In little-known-but-super-cool Metal Max 2, a mad scientist finds your corpse, drags it back to town and brings you back from the dead without penalty, which somehow suits the wild and crazy, post-apocalyptic world of the game. This enables you to actually explore new areas, even if you’re not sure you can survive. If you die, you simply start back in town and can try again. So it’s nice that there’s no such thing as Game Over in SNES games like Metal Max 2, Gokinjo Boukentai, and Romancing SaGa 2. Let’s say you reach an exciting new cavern to explore, but instead of going in you have to first grind through some easy battles in the woods for 30 minutes with the same old monsters you’ve seen before. Sometimes you have to grind just to survive sudden jumps in difficulty, which goes against what I think RPGs are all about: exploration and discovery. You never “forget where you were,” so the story is easier to follow and enjoy. This way the player can keeps pushing forward without the distraction of grinding, which has always been one of my favorite things about SRPGs compared to RPGs. Great character portraits by Yoshitaka Amano and gritty atmosphere. This keeps characters around an average level throughout the game. Many offset this danger by making experience gains relativeーkilling a lower level enemy might get you only one experience point, while a powerful enemy sends your EXP skyrocketing. This of course requires careful planning by developers to make sure the player doesn’t get stuck somewhere at a low level. This is used by many Strategy RPGs (Fire Emblem, Front Mission, etc.) that they are divided into stages with a set numbers of enemies. This is the most simple solution- you can’t grind if there aren’t any more enemies!
Many classic RPGs have explored alternatives here, tooーlet’s see how they handled “leveling up.” The problem is that grinding is hard to avoid in the standard RPG formula where each battle pushes you closer to the big “level up.” You’re inherently rewarded for grinding, and sometimes forced to by sudden jumps in difficulty. It can kill any momentum the game had going, and it turns play into work. In many RPGs you reach a point when battles are neither novel nor challenging, when you’re just going through the motions for gold or experienceーalso known as grinding.
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