Grinding! My Favorite Past-Time!

Grinding is so much fun! Sometimes I wish I was able to do it all day long. It's so nice to just sit back, and mindlessly duel monsters for hours.

Confused yet? No, I'm not talking about the way that teenagers dance. I'm speaking of grinding to level up your character!

I am a big role-playing game fan, and one of my favorite things to do is just adventure out into the wilds where I can continuously romp on the enemies that pop up. Games like Pokemon, Final Fantasy, and tons of other JRPGs allow you to train your characters like this, so that when you finally do decide to move on in the game, all that time you spent training can transfer into easily beating the next part of the game.

Pokemon is one of my all time favorite series of games that do this. You can spend your time in the wild grass trying to level up your Pokemon, which can lead to rewards such as new abilities for your Pokemon, or even an evolution if enough time is spent. Grinding your Pokemon like this can also make the next gym leader, or the next section of the game a lot easier! Sometimes all of that time spent in the grass can also lead to discoveries of rare Pokemon that show up very infrequently in any such area. I remember in the first game that the section of wild grass that led to the Elite 4 could be accessed before you even went on to the first gym leader. This grass was filled with Pidgeys and Rattatas, but if you took your time in this area while grinding your Pokemon to higher levels, you could also find some Spearows, some Primapes, and some Nidorans or Nidorinas. The reason I love Pokemon so much is because it allows me to have these mindless hours and hours of fun!

Games like Final Fantasy also require that you spend a little time grinding. There are actually many cases where you can't get by in a game like this without grinding, unless you are some kind of strategy guru.

This is the case with many JRPGs, and this is probably why I love all of them so much, but here is my plea to the American game creators:

Please, I beg of you, stop making games with linear stories that require that I continue on through my game before my character is able to level up again. It doesn't really make sense to me! Oblivion, sure you can grind, but if you go to sleep, and level up, the entire game gets harder! That's awful! I didn't spend all of my hours laboring away just so I could go take a one-hour in-game rest and have it all go downhill! Then there are games like Dragon Age: Origins, which you are able to level up your characters in, but it requires searching and digging around for quests. Why can't you just let me come back and forth to an area filled with some darkspawn? That's all I ask of you!

And to continue on with my plea, even though I really doubt this will do anything:

Dear creators of Elder Scrolls,

     I really do love your games, trust me! I'd just love them even more if you could make Skyrim a game where grinding actually does something for me, instead of making me toil away at leveling up my character, and being left in the dust whenever I go to take a nap in a bed. Yes, I realize that I could just avoid sleeping, but then quests that are only available at level 20 will never become available to me, and this would make me sad! Maybe you could just tune the game so that the harder quests are only available to the higher leveled people, and they get harder as you go, while at the same time having monsters in one area being fairly weak, for when my character is just a wee-little noob, and then when I stretch out across the lands, you can make things harder for me! Do that instead of punishing me every time I level up and making the entire game harder. Please, just find some way to reward grinders for their time. I'm sure we'd all enjoy that.

Thank you,
Brent Johnson

Thanks for reading everyone! Have a great day.