Level Grinding: Difference between revisions

{{trope}}

{{quote|'''Kyle''': "Dude! Boars are only worth two experience points apiece. Do you know how many we would have to kill to get up 30 levels?"

 

In RPGs, one usually gains strength and abilities through repeatedly killing monsters, over and over again.

In video game plots, only the hero ever has this advantage. It never occurs to townspeople to walk around their village and bash slimes until they're strong enough to face the pirate who's taken over.

 

 

The traditional way of level grinding is to kill lots of a very low level enemy, typically rats. However, [[Metal Slime]]-type enemies that give out large amounts of [[Experience Points|experience]] can shorten the process considerably. Given that the second group are always much more likely to be able to actually kill your character at lower levels, a ladder system is usually employed.

 

{{examples}}

* ''[[Ninja Gaiden]] Black'' has a group of [[Mooks|mook]] demons to fight near the end of the game. They are big, purple-ish zombies who hit hard, are tough to kill, but easy to avoid. The source of income in the game is the yellow essence that you gather as you kill enemies, the average enemy gives you about 20 points of essence. These three creatures, once you kill them, give you around 10,000 points of essence. And they respawn after you leave that arena and return, so you just return and kill them seven or eight times until you max out and upgrade all your weapons. Then you can return and max out again to buy all the extra health potions and ninpo items you want. If you're a halfway decent player, you can beat the final stage of the game relatively easy with all the items you bought.

 

* The classic ''Hero Quest'' (later ''[[Quest for Glory]]'') by [[Sierra]] had this. You improved your skills by using them, leading to sights such as the main character working on building up his 'climb' skill by scrabbling (initially ineffectively) at a tree.

** Skills in [[Qf G]] were odd ducks: as long as you had at least 1 point in a skill (the lowest is 5, but whatever) you could use and improve the skill. The difference between low skill and high skill was ''success'': if your weapon use was 5, then a basic stab might miss or be easily blocked, and if it does hit, it won't do much damage. The only skill that averts the success rate is magic: the higher your magic, the more you can cast before needing to rest or use a potion (skill rate with spells, on the other hand, increases damage or duration).

 

* In ''[[Dissidia Final Fantasy]]'', there are twenty-two separate characters all of whom can reach level 100. This is in fact not the true grind - through proper setup a level one character can beat a level one hundred Exdeath and jump to level 100 in a single battle. The true grind is the equipped abilities - some of the late ones require 500 points to master, and under normal circumstances you get one point a battle. Even on a day when the game gives 4x the reward per battle, it would still require 125 battles to master.

** You also have to grind for any of the exclusive level 100 weapons. In order to get them, you need to have 5 battlegen items that have, at most, a 5% chance of being created when you break a level 100 version of the person who's weapon you're trying to make. In addition, you need 5 exclusive "soul" items that will ''never'' drop during battle. Instead, you have to go to the second hardest Duel Coliseum track and hope you can get enough Megalixirs, which require 18 medals in a course where you max at 10 per battle. And they don't always show up. And you need ''20'' per exclusive weapon. Suffice to say, you're going to be fighting for a long time.

* In the [[NES]] version of ''[[Double Dragon]]'', as you fight and kill enemies, you fill a level bar that gives you new techniques when it resets. At the rate enemies are normally spawned, you don't get all your techniques until late in the game. If you're ''really'' patient, though, it's possible to get the entire moveset with the first two or three enemies you fight simply by punching them a few times and then moving away before you knock them out, and then repeating the process enough times to build up and reset the level bar.

 

* This is actually a necessity in ''[[Borderlands]]'', as anything two levels over you will [[Cut His Heart Out with a Spoon|rip off your genitals.]]

** On the first playthrough, anything two levels above you is actually pretty easy to kill. Anything four or more levels above you will murder you. On the second playthrough, anything ''one'' level above you will massacre and defile your corpse if you're not using proper tactics and weapons.

 

* In ''[[Crystalis]]'' you will find yourself unable to advance to certain parts of the game or damage certain enemies unless you have achieved a certain level

* The ''[[Diablo]]'' series revels in this. ''Diablo II'' online is basically ''made'' of powerleveling. 75% of characters start off like this: Get glitched by a high-level player to beat the game on the highest difficulty at level 1, join a game, go to the second-last room and wait for the other characters to kill things, exit game, go back to step 2. Maybe 0.1% of people actually play the game like you're intended to.

** In single and multiplay, the better gear becomes more important to keeping up than character stats. Because everything [[Randomly Drops]], level grinding is just a byproduct of farming.

 

** ''[[Maple Story]]''

** ''[[Ragnarok Online]]''

** As of ''Cataclysm'', this has become easier. Quests are more plentiful, easier to find, and more rewarding while professions and secondary skills (Herbalism, Mining, Archaeology) now also can grant XP.

*** The makers tried to avert this, but if you want to complete all the achievements you're still going to have to do a degree of grinding and low-level quests.

** Players have discovered a way to basically "farm" the best subjects for grinding. In 0.0 security space (Free-for-all PVP and player owned) NPC pirate ships can pay anywhere from a few hundred thousand ISK to over a million. By wiping out spawns until one with multiple high-bounty battleships appear, and then only killing the battleships, corporations with 0.0 space can basically create a perpetual money factory. This is due to the fact that there a few set spawn compositions the game loads whenever a spawn has been completely cleared. But when a spawn is only partially destroyed, instead of changing the makeup of the spawn the game just "refills" it, ensuring that high profit spawns stay high profit.

* ''[[Nexus War]]'' averts the obvious expressions of this trope only to use a whole bunch of less obvious ones. There's a clearly defined level cap that most characters reach fairly quickly, after which additional experience becomes useless except for bragging rights. However, the reward for leveling consists of Character Points (which can be traded for skills, spells, etc.), and players can also get Character Points by doing ''nearly anything'' often enough. Characters gain bonuses equivalent to levels for doing enough killing, vandalism, door repair, lockpicking, etc., etc. There are even bonuses for dying enough times, and so there are groups devoted to ''dying as much as possible'' that make up the bulk of the people visible outside in some cities.

** The game also had a rather ridiculous alternative to level-grinding: Simply handing a new character a maxed-out Mag (a piece of equipment that, by feeding it various items, could be customized both in looks and stat boosts) and a piece of armor with some high-end Slots (which provide even ''further'' stat boosts, including to HP and TP) could turn them into something comparable to an unequipped character 20-30 levels above them.

* The MMORPG ''[[Jade Dynasty]]'' (which is adapted from the Chinese ''Zhu Xian'' and its English equivalent ''Celestial Destroyer'') actually subverts this somewhat by giving the player a ''built-in bot'' at level 3, which is useable until level 90, at which point it starts using energy that has to be replenished. The bot even uses health and spirit recovery potions for the player, enabling someone to go to sleep with the bot running and wake up a few levels higher and much richer. However, since mobs give less experience and items as you level (up to no experience or items at all since your level is much higher than theirs), the bot cannot be used to avoid grinding completely.

* ''[[City of Heroes]]'' initially had a problem where you could get the next set of contacts only after you reached a certain level but it was possible to complete all the missions from your present contacts long before you had enough XP to level (especially if you were a solo player), so the only option, if you didn't team up with someone on their missions, was to randomly go around picking fights with mooks on the streets until you levelled up which could get real boring real fast. Subsequent updates of the game have drastically changed this: there are now more contacts, Newspaper/Radio missions are always available once you've reached a given (low) level, and you can always play in player-made Architect scenarios. As a result of this, pretty much the only time you actually see heroes/villains fighting mobs on the streets is if they're trying to get the last few XP points needed to level, they're on a Kill X Number of Y mission, or they're badge-hunting.

* Zynga games like ''[[Mafia Wars]]'' get to be this after a while, especially if you're unwilling to spend real money on what are essentially casual games.

* [[Air Rivals]], and how! The level grinding there is so intense after level 75 and specially at 8x levels that even the own developers of the game (which are, as you might guess, ''Korean''), decided to add new [[Peninsula of Power Leveling|maps of power leveling]] for players to get to the so-desired level cap of 110. Even with that, the american server ([[Ace Online]]) has a PERMANENT 200% EXP BONUS for everyone below lvl 75 and it gets reduced to 50% on weekends after that point. Geez.

 

* ''[[Nethack]]'' tries to avert this with a combination of [[Rubber Band AI]] and a level cap of 30 - however, potions and scrolls and such can boost individual stats without changing levels, which means that [[Randomly Drops|Random Drops]] are the way forward. This generally means grinding by pudding farming: black puddings will happily duplicate themselves if hit with an iron object, provide worthy XP, they very occasionally drop items (of more or less any form) when they die, and also leave corpses. Kill, sacrifice the corpses or eat them when you grow hungry, repeat until the level is full of puddings and your max HP is wherever you want it (usually in the six-figure region); the repeated sacrificing of corpses can also be used to gain spellbooks and artifact weapons, and to increase your intrinsic armour class. Several bots have been written to automate the process.

** If you're playing a wizard character who has found a spellbook of ''Create Monster'' then you can use that spell to create an endless stream of monsters to kill (non-wizards don't regenerate [[Mana]] quickly enough to make this feasible). The primary advantage this has over pudding farming is that it will generate monsters that have ''far'' greater [[Randomly Drops|random drop]] rates than black puddings.

* Inside a Star filled Sky is nothing ''but'' grinding. Because the game has no end that anyone could possible achieve in this millenium (or the next one, for that matter), all you're doing is moving back through entering items and getting better powerups. And if you're bad off, you make have to grind so that the first grind actually shows any effect.

 

** The [[Peninsula of Power Leveling|peninsula]] [[Good Bad Bugs|of]] [[Ascended Glitch|power]] is kept in later remakes.

* Because ''[[Final Fantasy II]]'' was [[Nintendo Hard|really difficult]] from the get go, grinding was the only way to survive the first real mission. This is partially because the game had the PCs starting out as weaklings who got offed in the first battle, and partially because the leveling system was ''radically'' different from virtually any RPG today (except the ''[[SaGa]]'' series, which may have grown directly from ''FFII''); characters gained HP by being damaged, attack skills by attacking with certain weapons, etc. As a result of its odd system, ''FFII'' has a very unusual grinding method: having your party members beat each other up to get HP bonuses. The game also had an [[Game Breaker|exploitable bug]] in which choosing to attack, canceling your selection, and repeating 100 times would register for leveling purposes as attacking 100 times and would level up the character's skill with the weapon in question. While some consider exploiting bugs to be cheating, the tedium of building up skill levels "honestly" causes most players to not care.

* ''[[The Elder Scrolls]] IV: [[Oblivion]]'' takes it a bit further; one can grind skills as their patience allows. Every skill can be increased this way, some easier than others. Skills that require targets can be helped along by summoning monsters to use as target practice. Certain skills, like Destruction and Restoration advance so slowly that unless you grind them regularly they'll remain permanently low. Others, like Alchemy, level so quickly this way that if linked to the player's level results in many many [[Empty Levels]] and can actually weaken the player in comparison to the world's enemies.

** This, in turn, led to the strange practice of deliberate ''under''-leveling, whereby the player increases her skills up to and beyond the point where she ''could'' level up - but chooses not to. The theory is that the opponents will remain at low levels, because the player does, and will have skill values appropriate to those low levels, while the player will have disproportionally higher ones. Thus, a first-level character in Oblivion can become the Archmage of the Mage Guild, Master of the Fighters Guild, leader of the Thieves Guild, Listener of the Dark Brotherhood and Grand Champion of the Arena. At the same time. Oh, and defeat invading demon army. The disadvantage to this is that the equipment and rewards available will always be of the lowest quality.

* Aside from [[That One Boss]] and [[Bonus Boss|bonus bosses]], the ''[[Shin Megami Tensei]]'' games tend to avert this. Taking the appropriate skill set and immunities into a fight is generally vastly more important than having a high level. Nothing drives this home faster than getting ambushed and watching your team get wiped out by relatively weak enemies spamming skills one or two of your characters are weak against, killing the rest of the party in the process.

** The games also make the inverse possible: with a low-level party and the right skills, it's possible to kill higher-level enemies with relative ease. The later games with the "Push" weakness system means you can go entire combat rounds of just pummeling the opponent over and over without consequence, or even letting the bad guys get a turn. Ever.

** It shows something when, even if you use the code to start the battle with only 1 exp point remaining to the next level, it still can take more than one hour to have a digimon reach Lv. 99 ONCE. Because if you want to max you stats, you'll be leveling from 1 to at least 70 several times, to say nothing of using the cross DNA evolution to learn skills you normally wouldn't be able to.

* To keep up its parody status ''[[Linear RPG]]'' does make you grind. Going straight will cause you to die. Best to end the game at level 40 which means there's a bit of running back and forwards. No really.

** The exception is ''Wizardry 4'', where there's no real reason to go back and level some more because the monsters you summon increase in power with each Level of the dungeon you go up.

** ''Wizardry 8'' allows it, but discourages level-grinding by throwing geometrically difficult opponents at the party the longer they hang out in a particular area; in particular, the [[Noob Cave]] monastery and the roads between settlements.

* ''[[Contact (video game)|Contact]]'' has this out the wazoo. Potentially, anyway. If you want [[One Hundred Percent Completion]], you'll have to raise every single stat to level 100, get every item, and for good measure fill up the treasure and food screens. Oh, and equip the most powerful decals you can find, if you feel like it.

* ''[[Dragon Quest]]'' is absolutely made of this. The entire series is basically 99% grind and 1% story.

** ''III'' for the GBC with its 150+ medals to collect. If you want to obtain all gold medals, prepare to not just fight lots of monsters, but to make ''sure'' you keep the ''right kind'' alive to the end of the fight so the right medal drops!!! And if you do get them all... the game's most powerful dragon gives you the ''ultimate reward!'' He says he's bored and ''goes to sleep!!!''

* Since ''[[The World Ends With You]]'' subsists on being a [[Self-Imposed Challenge]], you wouldn't think you needed to do this... until you realize that you've used up all your Scarletite, you can't replay the game to get more the easy way, and you need it to get postgame improvements (like being able to chain more than 4 battles together). The only way to get more? Start farming for Dark Matter... which is only dropped by two main bosses and {{spoiler|Reaper Beat}}, and even then in pathetically low percentages. The only way to bring those percentages up is to not only have a vicious drop rate to begin with, but to chain like crazy in order to multiply the rate further. It may not be level grinding per se, but damned if you're not killing yourself like crazy to pull it off.

** Then again, if you're a veteran dungeon crawler and just kill everything that comes your way without ever running from a fight (not hard since you recharge PP to heal between combat), you may find yourself ''overleveled'' for some parts without ''ever'' going out of your way to grind. In ''TLA'' you may be so lost during the whole [[Guide Dang It|trident sequence]] that by the time you meet Isaac's team you're ten levels past him.

** [[Golden Sun: Dark Dawn]] one-upped [[The Lost Age]], with {{spoiler|Tua Warriors, relatively weak monsters, that are the only randomly encountered monsters in the final area of the final dungeon}}, by taking advantage of the extra experience from unleash-killing monsters, it is possible to go from the mid-40s (the level you're supposed to be near the end), to the max level in two hours

* ''[[Septerra Core]]'' has a wonderful level grinding spot - the Smelting Complex. It's accessible as soon as you get the airship, but you aren't intended to go there until much later. Since all the enemies are mechanical, Led and Grubb can tear them apart with Repair, earning you large amounts of gold and EXP in the process.

* Every ''[[Xenosaga]]'' game has noteworthy grinding spots. ''Xenosaga II'' in particular has the Dammerung, an area in which only Shion is usable the first time you go through. Because of how the EXP is normally divided, in this particular dungeon Shion effectively gains 300% EXP - and everyone else gains 225%! Naturally an excellent place to gain some extra levels. [[Your Mileage May Vary]] as to whether or not those levels are actually helpful, but it's a nice option to have.

* ''[[Willow]]'' for the NES requires you to be at least level 13 to uncurse Fin Raziel so she can upgrade your wand into the [[Sword of Plot Advancement|Wand of Plot Advancement]].

* ''[[The 7th Saga]]'' for the SNES is known for the insane amount of time it takes to level up.

** The bug in question: The other potential PCs would level up as you do. At somewhere around level 45, the cleric type learns a spell that restores all his HP... and for no good reason, also all his MP. He's essentially immortal at that point. The other potential PCs would also sometimes steal your plot coupons, requiring you to duel to take them. If the Cleric ganked one late in the game, he'd be literally impossible to beat, since the AI isn't dumb enough to forget it has healing spells.

* ''[[Ginormo Sword]]''. You spend more time level grinding than you do fighting bosses, upgrading equipment, and moving around the map combined.

* ''[[Monster Hunter]]'', while not having explicit character levels, forces you to kill the same monsters over and over to get the weapons or armor made from their parts. Also, one gains experience in the form of real-life experience in killing the monsters, such that extremely good players often take on a high-level monster with no armor at all, just to show off.

** Grinding for weapons and armor is not necessarily true. If a player was good enough, a skilled player could take down monsters with an inferior weapon, albeit at the cost of time. Some event(side) quests even require the player to fight without armor thus highlighting the game's focus on dodging rather than blocking.

*** Averted both ways in the same game. Since you used the same character for both single and multiplayer, a maxed out singleplayer character would find the early game multiplayer trivial since you had already grinded the same monsters in the singleplayer. But it also made the singleplayer trivial since a maxed out multiplayer character fought advanced forms of the same monsters as well as multiplayer exclusive monsters and unlocked equipment far better than anything in the singleplayer. Lesson to be learned? Jump straight into multiplayer, come back later and curb stomp your way through the singleplayer.

* In ''[[Tales of Phantasia]]'', the best place for grinding would be [[Bonus Dungeon|Moria Gallery]], were the toughest and roughest monsters dwell (and also the ones who give more experience/money). You enter as a little more than a [[Kid Hero|boy of 50 or 60 in level]], and come out as a full grown [[Badass|man of level 90-ish]] with enough money to ignore all the trading sidequests and minigames. Besides, the [[Infinity+1 Sword]] is on the Gallery's last floor, plus [[Bonus Boss|a couple of powerful summons]]. If you are up to the challenge, no matter how many Cruxis spells [[Big Bad|Daos]] uses against you, you will be able to kill him with a butter knife.

* In ''[[Etrian Odyssey]]'', trying to 'skip' to the labyrinth's next floor without having explored a substantial amount of the one you're on will ensure swift death. Oh, and the only way to earn money in the game is to sell off items dropped by monsters. A game where sidequests are arguably a time-consuming practical necessity for the rewards, loot, and exp potentially gained by completing them. You'll [[Nintendo Hard|need]] the lot.

* In Mario RPG you might have to level grind at the most rewarding easy spot available which by the time you reach the Factory happens to be Star Hill.

* [[Return to Krondor]] will have you doing this a lot, especially in the first four chapters. You can easily spend hours going through doors and getting into random fights, in the hopes of getting to the next level. At least by going up a number of levels, you will have a higher number of weapons strikes, and more effectiveness with weapons and magic. There are less and less opportunities to level grind as you progress through the game, which may or may not be a good thing.

 

* ''[[Ace Combat]] 5'''s method of unlocking new planes within a "family" involved you farming kills on one model so as to unlock the next, then use the next to farm up to the third etc. ''X: Skies of Deception'' also has you unlock a set of colour schemes by grinding enough kills on the relevant planes. Well, all of them to be honest.

 

* ''[[Final Fantasy Tactics]]'' took level grinding (or, more specifically, stat-maxing) to unparalleled heights. The [[Bonus Dungeon|Deep Dungeon]] featured tiles that, when stepped on, would level your character '''down'''. These could be exploited by raising a character up with a stat-boosting job, then leveling the character down in a job with very weak stats (so the gain would overpower the loss), and then REleveling him up with another job to work on new stats. Many game-breaking tricks were possible to gain JP/XP... for example one could put an enemy to sleep and also speed break them repeatedly, which combined to give the player hundreds of free turns for every turn the opponent got. During each of these free turns you could steal from them, gaining party-wide JP and gold simultaneously.

* Any game made by [[Nippon Ichi]], which usually takes this to the extreme (generally the maximum level in these games is 9999). On top of this, the Random Dungeons most leveling up takes place in usually work towards the development of your characters and/or their equipment. It's two! Two! Two grinds for the price of one!

* Made ridiculously easy in ''[[Luminous Arc]]'', where healing or buffing any ally earns the character casting the spell 30 experience, and it takes 100 exp to level. This doesn't sound so special until you realise that upon gaining a level, your [HP] and [MP] are reset to full, allowing you to simply go to a low-level map with all your healers and buffers and boost them up by massive amounts.

 

 

 

 

* ''The Munchkin's Guide to Power-Gaming'' lampshades it, recommending that the tabletop roleplayers should make their PCs spill some boiling water in an anthill, so if every ant gives the minimum of 1 XP, you would get a boost of five or six thousand XP. The card game ''[[Munchkin (game)|Munchkin]]'' has "Boil an Anthill" as a "Gain a Level" card.

 

* In ''[[South Park]]'', the boys get sick of being killed over and over by a griefer on ''[[World of Warcraft]].'' So they kill boars for a few weeks straight to level up enough to kill him.

 

* Learning to do anything well almost invariably involves lots and lots [[Overly Long Gag|and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots]] of repetition. You ever hear of someone who can react on instinct, without thinking? That's because they've done whatever it is so many times that it's imprinted in their muscle memory.

 

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[[Category:Video Game Tactical Index]]

[[Category:CRPG Tropes]]