Keep in mind that wasn’t exactly an option when it first launched either.įire Emblem: Shadow Dragon sticks out too, where a significant number of units were under levelled going into the final mission. I just wanted to see how it ended and sure, I could’ve gone to YouTube, but I’d have lost that satisfaction. It took me a long time to defeat Zeromus spending hours levelling up across the Moon, and when I finally succeeded I felt both relieved and annoyed. When a game becomes reliant on it for advancement, that gets repetitive and when that happens, my interest waivers. I’m hardly the first person to make this point over the years - and I know plenty will defend grinding, too - but in my eyes, it really makes for poor gameplay design.

Something became increasingly clear as I did, however: so many of them just don’t respect your time.Įven if RPGs aren’t your speed, you’ve likely experienced grinding at some point a mundane method of levelling up, battling with lower-level enemies until you reach a high enough level to take down the next boss. Between that and Persona 5, which was recommended to me two years back, I played a lot of older RPGs.

I had a few experiences with them growing up, starting with Pokémon Sapphire, Golden Sun, and Final Fantasy III, but I wasn’t truly onboard until a work friend loaned me SRPG Fire Emblem Awakening. They are a commitment to get through, no denying that, but they’ve brought us some of gaming’s greatest stories and recently, Trails of Cold Steel has had me hooked. Personally, I’m a huge fan of RPGs of various flavours. Despite this pandemic, many of us still lead busy lives and when we get that chance to sit down with a game, you want to make the most of it. Factoring in other platforms with big releases like The Medium being added to the infamous “List”, there’s no wonder most of us have a backlog. They can’t all be winners, but for a traditionally quieter month, we’ve seen already big names like Scott Pilgrim vs. In Europe alone, the eShop had 43 new launches last week. We really are spoiled for choice these days and, in part thanks to digital distribution, more games are releasing than we can keep up with. In this piece, Henry discusses how he's fed up of being ground down by grinding. Soapbox features enable our individual writers to voice their own opinions on hot topics, opinions that may not necessarily be the voice of the site.

Xenoblade chronicles x level grinding