Ah yes, grinding. The easiest way to pad out the playtime of a game without actually creating more content. Though the exact definition of it is a bit unclear, as different people will perceive different things as grind. Really, it’s a very subjective term, the exact definition of which highly depends on what a player considers to be fun.

So, let me start out by saying how I would expect a JRPG to be played for an optimal experience. In general, I would expect to fight just about every encounter I come across while exploring a new dungeon, skipping some during backtracking and skipping most if the enemies are low level. Some might consider this too little fighting, some might consider it too much. It really depends on who you ask.

But really, what exactly is grind anyways? Well, according to Wikipedia it’s repeating the same action(s) for an extended period of time to achieve some result (like earning XP). It’s a rough summary, but in the end, that’s pretty much what it is. However, what I’m talking about here is not the act of grinding itself, but rather the feeling of grind.

Put simply, if I encounter a boss that I absolutely cannot win against unless I get unreasonably lucky or need to level up from encounters for an hour, that’s grind. Or at least what feels like grind to me. It also depends on how long and varied dungeons and the monsters within them are of course. Ideally, I’d want to fight monsters as I progress through the dungeon, not just for the sake of leveling up. To me, this is a massive difference and what differentiates fun gameplay from boring grind.

Going by that Wikipedia definition, simply the act of fighting the same encounters several times would already count as grinding, but I think there’s an important distinction to be made here. In most JRPGs you need to fight the same monsters multiple times in order to be strong enough to progress. However, if you’re doing this while progressing through the dungeon, the monotony of encounters is broken up by bits of story, puzzle solving and exploration. It feels like you’re fighting your way through the dungeon.

On the other hand though, let’s say you reach the boss of a dungeon and you realize you’re not strong enough. Let’s also say you’ve explored every nook and cranny you could think of, solved all the puzzles and made sure you have the best gear you could reasonably obtain. What choice do you have at this point?

Your only option is to grind out encounters until you’ve reached a higher level and try again. But how did we get to this point to begin with? Did the game expect us to do more optional tasks? Did we miss an area with some secret item? Is the game intentionally padded out? I’m sure anyone who’s played a decent amount of JRPGs has encountered a situation like this at some point. Let’s look at some things that could be the cause of this.

Playstyle Differences

JRPGs tend to give the player a lot of freedom in what they can do. This leads to players having various types of playstyles. Looking at it from a positive angle, this type of design makes the games enjoyable for more people and gives you the option to challenge yourself by playing a certain way. On the flipside however, this will also allow for “wrong” playstyles. In other words, playstyles that will prevent you from progressing if you keep them up. Those would include actions such as:

  • Skipping way too many encounters
  • Not bothering with exploration, therefore missing important items
  • Wasting ingame currency for items you don’t need
  • Skipping cutscenes and text, therefore missing important information

The issue is, game developers generally have limited control over player behavior. They could attempt to encourage players to take certain actions, but if those actions are actually taken depends on the players themselves. Even worse, if you play on a single save, you might end up effectively softlocking yourself (though these kinds of situations are fairly rare).

I remember the first time playing a JRPG (Final Fantasy 13) at age 12, I was completely clueless as to how I should be playing. The only RPG I’ve played before that was Pokémon, which is very forgiving, as you don’t really need to strategize to beat the game. If you only use your starter in battle, it will inevitably become overleveled. Combine that with spamming healing items and you’ve got yourself a pretty easy time.

As a result, I would play FF13 by essentially spamming the same attacks repeatedly, not caring about equip, skipping encounters and skipping most text. Naturally, it was a complete mess and I eventually reached a Boss that I couldn’t get past, and I likely couldn’t have gotten past without a lot of grinding. Of course, this is to be expected with such an utterly moronic playstyle, but it still goes to show how much freedom JRPGs are willing to give you.

Of course, by now I figured out that you should maybe play the game instead of trying to skip through most of it, but there are still going to be players with varying willingness to engage with optional tasks. This doesn’t only include grinding encounters, but also includes things such as side quests. Most JRPGs generally expect you to do at least a few of them. If you don’t, you’ll eventually end up underleveled.

Game Design

Well, obviously, you can’t always blame the player. Sure, if they played like 12 year old me played FF13, it would be more than reasonable to blame the player. However, most people don’t play like that. Even with my current approach describes above, I’ve still encountered games that I felt were grindy, so much so that I actually dropped a game after only 3-4 hours.

Let’s look at two examples.

The Caligula Effect: Overdose

This is an interesting one. Mainly because you don’t actually need to go out of your way to gather experience. This is a different type of grind. One major issue here is the battle system, which appears innovative at first, but is incredibly flawed once you actually engage with it. In a nutshell, your most effective tactic becomes just spamming whatever damage dealing move has the highest accuracy. I won’t go into detail about the battle system here. Just be aware that it can be incredibly boring because the strategizing they want you to do is so absurdly luck based that you may as well not even try. At least for the higher level enemies where you’d actually need to strategize.

What also doesn’t help is that your characters are fully healed and restored after every battle, giving you absolutely zero incentive to try and battle in a more efficient way. But the ultimate nail in the coffin is the complete lack of enemy variety and endless dungeons that pretty much consist of the same assets copy-pasted over and over again. If I didn’t know any better I’d guess the dungeons are procedurally generated. However, the layout always stays the same, so I highly doubt it.

In the end, this makes the game feel incredibly grindy. I still stayed for the character scenarios, which were written by the same person who wrote the scenarios for Persona. However, it was an overall very boring experience because every dungeon, every enemy and every battle felt the same. No matter how far you got. Even though you were making progress, it really didn’t feel like it because the main story was also incredibly bland (though I believe the idea had potential). I could say way more about this one, but I’ll leave that for a full review I might do at some point.

This is why enemy variety is so incredibly important. Getting to fight new enemies and finding strategies to effectively deal with them over several battles is a very fun gameplay loop. Being able to defeat them easier and easier as the dungeon goes on is also very satisfying and gives you a good indicator that you’re getting ready for the boss. If a game fails to implement basic features like this you end up with Caligula Effect: Overdose.

Hyperdimension Neptunia Re;Birth1

This is the one I quit after 3-4 hours. Why? Because you may as well call it “Grinding: The Game”. A little disclaimer first: apparently if you buy DLC characters the game becomes reasonably paced. I played it without DLC though, and that’s the experience I’m going to be referring to. And let me tell you, it was one hell of a grindfest.

I played it like I would play any usual JRPG, which worked pretty much fine until I got to the Black Heart boss at the end of Chapter 2. I absolutely got my ass handed to me. I actually thought this was one of those battles you’re supposed to lose at first. After that experience I decided to Google and found a post on the Steam Discussions talking about this boss. The person posting this said his characters are around Level 8. For reference, mine were around Level 11, so it’s not like I was absurdly underleveled.

In said thread they linked a guide. A guide for the second boss in the game. It states the following requirements:

You want a bare minimum of:

  • All characters level 10-12
  • Life rings on everybody, these can be bought at the store for 5000 credits, credits can be easily gotten by doing the kill quest in the same are that is open to you and is easily repeatable.
  • Best equips from the store for each category.
  • Items such as Paralaxin, healing grass, energy fragments etc.

Recommended:

  • All characters Level 15 with above requirements.

I mean, maybe I just suck at Neptunia specifically, but come on. They expect you to do repeatable side quests multiple times, get the best gear available up to this point and grind levels on top of that? Do I need to remind you that this is 4 hours into the game? Look, I wouldn’t even mind grinding for an hour or two if I’m 30 hours deep into a JRPG, but not in the first 4 hours. I mean, what is this? An hour of grinding every 4 hours of gameplay? No thank you.

Sure, maybe the game will get better from that point onwards, but I wasn’t willing to find out. I’d rather spend my free time playing a better game. I believe this falls into the category of bad design. I can understand requiring me to beat all enemies I come across and doing some side quests, but not to such an extreme extent. And on top of that, the game will mock you for even considering to activate easy mode. I mean, maybe this whole thing is an elaborate joke. Although more likely, it’s probably meant to make people buy DLC characters which are apparently a good bit more powerful than the regular cast.

I personally believe a game should have linear level requirements so that you don’t suddenly reach a point where you need to start grinding because of some overpowered boss. And honestly, most JRPGs I’ve played up until this point were designed like that, with the two games mentioned above being the only exceptions I could think of. Even the more mediocre games I’ve played (such as Death end re;Quest) didn’t have any issues with requiring excessive grind and were still good fun as a result.

Difficulty levels

Here’s something sort of related to the design of those games. Almost every modern JRPG I know of has some sort of difficulty setting. Often times one that can be changed at any time. I usually play on Normal difficulty and stick with that throughout my entire playthrough, as that’s usually the intended experience.

The main reason I like to play on Normal difficulty is because other difficulties just tend to feel hastily implemented. I feel like this is universal for all JRPGs. It doesn’t add any meaningful new challenges, it just either rigs the game in favor of the player or in favor of the enemies. I mean, sure, it does sort of make the game easier and harder respectively, but it doesn’t actually do anything interesting. It doesn’t actually add complexity or meaningful content.

Increasing the difficulty will generally require you to grind more, while reducing the difficulty will allow you to skip more stuff. You might as well rename it to “grindiness level”. Sure, there’s certainly nothing wrong with having these options, especially considering that they’re probably not all that hard to implement.

I do feel like there are some missed opportunities though. For instance, a harder difficulty could increase the amount of enemy variety by adding some enemies that require more complex strategies to defeat. Or perhaps adding more moves that are harder to use but give you more power if you can figure out how to use them right, which would be required to defeat the tougher enemies.

I’d say the best example for a good use of difficulty levels are rhythm games. Harder difficulties don’t just arbitrarily make everything faster. You get new patterns that are more difficult to hit and thus different ways to interpret the rhythm of the song. You actually get more content, not just the same thing you already played but faster. This way the higher difficulties actually feel fresh and interesting to play rather than just being an artificial bump in difficulty.

Though to be fair, I can understand full well why JRPGs don’t implement their difficulties like that. The story is usually very important for JRPGs. Anything story driven will have an inherently lower amount of replay value because a big part of the fun in those games is following the story. If you already know what’s going to happen it’s only going to be half as fun. As a result of this, all that extra content hidden behind difficulty levels would likely not be played by very many people, so it wouldn’t be worth implementing.

Let’s face it, if you stripped all the story from something like Persona 5 it wouldn’t be nearly as great as it is. Of course, the gameplay is still a big part of the fun, but if all you did in that game was fight through palaces for no reason it would likely become repetitive after the 2nd or 3rd palace. However, having it switch between character interaction, story progression and dungeon crawling makes it a game you can easily play for over 100 hours. Especially since all of those parts are executed very well.

Conclusion

Well, this post turned out a bit messy. I guess I just wanted to say what I think about some common design choices in JRPGs and some opinions I’ve heard about them. Especially since I’ve seen many people say that grinding is very common in JRPGs. And I mean, depending on what your personal interpretation of grinding is, this is either completely wrong or right on the money. I personally don’t view most JRPGs as grindey since encounters are often very well integrated and bosses at a reasonable strength. There are of course exceptions as I mentioned above, but those are just that: exceptions.

I do realize that JRPGs are a bit of a niche genre, so some weirdness is bound to be there. But hey, that’s part of the fun, right? Despite having some common design quirks, they can also deliver experiences that no other genre can give you. That’s why they’re still one of my favorite types of games to play.