was a piece of cake, Lich was nothing to me, Kraken MIGHT have almost beaten me, and Chaos was a notable challenge but fell fairly quickly.
All because I grinded in Corneria to have enough money for plenty of tents.
Grinding is only important in poorly made RPGs. The good ones don’t make you kill enemies that drop 2xp for hours upon hours upon hours just to progress through the game. The bad ones? They can take a hike, I have other games I could play that are fun. Grinding = padding. Make a fun game, not a needlessly long game.
I don’t think you’ve described any RPG that exists anywhere.
Sure he did. The original Everquest back in ’99. The days and days I spent camped along the beaches of Oasis, grinding crocodiles for XP to inch through the levels… XD Back before games introduced the idea of leveling through questing, grinding was the only way to progress.
Though I can’t recall a single-player title that I’ve ever felt required grinding like that.
Oh I was referring to “An RPG where grinding isn’t important”, all RPGs I’ve played have required grinding to some degree.
Even Final Fantasy Lightning Returns which very specifically made grinding useless with and put all your stat increases into filling out requests required grinding out those quests and killing monsters to optimize your abilities.
That aside:
I actually dove back in to EQ Original since private legacy servers are still a thing and man, still pretty fun. Particularly as a Druid who can rocket across maps and teleport and socialize and group.
It depends on what you consider grinding. There are lots of games where you don’t need to specifically stop and grind an area. Though in a lot of those games you do often see things like random encounters and that is grinding in a sense. You don’t need to specifically grind but going through the map ends up with a certain amount of grind by default.
Also there are many games where you don’t grind monsters but grind quests. If you have to do all the quests including things like random fetch quests, that can be considered grinding too.
For me, that was Dark Age of Camelot, where the only real questing was repeatable for grind, or your main quest line. Good times.
Oh, good God, you poor bastard. I quit the original Everquest because of that. Grinding spiders as a solo warrior in the Common Lands/desert of Ro, what a tedious slog. I finally made it to level 16 and got dual wield only to find it was dual wielding a long sword and a short sword, which would less damage than the two handed tarnished longsword i was wielding at the time. I stopped playing almost immediately afterwards.
Your first mistake was being a solo warrior, warriors needed to group just like wizards did.Unfortunately warriors were kind of mechanically boring in EQ.
Shadowknights, Paladins were more interesting.
Oh Ever-crack, how many an hour of my life you devoured. I remember spending days and days in BB. “Train to Zone”. Good times. Another life time killing treants in South Karana. 🙂 Once I went to a guild mates “wedding” in a good town (I was necro) and died enough times to lose 2 levels. Back when getting to the maximum level in a MMORPG was a massive achievement (rather than the inevitability of modern RPGs). But if you want another game that took grinding to impressive levels – Legends of Kesmai, my first ever MMORPG. Had separate leveling… Read more »
Or maybe wow golden ear aka vanilla … grind those fulborgs, grind them until your eyes bleed and you finally get to level 60.
Oh God not the Furbogs x.x now im going to have the nightmares again x.x
While not an MMO, ES Morrorwind was fun to level every little thing. Right from the get go you are jumping around like a moron to bring up the acrobat skill, swing weapon, etc just so you can level up x.x
Yes. Exactly why 99% of games with an “XP points” or similar system should be avoided imo. Go for games where the only reason to replay a level if for *yourself* to become better at it, not for your stats upgrading when you do the exact same thing.
Many games use experience, and many of them are fun.
Disregarding them just because of a VERY widely used feature basically means that you are shutting yourself off from several genres, which is not a good or fun idea.
My rule of thumb is that if a JRPG forces me to grind levels just to be able to proceed, I’m either not playing it right (i.e. not exploring enough or trying to avoid battles) or the game is just not balanced properly and isn’t worth my time. Not all JRPG fans are in it for the turn-based menu-based active math formula that is a JRPG battle. For some, it’s a necessary evil in order to get to the other things – dialogue, plot, music, exploration. Random encounters and such are palatable to me because you get little rewards along… Read more »
This is exactly how I see a lot of JRPGs. Thanks to earlier games in the genre (and gaming in general, really) doing it people have gotten to the point where they think grinding is the only way to play them. It irks me when people just say “you need to grind more” when referring to harder parts of a game. An option, yes, but often not even close to the best one. Many games specifically discourage grinding by lowering experience gains when you hit higher levels or even making experience near worthless. Your strategy and character builds being the… Read more »
If you’re grinding in an RPG you’re doing something terribly wrong.
yeah it’s ironic for both of them
Any RPG? I don’t remember grinding in Dragon Age Origins, or absolutely classic Baldur’s Gate. When you clear an area, it stays clear.
Oh boy, I can’t wait for Ethan to play JRPG and after a page of being all “this sucks, this is stupid, this is repetitive”, the next one we see Lukas walk into the room, Ethan still playing obviously played through the entire night and repeating the mantra “this is not fun, this is not fun, this is not fun” over and over again while Lukas rolls his eyes. XD
Lucas.
That was such a necessary correction, thank you *Rolls eyes*
Emily should start with Grandia 1-2. It is classic, intereresting story and characters and has less grind that the majority of other JRPG.
She’s right.
oh that is gold right there. JRPG fan not liking doing the same thing over and over? oh wait! she uses action replays!
Most JRPGs don’t involve serious grinding on the scale that Emily is being told that MH involves. You do wander around in a cave for an hour beating everything up, but that’s an hour. In MH, most fights are 15-40 minutes, and Ethan is talking about DOING TWELVE FORTY MINUTE FIGHTS. That is much more than all but the grindiest of games.
sounds like every single one of my final fantasy playthroughs
Which FF? Once you get to the double digits you have some really drastically different gameplay in comparison to the older ones, so saying “FF XIII” and “FF VI” are like saying “Pokemon” and “Breath of Fire”. Similar, but two different sides of the genre. In the earlier FFs, most fights take 2 minutes at most unless 1. you are in an area that you are not equipped for or 2. It’s a boss fight. This is doing 60 minute long fights, as opposed to 12 easily lost fights that are half an hour long each. You could become strong… Read more »
Actually those are like saying “Pokemon Conquest” and “Eternal Eyes” (PS1 was so long ago…)
I was a pretty big jrpg fan growing up. Grinding was one thing the dev could force me to do that would put me off their title completely. In fact the only game I remember doing it in was star ocean 2. Combat in that game was so much fun as to make it not a chore.
As an aside I don’t see them working out long term if Ethan can’t respect her different tastes in games.
On the note of any Star Ocean though you can play any one of them without ever having to grind. Either through item creation or general exploration you’ll get more than enough equipment to make up for any lacking stats. You’ll get more than enough skill points to put into your passive skills through natural play to make grinding pointless. I’ve heard tell that you have to be at least level 180-200 to beat the unlimited final boss but you can absolutely do it as low as level 120 just by going through the Maze of Tribulations. The equipment you… Read more »
Oddly enough, this same communications spike happens whenever Lucas tries to call him him about picking up groceries or paying rent. In all honesty, though, this is pretty much the same argument I’ve had with a couple of my friends in regards to the Telltale Games. I like to view them as interactive movies with well-written or at least entertaining characters and occasionally branching paths that you can explore for curiosity sake, but then my friend will go, “You just sit there and watch!” and then I’ll go, “Story!” and he’ll go, “Boring!” and then we fling each other off… Read more »
Yeah, Telltale Games are movies except you can yell at someone “No don’t do that!” and they sometimes listen.
My guess is that she just grinds enough in JRPGs to get by which probably makes it more fun for her since it does ramp up the difficulty a bit.
I think this was actually pretty generous on Ethan’s part when you think about it. She has no interest in Post Apocalyptic games and is a JRPG fan, so what did Ethan do? He introduces her to Post Apocalyptic settings in the most JRPG out there.
If anyone says Monster Hunter isn’t Post Apocalyptic, look up the lore, it makes the events of Fallout look childish in comparison.
“There was once an ancient civilization that did some fucked up stuff and then got wiped out and you can literally ONLY learn this through reading material outside of the game” does not make MH a “post-apocalyptic game” XD
Here I was thinking you went out of your way to be subtle with Ethan trying to ease her into the genre 😛 As for only being able to learn things from outside material, I (like everyone else) hated the underwater combat of the older games, but the final fight with Ceadeus and Goldbeard was my favorite stage (loved the nod they gave to it in Kulve Torath’s second area) and it did give a pretty good hint. Now though I’m trying to remember the lore behind the Charge Blade, Switch Axe and Gunlance, where it was mentioned they are… Read more »
I always imagined that the Charge Blade was the “weapon no one has ever seen” that the MH3 Wyverian Artisan kept on saying he wanted to make. The Switchaxe and the Gunlance are probably the result of the da Vinci equivalent of that time period or place being inventive with the crazy aspects of the body parts of all of these animals. I mean, Iodrome, Great Baggis, etc all have a small and compact body part that is used to store potent liquids. You could easily repurpose that to be a storage container for phials (assuming phials are not holding… Read more »
A post-apocalyptic game has to have a little more than just a past apocalypse. I mean, heck, Pikmin could be considered a post-apocalyptic game under that definition. Technically, GTA could be considered post-apocalyptic. The apocalypse might have happened 65 million years ago, but ‘post’ is ‘post’.
Wonder what Ethan would think of Chrono Trigger?
Tim, next you will be telling us that the expanded universe of Star Wars doesn’t count! 😀
Grinding is a terrible, out-dated excuse for padding a game to 80 hours. I’m with Emily on this one.
It’s not grinding if its fun?
I mean when you are on the 15th round of Rathy to get a Ruby, you are bored. But when you have cleared Jargas for the first time and need to go back and do a second round, it’s still fun.
It’s the “dozen” part that isn’t fun, not the doing the same fight again part.
For me, I have a problem with grinding when it doesn’t fit the environment or the game. Case and point, if you are in the middle of a large scale battle, or traveling through an area explicitly stated as being filled with dangerous creatures etc
Getting attacked by bandits every ten feet on a road, yeah that’s BS, but constantly attacked by critters while in a cave is believable and sensible.
“5,800 Zubats on the cave walls, 5,800 Zubats;
Take one down, pound it to the ground, still 5,800 Zubats on the cave walls!”
Is that a VGA cable plugged into his monitor?!
Nothing wrong with VGA, and even still, that might just be an unusually-colored DVI or HDMI cable. Never seen one in blue, but I’ve got a couple dark-gray DVI cables, and an orange HDMI cable, so, I suppose it could be a blue DVI or HDMI, or DisplayPort connector.
Or, maybe he’s going old-school and using VGA. Nothing wrong with good old analog, after all.
most of my dvi cables are blue.
I’ve always felt like grinding can be either a cop-out excuse to pad play time, or a legitimate mechanism to help you improve by repeating fights to learn the tricks and improve your skills, making each progressively more difficult enemy, proportionately (in theory) less difficult. Except for games where a quest you missed or didn’t take early on, that you now want for that 100% completion, requires you to smite enemies that would have been difficult in the beginning but now basically make you feel bad for spending mana on. “My weakest spell/attack is still OP and excessive overkill crowd… Read more »
Most amount of grinding I’ve ever experienced in a game (not counting when I was younger, and didn’t quite get the minutiae of some) was/is self-imposed. Resonance of Fate. Trying to grind out map tiles of a certain type so I can chain bonuses further throughout all the levels. (I may be a bit of a masochist with any game that has grindable elements… xD )
Huh. With all the problems with the PC release, I totally believe it would interfere with VOIP to boot.
I can’t say much, since I don’t play many RPGs. Subnautica is a RPG if you think about it. But what I do predict:
Beginning of the falling-out!
(Unleash the black demons that are haters)
See you all on Monday
Did I hear that somebody doesn’t like the grind?!?
Can I get a GIT GUD?!?!?!
Wait I thought Emily was the JRPG player, shouldn’t Ethan be the one complaining about the gameplay?