Quote Originally Posted by Skyblade View Post
Bolivar, despite the powerlevelling in the early FFs, they were never called a grind during their heyday, because grinding is a fairly new term. It was not around in the earlier days of gaming for a couple very good reasons. First, games were simple. With a game like Tetris, there is no grind, even though it is all repetition. When that's all there is to a game, it's not a grind (because there is no end objective). People who didn't like it, quit. Also, games weren't as mainstream, and gamers mostly stuck to what they knew and enjoyed. Until we had games that were complex enough, and mainstream enough, we never had the term grind. Grind came about to describe people feeling forced to play through something repetitive they did not enjoy to get to something else that you do enjoy (or think you will enjoy). People will go back and play FFIII now, and may think that some parts of it require a grind, because they don't like the endless random fights or the amount of levelling/training you had to do for it. But the people who played and loved it when it came out would never even think of it as a grind. To them, that's just the game, and they do it because it's fun. As you do.
Keep in mind about actual grinding in older games like FFI or III (grinding experience to get powerful enough to fight the enemies in the next dungeon or the next boss), that's a large staple in those for the same reason a lot of games in that era are brutally hard and unforgiving; if they weren't, they'd last an hour and you'd never play them again. They couldn't spin 40 hour yarns or feature enough levels to get multiple hours of game out there without making it hard. That said, the games that were really fun because the gameplay was solid in spite of being hard were also extremely rewarding simply for the sense of accomplishment when you finally did advance.

That said, the days where I find grinding for the sake of grinding or for some slightly useful reward to be the least bit pleasant are long gone. I typically hate it myself because most games offer little real pay off for the time and effort put in, and any game that requires grinding to continue with the story loses me sooner rather than later (I'm looking at you Dragon Quest VIII). The games where I don't mind grinding and could literally do it for hours are always the games where the battle system is so fun, challenging and addictive that I can't put it down. Unfortunately those are also fewer and farther between these days. I haven't seen many games of any type that offered combat that was so rewarding on it's own that I could stand grinding.

FFXII was one that did for me though. I would happily grind for loot when I needed money or go on hunt after hunt slaughtering scores of enemies because the gameplay was challenging enough to be rewarding and such a refreshing change from the old ATB system that I didn't mind playing it for hours on end. You can offer all of the quest rewards and interesting tidbits about the game world you want to try and reward grinding but it's not going to hold my attention as well as a combat system that is just plain fun and challenging.