Automoderated users, Autopatrolled users, Bureaucrats, Comment administrators, Confirmed users, Moderators, Rollbackers, Administrators
213,483
edits
m (rewriting links: Wo W=>WoW) |
No edit summary |
||
(20 intermediate revisions by 4 users not shown) | |||
Line 1:
{{trope}}
[[File:
{{quote|'''Kyle''': "Dude! Boars are only worth two experience points
'''Cartman''': "Yes. 65,340,285, which should take us 7 weeks, 5 days, 13 hours and 20 minutes, giving ourselves 3 hours a night to sleep. What do you say, guys?
|''[[South Park]]'', "Make Love Not [[World of Warcraft|Warcraft]]"}}
In RPGs, one usually gains strength and abilities through repeatedly killing monsters, over and over again.
Line 10 ⟶ 11:
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.
In online [[RPG
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.
Line 16 ⟶ 17:
The act of Level Grinding is probably one contributing factor to the creation of the [[Bonus Dungeon]].
[[Level Scaling]] can invert the trope, with monsters that scale according to the character's level. This negates the need to grind, but introduces [[Empty Levels|its own set of problems]]. ''[[
If the game is unbalanced or mean enough to practically require you to level grind, that's [[Forced Level Grinding]]. On the other hand, there's [[Anti
{{examples|Examples}}▼
== Action Game ==▼
== Video game examples ==
▲=== Action Game ===
* ''[[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.
* ''[[X
== Adventure Game ==▼
▲=== Adventure Game ===
* 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).
=== Fighting Game ===
* In ''[[
▲* In ''[[Dissidia Final Fantasy (Video Game)|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.
=== First Person Shooter ===
* This is actually a necessity in ''[[
▲* This is actually a necessity in ''[[Borderlands (Video Game)|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.
=== Hack And Slash ===
* 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.
Line 52 ⟶ 47:
** 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.
==
* Best example of this come from [[
▲* Best example of this come from [[MMORPG|MMORPGs]] originating from Korea, notorious for having an atrocious leveling pace. Prime examples are ''[[Maple Story]]'' and ''[[Lineage 2]]'', which has a leveling pace so bad and arduous that there are many private servers that give players ''thirty-two times'' as much experience, money, and loot as the official game yet still contain playtimes roughly equivalent to ''[[World of Warcraft]]''. Add the fact that dying will result in XP loss that can de-level you quickly, even when another player kills you. Such games give rise to the euphemism ''Korean flavour'' MMORPG, even when the game isn't from Korea. Examples include :
▲** ''[[Fly FF]]''
** ''[[Maple Story]]''
** ''[[Ragnarok Online]]''
Line 63 ⟶ 57:
* Pretty much all the [[Allegedly Free Game|"free"]] ones make their money this way, instead of selling the game or subscriptions. When right from the start of the game, gaining a single low level or the most rudimentary of equipment upgrades involves a week of killing the same small set of monsters or performing the same tedious chores, suddenly it doesn't seem so bad to [[Bribing Your Way to Victory|drop a few bucks into your account and shortcut yourself there.]]
* ''[[Anarchy Online]]''. This game has 200 NORMAL levels, 20 "shadow" levels, 30 "alien" levels (the experience for which can only be gained from a certain type of monster), and also 70 "research" levels, for a grand total of... 320 levels of some sort that can be obtained!
* ''[[
** The advent of Abyssea has made level grinding much easier. Before, the best XP parties could make 20,000-30,000 XP per hour, average parties making 5,000 to 10,000 XP per hour. (For reference, it takes 156,000 XP to go from 79 to 75.) In Abyssea, players can earn up to 60,000 XP per hour fairly easily. To say that this has energized the player base is an understatement, people look forward to grinding now.
* A large amount of leveling in ''[[World of Warcraft]]'' comes from grinding. This was parodied by ''[[South Park]]'s'' "Make love not Warcraft" episode, where the kids stay in a forest killing millions upon millions of ''boars''. As many people have since pointed out, it's actually impossible to get to a super-high level in the game by doing this (and [[WoW]] offers alternate methods to leveling, such as quests), but [[Rule of Funny|damned if actual game rules are going to get in the way of a funny show]].
** 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.
* Semi-averted in ''[[
** 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.
* ''[[
* As a MMORPG, ''[[Phantasy Star Online]]'' had a lot of grinders trying to catch up to the sharkers/Action Replayers when it was first released. The usual method of doing this was to equip the low-leveled character with a handgun or a rifle, go into multiplayer mode with a character who had beaten Normal mode, and employ hit-and-run tactics on the enemies in the second or third levels while the higher-leveled character stayed back and picked off the faster enemies. Since exiting the room caused the enemies to turn around and slowly march back to their starting positions while retaining all damage done to them, it was easy to exploit. There was a
** 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 ''[[
* While the low cap (level 20) of ''[[Guild Wars]]'' tends to lead to less level grinding, there is an odd tactic where players ''kill themselves'' repeatedly near enemies to level up those enemies.
** It's called [http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Death_leveling death leveling] and it's required to get the grind-tastic "Legendary Defender of Ascalon" title, earned by reaching level 20 ''without'' moving your character past the Searing. Once you hit a certain level pre-Searing you'll run out of ways to earn XP. (No more available quests, and all the monsters are now too low-level to yield exp when you kill 'em.) The only way to continue your own character's leveling is by grinding the ''enemies'' for levels and this is accomplished by letting them kill you over and over, as enemies gain experience points when they kill a player. After a few hours you kill the leveled monsters, gain a comparatively paltry amount of XP, rinse, and repeat. You masochist.
** A less aggravating grind is needed to get a maxed Survivor title, IE reach a certain amount of XP without dying. The first level of this title is reached at the levelcap (20), but the highest level of this title is only awarded if you gather enough XP to reach level 100 if there was no cap. While this technically can be done just playing normally, you'll likely die at ''some'' point that way, preventing any further progress on the title. Best to find an area with high-level-low-threat mobs and grind them.
* Though it flirts with being an [[Allegedly Free Game]], Aeria Games' ''[[Shaiya]]'' fits here. There are four difficulty modes which are unlocked as a player advances along the leveling curve, each one bringing more benefits and challenges. The problem is, each difficulty mode sends the character back to the very beginning of an unimaginatively-written story, and the leveling pace is even ''slower'' to compensate for the power-ups. Some Shaiya players think that this justifies powerleveling, some do not. And some candy-coat level-grinding with dungeon raids involving a handful of very powerful veterans doing the heavy lifting for a number of new meat.
* At first, ''[[
* ''[[Star Trek Online]]''. Although most of the progression is done through storyline "Episodes", once you reach the level cap there's a ''lot'' of grinding to get Marks of Exploration or Emblems in order to get better equipment for your starship.
** Replaced now with Dilithium, which is used in all the various ways to get better equipment for your ships.
* ''[[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.
* The [[Multi User Dungeon|MUD]] ''[[Lusternia]]'' takes this to an extreme. Level grinding becomes progressively easier as you go on: while you technically gain much less experience per kill, the chance of performing critical hits ramps up ''massively'', increasing the speed of said kills (the most powerful crit you can get does a whopping 32x damage). However, once you reach level 100, you become a Demigod, and experience is replaced with "essence". A lot of the unique Demigod abilities require essence to buy, meaning you have to hunt an awful lot just to unlock them: more insidious is the fact you ''lose essence when you die'', and if you lose enough you'll be kicked back down to level 99 and lose all your neat abilities. Most level 100 players refuse to go outside their organizations unless they have a huge buffer of essence, and there are [[Griefer|gank-squads]] organized specifically to target new Demigods. Needless to say,
* [[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.
=== Role Playing Game ===
* ''[[
▲* ''[[Final Fantasy I (Video Game)|Final Fantasy I]]'' had a mapping bug that allowed the player to fight high-level monster groups very early in the game by visiting a two-square peninsula northeast of Pravoka, the second town visited. Once the Mages learned group-effect spells like FIR2 and HRM2, many of the encounters provided quick experience boosts. Later on, the best [[Level Grinding]] was available in the Ice Cave, where a fixed battle with the EYE boss could be repeated for thousands of easy experience points. Another location is the "Giant's arm" in the Earth Cave, a certain bend in the cave where every single step you take results in an encounter with giants or green ogres.
** The [[Peninsula of Power Leveling|peninsula]] [[Good Bad Bugs|of]] [[Ascended Glitch|power]] is kept in later remakes.
* Because ''[[
** The GBA remake fixed the "select-cancel" bug, but raised the overall stat growth rate to compensate. Attacking your own party to boost HP remained a viable strategy, but it was no longer quite so necessary.
*** It also introduced a new bug which arguably tops the select-cancel bug in effectiveness, or at least automates the process a great deal: equipping a character with twin shields and then letting them try to attack an enemy boosts their shield level, but if you switch weapons before the end of the battle, something not possible in the other versions, all the gained experience will go towards that weapon type instead, letting you gain weapon levels without even looking at the screen.
*** It also helps that the GBA remake removed stat ''decreases''. Can you say [[No Kill Like Overkill|theoretical party with ALL stats maxed out]]??
*** There is, however, a limit in the GBA/PSP remakes. Weapon skills are capped at a certain point until you progress in the story (for example, try maxing sword skill before you finish the ice cave, and you'll notice it stops increasing around level 7 for Firion). Stat growth is faster, but ''also'' capped, though in a "softer" sense (once you reach the stat cap for the point, you have to take slightly more drastic measures to increase them). Magic, on the other hand, is ''never'' capped, and if you're willing to put the effort into it, you can have a level 20 fire spell before you're finished the first quest.
* There is a bit in ''[[
** The problem with this is that you will have awful base stats, as you won't have any summons to have [[Final Fantasy VIII
* ''[[Final Fantasy X]]'': not only do you have mundane level grinding (mixed with the complicated and often annoying sphere grid system), you also have level grinding for your blitzball team! And trust us, you'll need it.
** And if you want to beat Nemesis, prepare to rip out the entire sphere grid and grind to replace all those piddling +1 & +2 stat bonuses with +4's won from arena bosses.
* In ''[[
** Later in the game, you can find Negalmuur, a monster that summons other, weaker monsters. You can set Gambits on your characters to attack the summoned monsters and defend yourself from Negalmuur's attacks, go to bed, and wake up to three level 99 characters and a shitload of dropped loot.
* As the battle system of ''[[Baten Kaitos]]: Eternal Wings and the Lost Ocean'' is card-based, it's not nearly as important to have a high level or great stats as it is to have a well-rounded, efficient deck. However, since most of the best cards are only randomly dropped by enemies, the net effect is the same: a lot of time spent wandering around in the wilderness killing random monsters until your deck is up to par.
Line 115 ⟶ 107:
* ''[[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.
* The first game in the ''[[The
* 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.
Line 126 ⟶ 118:
** That doesn't necessarily mean 20+ hours are spent grinding. When your pokemon are all sharked to level 100, it cuts down the time taken for all serious battles at the same time, because you're just one-shotting everything. That's not saying that the series doesn't revolve mostly around level-grinding, but that's not really an accurate way to measure how much time is spent grinding, because you're also not experiencing more drawn out and difficult battles which rack up game time. If you're doing a speed run, you still are going to take some extra time fighting the gym leaders, etc.
* The ''[[Pokémon]]'' [[Game Cube]] side-games, ''[[Pokémon Colosseum]]'' and ''XD'', actually ''avert'' this trope for the most part - while you can have level grinding, the Pokemon you can catch are as high a level as the area opponents, meaning you can go through the game with just using Pokemon as you catch them rather than training them. The only real point where it does require leveling is against the penultimate and ultimate bosses, which take a leap of levels over the next best opponents.
* All the Digimon World games sans the first one fall into this. The DS games, however, take this to never seen extents. The random encounter rate in these games is fixed, but very high, and no way to repel enemies. The areas you explore are very large, with no map whatsoever. Plus, the enemies give very low experience, while the experience needed in order to level up grows exponentially (ironically, beating the weakest enemy in the game is enough to level anything from 1 to 3). The later bosses have much higher stats and skills than you'd have without Korean MMORPG-levels of grinding. A simple test of beating the game with no random battles and following the right paths in the maze-like dungeons shows that the main story can be beaten in two hours or so, and the post-story mandatory missions in another hour or so. In a game that a proper raised [[
** 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 (
* ''[[
** Woe to the poor player who started the DQ series with ''[[Dragon Quest VIII
*** And, of course, in doing so, you'll earn King Toede's stern disapproval for taking forever to get things done.
** Even the very first game has its moments. Wandering too far from the first castle before gaining a level or two from Slimes will result in a quick, depressing death at the hands of... a Spooky.
** The grinding is most apparent in ''[[
** ''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 ''[[
* ''[[
** 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
* ''[[Soul Blazer]]'' allowed level-grinding. While monsters that spawned from lairs would stay dead once killed, some monsters did not spawn from lairs, and these would respawn every time your character left and re-entered the dungeon. Because the requirements for each successive level increased roughly exponentially through the game, however, spending several hours of grinding in one area would be completely negated by a few minutes of grinding at the start of the next area (where the monsters would generally suddenly offer 5-10x more XP).
** Its [[Spiritual Successor]], ''Illusion of Gaia'', did not allow level grinding at all. Each permanent stat increase was gained after clearing an area of a dungeon, and there were a finite number throughout the game (any missed stat increases were granted anyway on arrival at the dungeon boss, so underlevelling was avoided too).
Line 150 ⟶ 142:
* ''[[Kingdom Hearts]]'' almost begs you to Level Grind for some side-quests, like Sephiroth in both games or Terra and the Data Battles in Final Mix + : while the final boss can be defeated at level 50, most players will need to reach lv. 99 before being able to defeat these [[Bonus Boss|bonus bosses]].
** Then amped up by KHII's Forms. Suddenly you need to grind not only your level but also your Valour Form's levels. Or possibly your preferred summoned creature's.
* ''[[
* You won't come out of ''[[Albion]]'''s first big dungeon alive, unless you spend a few days on the previous island, doing nothing but slaughtering the local wildlife, and visiting the local healer for occasional free potions you can sell later.
* ''[[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 ''[[
** It is also worth noting that everything in the Dammerung is weak against Shion's attacks; it doesn't take very long until she one-shots everything with her basic attacks. And don't worry if you passed that area up before you discovered
* ''[[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.
Line 160 ⟶ 152:
** 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.
* In ''[[Star Ocean: Till the End of Time]]'', the highest level your characters can reach is 255, so it goes without saying that much
* ''[[
** 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 with Monster Hunter Tri. Monster Hunter Tri's online multiplayer required you to grind "Guild Points" to unlock the more next "level" of quests and monsters.
*** 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 ''[[
* ''[[Dragon Age]]: Origins'' included a pretty boring grind: if you don't slaughter the entire Dalish settlement, the Elven emissary will appear in your party camp and accept "crafting materials" to upgrade Elven troops' equipment for the [[Final Battle]]. Now, "crafting materials" include Elfroots, which are available for 60 copper pieces in ''unlimited quantity'' at the Elven camp, and each batch of 89 pieces (called "Give all Elfroots") nets you ''880 XP'' (meaning it costs only 112 gold to grind from level 0 to the level [[Cap]]
* In ''[[
* 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 (Video Game)|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!
** The ''[[Disgaea]]'' series especially falls into this category, being custom-made for Grinders. Levels top off at 9999 (excluding transmigrations), and ''while'' you're grinding, you're also turning your weapons into [[Infinity
** Fortunately, it's very easy to be a smartarse and game the system what for. The fact that you can "Fuse" enemies by way of throwing them into their kin and up the rewards for killing the stronger result is practically built for this.
*** Including transmigrations, the levels go even higher. Apparently the maximum number of stored levels you can get before storing more stops having an effect is ''185000'' - and that's not counting the 9999 levels you can make a character gain normally.
** ''[[Disgaea 3: Absence of Justice]]'' adds a third aspect to the grinding with the Class World, which allows you raise a character's aptitudes, as well. Taken to the extremes in ''[[Disgaea 4:
** ''[[Phantom Brave]]'' has what may be the easiest level grind in existence. Goes like this: There's an easy way to get a character that can easily "steal" objects that are much higher level early in the game. Use it to get high-level items and fuse them together. Use that item to power level the character, then have it get even higher-level items. Before long, all you have to do to level any character up is to hand it your hand-made [[Infinity
* 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.
=== Wide Open Sandbox ===
* In ''[[Minecraft]]'', experience gained by killing mobs gives experience levels. Although these are pointless for the first part of the game, once the player obtains diamonds they can make Enchantment Tables. These allow weapons, armor, and tools to be enchanted with special abilities, such as reduced damage from use, extra damage when attacking monsters, protection from certain types of damage (explosions, fire, water, fall, etc.), and increased item drops. The problem is that experience gained from monsters is worth much less at higher levels, and dying makes the player lose almost all their experience. As a result, even with structures built specifically to spawn and damage mobs automatically, it can take days to get enough experience for the best enchantments. Made worse by the [[Random Number God]] deciding what enchantments are received, which can absorb large amounts of exp only to give a common, less useful enchantment or even ''ignore up to one quarter of the experience'' (but still take it) when calculating which enchantment will be given.▼
== Non-video game examples ==
▲* In [[Minecraft]], experience gained by killing mobs gives experience levels. Although these are pointless for the first part of the game, once the player obtains diamonds they can make Enchantment Tables. These allow weapons, armor, and tools to be enchanted with special abilities, such as reduced damage from use, extra damage when attacking monsters, protection from certain types of damage (explosions, fire, water, fall, etc.), and increased item drops. The problem is that experience gained from monsters is worth much less at higher levels, and dying makes the player lose almost all their experience. As a result, even with structures built specifically to spawn and damage mobs automatically, it can take days to get enough experience for the best enchantments. Made worse by the [[Random Number God]] deciding what enchantments are received, which can absorb large amounts of exp only to give a common, less useful enchantment or even ''ignore up to one quarter of the experience'' (but still take it) when calculating which enchantment will be given.
=== Anime and Manga ===
* The necessity of this trope is somewhat addressed in [[Houshin Engi]]
* This is basically what Accelerator was trying to do in ''[[
===
* In the ''[[Harry Potter]]/[[Sword Art Online]]'' [[Crossover]] ''[https://www.fanfiction.net/s/11815818/1/Mystic-Knight-Online Mystic Knight Online]'' there are multiple references to the characters trapped inside ''SAO'' (including Harry) grinding for experience (as well as "col" and "mats") in order to work their way out of the game.
* In ''[[The Games We Play (RWBY fanfic)|The Games We Play]]'' by Ryuugi, a ''[[RWBY]]''/''[[The Gamer]]'' [[Crossover Fic]], Jaune Arc forms a party with a non-[[Ax Crazy]], non-[[Jerkass]] Adam Taurus (and later adds [[It Makes Sense in Context|his daughter, his familiar and Raven Branwen]]) with the explicit purpose of leveling them up sufficiently to face the [[Big Bad]] by killing thousands of monstrous Grimm.
===
* ''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 (
▲* The necessity of this trope is somewhat addressed in [[Houshin Engi]]--the [[Brilliant but Lazy]] protagonist Taikoubou, when tasked to seal ''365'' souls (a good number of whom belong to the local [[Evil Empire]]), tries to short-cut the process by taking on the {{spoiler|apparent}} [[Big Bad]] first. He gets his ass-handed to him, and he spends the rest of the plot working his way up the [[Sorting Algorithm of Evil]] and taking levels in badass.
▲* This is basically what Accelerator was trying to do in ''[[To Aru Majutsu no Index]]'' - killing 20 thousand level 2 espers to advance to level 6. Sure is a loooong grind.
▲* ''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 (Tabletop Game)|Munchkin]]'' has "Boil an Anthill" as a "Gain a Level" card.
== Western Animation ==▼
▲=== Western Animation ===
* 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.
=== Real Life ===
* 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.
{{reflist}}
[[Category:Older Than the NES]]
[[Category:Video Game Difficulty Tropes]]
[[Category:Truth in Television]]
[[Category:Video Game Tactical Index]]
[[Category:
[[Category:
|