With the appearance of the role-playing game on video consoles, a genre less about actual role-playing and more about navigating enemy dungeons via numbers rather than reflexes, we also saw the appearance of grinding. How grinding works is simple enough. If your statistics aren’t good enough to defeat an enemy boss, just defeat enough weaker enemies that you gain enough experience to overwhelm the boss’s superior numbers. Grinding has long been a bane of many a gamer’s existence, and many consider the way modern games tend to dispense with the practice as an improvement. But does removing grinding actually improve a game, or just change it?
I advance this argument from a somewhat ironic position. I hate grinding, and never do it if it can all be avoided. But from a gameplay perspective, this choice still significantly alters my experience. Let’s use Chrono Trigger for the Super Nintendo as an example. In normal gameplay, you should finish the game around level fifty without too much trouble. In my style of grinding averse gameplay, I’m closer to around level forty. This makes the final boss Lavos much more challenging, a world ending abomination entirely deserving of its textual reputation.
Then of course, there’s going the other way entirely- avoiding quite literally every battle possible as to accomplish a low-level game, abusing various mechanics so badly that the Lavos fight becomes a war of numbers against the game itself. Despite the mostly linear nature of Chrono Trigger, and other sixteen-bit games like it, this particular style of console RPG gave players a lot of options in terms of the choices they had to make about questions so seemingly binary as to whether fight a lot of battles or not. It isn’t necessary, by any means, to get Chrono Trigger’s characters to level ninety-nine. But whether it’s for the ultimate Spekkio battle or just to get one character a weapon that automatically hits the damage cap on a critical, some players are motivated that way too.
Of course, not all console RPGs work quite so well within that framework. Fights that the player is scripted to lose may not seem as such to a player used to grinding their way out of any seemingly impossible battle. Skies of Arcadia for the Dreamcast features a fairly egregious example with a late boss only a couple dungeons stronger than the player who certainly seems beatable- and would be, except that he has hidden regeneration. But then Skies of Arcadia, like so many console RPGs, turned grinding into a chore by forcing people to do it with a high random encounter rate that can’t be lowered.
What about those who choose to grind? NeutralAgent is a notorious figure who has stubbornly persisted in playing a high-level World of Warcraft panda with no political allegiances, who simply crafts his way to the level cap. To what purpose? Well, I mean, let’s think this through all the way. What’s the purpose of any game? It’s to relax, and each of us does it in our own way. Despite the lack of options in older styles of games, and the obvious intentions of the developers, it’s gratifying to find a way to color outside of those lines in a limited canvas. Grinding is a tool to accomplish that.
And indeed, if we really want to get philosophical, it’s not like all grinding is created equal. Most games only allow grinding by fighting. But NeutralAgent grinds by crafting, because the World of Warcraft mechanics allow for it. Many games allow for absurd options like this. Final Fantasy VIII for the Playstation, as an example, has an elaborate minigame that makes it possible to get strong enough to easily wipe out the final boss of the first disc in a single round. Actually abusing this minigame in such a way takes about as much time as playing the game “normally” but I use quotation marks here for a reason. Normal gameplay is whatever works for the player, even if it might seen bizarre to someone else.
Again, it might sound strange to try and level every single Runescape skill to 99, but for some people, the tedium is relaxing. Gratifying even. Sure, all that’s happening is that a number’s going up. But all of modern life at this point is just about numbers going up, usually through highly abstract methods. Many an aspiring YouTuber has been perplexed as to why one video, and only one video, went viral and they can’t seem to get a decent number of viewers interested in the rest of their content. Grinding in retro styled video games is enjoyable because improvement is consistent
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