Are there any games where you've needed to grind for long periods of time and actually enjoyed it?
My answer is
No.
But let me explain. The no is I've not needed to grind at all. However I did it anyway and enjoyed it.
Im my opinion the games that don't need grinding but have the option there are the best. That way the player can choose to not grind and have a tougher lower level run through or an easier post grind play through. A good recent example of this is
DQ-XI. Zero grinding is needed to beat the game, but if you want to grind you will make a few specific boss battles a lot easier and the metal slimes make grinding a lot easier. DQ series fans will understand this and how it affects grinding.
I will say grinding makes the first run through of
Persona 5 a lot easier too. Due to the nature of the game, you need to set up your grind sessions around a well placed safe room though so you can use it as a base and not use any healing or MP items (to maximise each grind session. This is for XP but the drawback is if you're too powerful you kill enemies too fast and have less chance to keep them alive so they give you the option to capture them as Personas.
Don't grind for cash though. If you really want to do that, just abuse the Mementos boss exploit for that. The Royale version coming in 2020 might patch this exploit out.
It's actually fun to grind here as it doesn't change any of the outside dungeon stuff, which is more than half the game and can't grind that by design.
Breath of the Wild - Korok searching, is a grind and in my opinion one of the worst parts of the game. The number of them is not the issue. For me the issue is they break the natural flow of the game. That flow being world exploration. BotW is a world exploration first game and everything else second. being forced to analyse every nook of every area for the Koroks is annoying. Even when you know all of the signs that a Korok is there, you are then just looking for those signs and not admiring the scenery at your own leisure. How deeply or broadly the player explores the scenery should be up to the player, not forced upon the player in way of a pointless collectable (after getting a certain number of them).
In my opinion 1 Korok in the game or 900 of them makes no difference. I think even one of them is one too many as they are poor design.
Xenoblade Chronicles X and
Xenoblade Chronicles 2 was fun to grind in. Mostly because the battles were fast paced and integrated well into the game. They didn't have long battle intro and outro sequences. Add in the great music in both games really helped too. Farming faction XP in XCX was also a fun grind. Sure there is an optimal way to do it, but overall it was desgned very well. It just happened when you played the game. You just chose your favourite activity, be it combat or farming collectable pickups on the ground or doing quests or whatever and assigned that task to give faction XP. Essentially killing two birds with one stone.
XC2's lootboxes - the cores were fun to farm, but not fun to open because, like all loot boxes how many you need to get what you want is all RNG with terrible odds. This lootbox RNG in my opinion is the worst part of XC2.
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The grinds I hate the most are RNG grinds. The ones where you have to do the same thing thousands of times over hoping for a rare drop of loot or some other RNG based event to happen. Knowing that RNG determines the length of the grind, not how long you grind for or player skill to me is a slap in the face. Blizzard games are infamous for doing this.
Diablo 2 and
World of Warcraft especially.
Diablo 3 is not so bad. Even though sets and specific legendaries are needed for certain builds, you can farm junk versions of them easily enough so you can get your build going and then up the game difficulty to farm better versions of the loot your build needs.
Farming loot boxes in any game is not fun, be them free or paid. I am very glad that the slow process to eliminate this from video games has started.
lightning dodging mini game in FFX where you have to successfully dodge 100 random bolts of lightning in a row to get the game's ultimate weapon.
Super Mario RPG had the same. Get 30 (if I remember correctly) bounces in a row with multibounce to get some of the best armour in the game. There's other crap like that in the game too for other best in game armour. I either cheated to get the armour or never bothered with trying for it legit. Why bother as it's not needed to beat the game and 100% not fun to grind garbage like this.
The
Captain Toad and
Super Mario Galaxy 2 Grandmaster stages are both grinds as well. Simply because without insane skill it takes a **** load of tries to beat them. So many that the average player will give up long before they get the job done. Grinding Grandmaster stages in any game is also 100% not fun and something I mostly refuse to do outright.
For the record I define a Grandmaster stage as one that is at the end of a game and is many many times harder than the rest of the game. A pointless barrier to 100%ing the game.
Sure the Darker Side of the Moon in
Super Mario Odyssey was the hardest stage in the game but it was honestly not that much harder than the Dark Side of the Moon and didn't feel Grandmaster-y at all. For me I found a few of the Dark Side of the Moon, Moons just as hard to do, though a lot shorter to complete.
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We need to stop thinking of XP grinds as the only grinds in video games. Many of us grind in video games for things that are not XP related. Be it loot, or Grandmaster stages or cash or speed runs for the personal best times or something else.
I do think speed run grinding does not really count here as if you are doing this, you are doing it by choice and it's not required at all to beat the game.
