History Main / LevelGrinding

* ''LightNovel/ACertainMagicalIndex''
** This is basically what Accelerator was trying to do with the [[CloningBlues Sisters]]: Killing 20 thousand level 2 espers to advance to level 6. Sure is a loooong grind. Though the thing that actually got him within a hair's breadth of the Level 6 Shift was [[spoiler:[[NiceJobBreakingItHero getting punched in the face by Touma a few times]]]].
--->'''Accelerator:''' Guess the secret to leveling up is to face a strong opponent, huh?
** Thor says he gets stronger and more skilled with each fight. By the time Touma meets him, Thor says he's become so powerful that Touma is pretty much the only opponent who could give him any significant boost.

* This was necessary in the MostDangerousVideoGame that was ''LightNovel/SwordArtOnline''. The minimum safety margin is to be at least ten levels higher than the floor you're on; so if you're on Floor 40, you need to be at least Level 50. By the time the Clearers hit the Level 75 Boss, most of them are around level 90. Due to diminishing returns, basic grinding was inevitable.

* In ''LightNovel/TheRisingOfTheShieldHero'' the awakening of Cal Mira Island spawns a large number of monsters with increased XP rewards. As such the Heroes and other adventurers flock to it and grind their levels to the point of diminishing return.
** After Naofumi [[spoiler:founds a village and starts training his new slaves]] he loads them onto Firo and tells her to go grind some levels. She simply crushes any monsters she encounters to death with her carriage, without ever slowing down, and the people in the carriage receive XP without having to fight.

* The basic premise of the descriptively-titled ''LightNovel/IveBeenKillingSlimesForThreeHundredYearsAndMaxedOutMyLevel'': the protagonist reincarnates as an [[CompleteImmortality Completely Immortal]] witch in an RPGMechanicsVerse who kills a few slimes every time she goes down to the village, with her killing around 25 per day as exercise and to earn money. When she finally thinks to check her stats 3 centuries later, it turns out she's level 99, has a dozen apocalyptic spells she never knew she'd learned (she'd only used the ability she started with, [[KnowYourVines identifying plants to make medicine]]), an additional ability that doubles the amount of exp she gets from killing slimes[[note]]It simply adds 2 exp points to whatever exp she gets from killing a monster, but since slimes are only worth 2 exp to begin with, that means it doubles how much she gets from them[[/note]], and her numbers are so high that she curbstomps a dragon while trying out one of those spells for the first time. To give an idea of just how long she grinded for, the guild receptionist she talks to calculates that an adventurer would have to kill ''4380 large dragons'' to reach max level.
* In ''Literature/SoloLeveling'', after Jin-Woo gained the ability to be the only Hunter to grow stronger with each monster fight he gets into, he does everything he can to change from the weakest to the strongest.
[[/folder]]

** The series accentuates this trope by letting you start a battle with a weak Pokemon, knock out a high-level enemy with a strong one, and [[LeakedExperience have both Pokemon earn experience points]]. On the downside, you need to have battled your way to the higher-level locations first.

Note that while the term Level Grinding typically has [[ScrappyMechanic a negative connotation]], there's a reason why it's still prevalent to some degree in so many games even today: [[TropesAreTools many players actually enjoy it]]. Furthermore, because grinding typically doesn't require as much concentration or brainpower as normal gameplay, it can make for an excellent companion activity to other things such as listening to music or podcasts.

** It can become this at times. At least as an inexperienced player who may not collect all the djinn, you will require LevelGrinding in ''VideoGame/GoldenSun2001''. In ''VideoGame/GoldenSunTheLostAge'', you can grind until level 99 in the turtle cave, which isn't really hard considering the insane amount of exp Wonderbirds give, if you want to. It isn't required.

* ''VideoGame/NinjaGaiden Black'' has a group of {{Mooks}} demons to fight near the end of the game. They are big, purple-ish zombies who hit hard, are tough to kill, but easy to avoid. The source of income in the game is the yellow essence that you gather as you kill enemies, the average enemy gives you about 20 points of essence. These three creatures, once you kill them, give you around 10,000 points of essence. And they respawn after you leave that arena and return, so you just return and kill them seven or eight times until you max out and upgrade all your weapons. Then you can return and max out again to buy all the extra health potions and ninpo items you want. If you're a halfway decent player, you can beat the final stage of the game relatively easy with all the items you bought.
** ''VideoGame/NinjaGaiden 2'' also has an easy way to grind as much essence as you need to max out every weapon and buy as many healing items as you can hold: in one part of the AirborneAircraftCarrier level, you come across a long hallway that's blocked from one end by laser beams: if you try to pass them, you naturally take damage and an alarm is triggered, which summons some TAC Ninjas to take care of you. However, the alarm trigger is actually seperate from getting hit by lasers, meaning that if you inch your way right next to the lasers, you can summon as many of them as you want without running out of health in the progress. Not only that, but the ninjas enter the room via a long hallway and take their sweet time getting to you, which easily allows you to kill them in a single [[ChargeAttack Ultimate Technique]] from the [[SinisterScythe Eclipse Scythe]].

* ''InsideAStarFilledSky'' is nothing ''but'' grinding. Because the game has no end that anyone could possible achieve in this millenium (or the next one, for that matter), all you're doing is moving back through entering items and getting better powerups. And if you're bad off, you make have to grind so that the first grind actually shows any effect.

* ''{{VideoGame/Contact}}'' has this out the wazoo. Potentially, anyway. If you want OneHundredPercentCompletion, you'll have to raise every single stat to level 100, get every item, and for good measure fill up the treasure and food screens. Oh, and equip the most powerful decals you can find, if you feel like it.
* The ''VideoGame/DragonQuest'' is basically 99% grind and 1% story.
** In the first game, wandering too far from the first castle before gaining a level or two from Slimes will result in a quick, depressing death at the hands of... a Spooky.
** The grinding is most apparent in ''VideoGame/DragonQuestIV''. Due to the unique chapter set-up, you'll have to do the pre-journey grind FIVE SEPERATE TIMES.
** ''III'' for the GBC has 150+ medals to collect. If you want to obtain all gold medals, prepare to not just fight lots of monsters, but to make ''sure'' you keep the ''right kind'' alive to the end of the fight so the right medal drops. And if you do get them all, the game's most powerful dragon gives you the "ultimate reward": He says he's bored and goes to sleep.

** ''[[VideoGame/DragonQuestIX IX]]'' takes this UpToEleven. Each character can reach Level 99 in each job. There are 16 jobs. For comparison, beating the final boss is feasible at Level 50. After completing the main game, Level 99 characters can restart at Level 1, but keep all of their skills. This is the only way to maximize all of the many in-game skills.
* ''VideoGame/GoldenSun'' can become this at times. At least as an inexperienced player who may not collect all the djinn, you will require LevelGrinding. In ''Golden Sun: TLA'', you can grind until level 99 in the turtle cave, which isn't really hard considering the insane amount of exp Wonderbirds give, if you want to. It isn't required.
** Then again, if you're a veteran dungeon crawler and just kill everything that comes your way without ever running from a fight (not hard since you recharge PP to heal between combat), you may find yourself ''overleveled'' for some parts without ''ever'' going out of your way to grind. In ''TLA'' you may be so lost during the whole [[GuideDangIt trident sequence]] that by the time you meet Isaac's team you're ten levels past him.
** VideoGame/GoldenSunDarkDawn one-upped The Lost Age, with [[spoiler:Tua Warriors, relatively weak monsters, that are the only randomly encountered monsters in the final area of the final dungeon]], by taking advantage of the extra experience from unleash-killing monsters, it is possible to go from the mid-40s (the level you're supposed to be near the end), to the max level in two hours

* ''VideoGame/RuneScape''. You'll regularly see things like people setting line after line of fires just to get their firemaking skill up, or spending hours mining ores, smelting them, crafting them and selling them just to get those three skills going... It could be nearly king of this trope -- according to one of the top players (who has maxed out every single skill), it takes at least 3000 hours to max out every skill (level 99) in the game, and that is if you only grind out the most efficient way possible for every single level.

* Since ''VideoGame/TheWorldEndsWithYou'' subsists on being a SelfImposedChallenge, you wouldn't think you needed to do this... until you realize that you've used up all your Scarletite, you can't replay the game to get more the easy way, and you need it to get postgame improvements (like being able to chain more than 4 battles together). The only way to get more? Start farming for Dark Matter... which is only dropped by three bosses. And these three bosses aren't any bosses, they're [[spoiler:Reaper Beat, Taboo Minamimoto, and Draco Cantus. The first two are Hopeless Boss Fights that you have to WIN this time and the last is the Final Boss, who can only be fought after fighting three other bosses and you HAVE to watch the long ending and credits afterwards, unless on iOS, which allows you to skip.]] To make it even worse, they're dropped in pathetically low percentages on high difficulties. The only way to bring those percentages up is to not only have a vicious drop rate to begin with, but to chain like crazy in order to multiply the rate further. It may not be level grinding per se, but damned if you're not killing yourself like crazy to pull it off.
** You could also TakeAThirdOption and simply fight taboo noise (as well as regular, to improve your drop rate) for Shadow Matter -- ten pieces of Shadow nets one of Dark. On Ultimate difficulty, level 10 leaves you with plenty of hit points for a six to ten chain battle, a base drop rate of 99, and, if you have it, you can add a pin to boost your drop rate even further. The rest of the difficulty can be mitigated (if not altogether eliminated) with equipment and post-game pins. Two Lightening Rooks, a Pig pin, and a subconscious recovery pin "just in case" and you're good to go -- you can even defeat one boss before he transforms into his ultimate form.

** The series accentuates this trope, though, by letting you start a battle with a weak Pokemon, knock out a high-level enemy with a strong one, and [[LeakedExperience have both Pokemon earn experience points]]. On the downside, you need to have battled your way to the higher-level locations first.
** Interesting note though: that party of Level 100s you cheated up? Worthless in the Frontier or multiplayer. Due to a complicated and hidden set of values, the Pokemon you defeat while leveling up add to the stats you gain. It's not too important for the bulk of the game, to the point that a casual player can safely ignore them, but they're essential for post-game content and multiplayer. Pokemon that were simply Rare Candied up to 100 are vastly inferior to ones which were very carefully levelled. The same thing applies to the Action Replay codes that boost XP gain in each battle. The lack of hidden stat bonuses ''can'' be fixed in most generations... by stat grinding (which, to be fair, takes a ''lot'' less time than fighting your way to level 100, even without optimization, so long as you know what you're doing.)

* ''VideoGame/DragonQuest'' is absolutely made of this. The entire series is basically 99% grind and 1% story.
** Even the very first game has its moments. Wandering too far from the first castle before gaining a level or two from Slimes will result in a quick, depressing death at the hands of... a Spooky.
** The grinding is most apparent in ''VideoGame/DragonQuestIV''. Due to the unique chapter set-up, you'll have to do the pre-journey grind FIVE SEPERATE TIMES. Have fun with that.
** ''III'' for the GBC with its 150+ medals to collect. If you want to obtain all gold medals, prepare to not just fight lots of monsters, but to make ''sure'' you keep the ''right kind'' alive to the end of the fight so the right medal drops!!! And if you do get them all... the game's most powerful dragon gives you the ''ultimate reward!'' He says he's bored and ''goes to sleep!!!''

*** Of course, [[OneHundredPercentCompletion maxing out everything is optional]]. It's also absolutely ''diabolical'', since there's the aforementioned 16 jobs you can level, plus the Alcheminomicon (a book to fill with all the alchemy recipes in the game), the Bestiary (defeat at least one of every enemy and boss in the game), the Wardrobe (get one of every armor and weapon in the game), and the Quest List (just finding some quests are a major GuideDangIt, let alone finishing them!). The page even mentions that a hardcore gamer ''finally'' got 100% Completion...after 773 hours of play. And now it's impossible due to the DLC servers shutting down.

** There is an interesting experiment you can do. Shark infinite Rare Candies from the get go, forget about training and get to the Battle Frontier quickly. Guess what? You reach the zone in ''half'' the time it takes to beat the Ruby version legally. It means that you spend more or less 20+ hours of your playtime ''only grinding''.[[note]]Well, not precisely. When your Pokemon are all sharked to level 100, it cuts down the time taken for all serious battles at the same time, because you're just one-shotting everything. That's not saying that the series doesn't revolve mostly around level-grinding, but that's not really an accurate way to measure how much time is spent grinding, because you're also not experiencing more drawn out and difficult battles which rack up game time. If you're doing a speed run, you still are going to take some extra time fighting the gym leaders, etc.[[/note]]

* Aside from ThatOneBoss and [[BonusBoss bonus bosses]], the ''Franchise/ShinMegamiTensei'' games tend to avert this. Taking the appropriate skill set and immunities into a fight is generally vastly more important than having a high level. Nothing drives this home faster than getting ambushed and watching your team get wiped out by relatively weak enemies spamming skills one or two of your characters are weak against, killing the rest of the party in the process.
** All this really means is that rather than '''level''' grinding, you're '''skill''' grinding instead. You didn't think "appropriate skill set and immunities" came for free, did you?
** The games also make the inverse possible: with a low-level party and the right skills, it's possible to kill higher-level enemies with relative ease. The later games with the "Push" weakness system means you can go entire combat rounds of just pummeling the opponent over and over without consequence, or even letting the bad guys get a turn. Ever. Although God help you if you don't have your party members on "standby" at some points, as they tend to think attacking the enemy (and therefore putting it back on its feet) is more useful than, say, forcing the enemy to waste its turn getting up. Even when they know the enemy is immune to weapon attacks, ''they'll still go after it.''
** But then you get something like The Answer in [[UpdatedRerelease Persona 3:FES]], of which 75-90% of that story was a forced level grinding session to get yourself back into the 70s. Yes, for random encounters, weakness exploitation was superior to overleveling, but with bosses that had high chances of evading their weaknesses and very hard hitting attacks, you needed the levels just to have the HP to survive long enough for your attacks to connect. Also the [[FakeDifficulty lack of a persona compendium]] makes covering and exploiting weaknesses much harder.

** ''VideoGame/{{Persona 3}}'' is fond of throwing The Reaper at you if the AI suspects you're level grinding. Unfortunately, some amount of grinding is required if you want to access higher-level personae -- the first Star persona is level 39, and you'll need the persona to max the Social Link (the game's other major challenge). Based on the dungeon's layout, you can either engage in combat multiple times as you move up a few floors, then return to base when significantly depleted ''or'' attempt a NoDamageRun to the next terminal floor by simply outrunning and escaping battles. Of course, you won't stand a chance against the boss on the terminal floor unless you enter some fights on other floors, at which point The Reaper will punish you for grinding by instantly killing you and wiping out any levels and items gained. The boss on floor 110 requires you to advance beyond the minimum, as you'll need to be significantly leveled in order to create a certain persona from the Fortune arcana and fight it solo. (Yes, solo. Otherwise, it's a quick murder-suicide affair with your party members. You have to be able to block wind attacks while carrying no healing abilities, as otherwise you'll heal the enemy when it charms you -- thus nullifying the potential utility of Yukari.) There's also the fact that most players have their last save at the dungeon the night before a boss fight, so grinding is sometimes the only option if you can't win the fight and don't want to lose 30-50 hours of gameplay. While bosses should always be a few levels ahead of players, if the boss is ten levels ahead of ''you'', you're doomed.

* There is a bit in ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyVI'' where players can force the game into a loop of fighting an unbounded number of low-level monsters, with a party member who can heal the entire group for free as much as he wants. As a result, simply putting a book on top of the 'A' button and going away for a few days will leave the player with four maximally-leveled characters quite early in the game.
** The problem with this is that you will have awful base stats, as you won't have any summons to have [[VideoGame/FinalFantasyVIII Junctioned]] to your characters, which gives them all the good stat bonuses and spells. Doing this can actually make the game harder [[note]]although even without the stat boosts, level 99 is strong enough to defeat Kefka[[/note]] by the very end and make the bonus dungeons very difficult.
** A desert patch next to Doma Castle in the World of Ruin (SNES version) has an endgame grinding area where a bug causes experiece points gained are boosted to extraordinary amounts when you fight with a lower number of members, with a solo fighter gaining maximum exp and leveling up like mad from a single fight. As the result, a player may have a character/a duo taking turns grinding to level 99.
** Late-on in the World of Balance, once you have your (nearly) complete party and GlobalAirship, returning to the Haunted Forest from Sabin's Scenario grants a high chance of encountering a single, low level monster... which gives 3 AP quite reliably upon defeat, but is worth little to no EXP, meaning you can have a party who have learnt all of the available spells from Espers within a relatively short time, without becoming extremely over-levelled.
** There's also the Intangir on Triangle Island. Thanks to the Vanish bug, he can easily be defeated with X-Zone. You get no experience, but he gives a whopping 10 AP per battle!

* ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyX'': not only do you have mundane level grinding (mixed with the complicated and often annoying sphere grid system), you also have level grinding for your blitzball team! And trust us, you'll need it.
** And if you want to beat Nemesis, prepare to rip out the entire sphere grid and grind to replace all those piddling +1 & +2 stat bonuses with +4's won from arena bosses.

* Because ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyII'' was [[NintendoHard really difficult]] from the get go, grinding was the only way to survive the first real mission. This is partially because the game had the [=PCs=] starting out as weaklings who got offed in the first battle, and partially because the leveling system was ''radically'' different from virtually any RPG today (except the ''VideoGame/{{SaGa|RPG}}'' series, which may have grown directly from ''FFII''); characters gained HP by being damaged, attack skills by attacking with certain weapons, etc. As a result of its odd system, ''FFII'' has a very unusual grinding method: having your party members beat each other up to get HP bonuses. The game also had an [[GameBreaker exploitable bug]] in which choosing to attack, canceling your selection, and repeating 100 times would register for leveling purposes as attacking 100 times and would level up the character's skill with the weapon in question. While some consider exploiting bugs to be cheating, the tedium of building up skill levels "honestly" causes most players to not care.
** The GBA remake fixed the "select-cancel" bug, but raised the overall stat growth rate to compensate. Attacking your own party to boost HP remained a viable strategy, but it was no longer quite so necessary.
*** It also introduced a new bug which arguably tops the select-cancel bug in effectiveness, or at least automates the process a great deal: equipping a character with twin shields and then letting them try to attack an enemy boosts their shield level, but if you switch weapons before the end of the battle, something not possible in the other versions, all the gained experience will go towards that weapon type instead, letting you gain weapon levels without even looking at the screen.
*** It also helps that the GBA remake removed stat ''decreases''. Can you say [[NoKillLikeOverkill theoretical party with ALL stats maxed out]]??
*** There is, however, a limit in the GBA/PSP remakes. Weapon skills are capped at a certain point until you progress in the story (for example, try maxing sword skill before you finish the ice cave, and you'll notice it stops increasing around level 7 for Firion). Stat growth is faster, but ''also'' capped, though in a "softer" sense (once you reach the stat cap for the point, you have to take slightly more drastic measures to increase them). Magic, on the other hand, is ''never'' capped, and if you're willing to put the effort into it, you can have a level 16 fire spell before you're finished the first quest.

* ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyI'' had a mapping bug that allowed the player to fight high-level monster groups very early in the game by visiting a two-square peninsula northeast of Pravoka, the second town visited. Once the Mages learned group-effect spells like [=FIR2=] and [=HRM2=], many of the encounters provided quick experience boosts. Later on, the best LevelGrinding was available in the Ice Cave, where a fixed battle with the EYE boss could be repeated for thousands of easy experience points. Another location is the "Giant's arm" in the Earth Cave, a certain bend in the cave where every single step you take results in an encounter with giants or green ogres.
** The [[{{PeninsulaOfPowerLeveling}} peninsula]] [[GoodBadBugs of]] [[AscendedGlitch power]] is kept in later remakes.

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[[folder: Adventure Game ]]

'''Cartman:''' Yes. 65,343,284, which should take us 7 weeks, 5 days, 13 hours and 20 minutes, giving ourselves 3 hours a night to sleep.

* ''VideoGame/NinjaGaiden Black'' has a group of [[{{Mooks}} mook]] demons to fight near the end of the game. They are big, purple-ish zombies who hit hard, are tough to kill, but easy to avoid. The source of income in the game is the yellow essence that you gather as you kill enemies, the average enemy gives you about 20 points of essence. These three creatures, once you kill them, give you around 10,000 points of essence. And they respawn after you leave that arena and return, so you just return and kill them seven or eight times until you max out and upgrade all your weapons. Then you can return and max out again to buy all the extra health potions and ninpo items you want. If you're a halfway decent player, you can beat the final stage of the game relatively easy with all the items you bought.

** Getting that M.D., J.D., or PhD in many countries starts by excelling in high school or even earlier. And if you see someone who has letters after that, they probably spent a few years getting those, too.

* The world of ''LightNovel/IsItWrongToTryToPickUpGirlsInADungeon'' functions like a video game. Adventurers who have been sponsored by a god gain stat boosts and acquire skills from fighting and defeating monsters. However, it's not supposed to be possible to actually gain a level from anything which doesn't put you in serious danger of breaking somehow, and most of the grinding is being done for the prosaic goal of improving your survival chance at entering the Dungeon and getting resources out.

* ''VideoGame/DragonAgeOrigins'' included a pretty boring grind: if you don't slaughter the entire Dalish settlement, the Elven emissary will appear in your party camp and accept "crafting materials" to upgrade Elven troops' equipment for the FinalBattle. Now, "crafting materials" include Elfroots, which are available for 60 copper pieces in ''unlimited quantity'' at the Elven camp, and each batch of 89 pieces (called "Give all Elfroots") nets you ''880 XP'' (meaning it costs only 112 gold to grind from level 0 to the level {{cap}}--roughly an eighth of the transaction volume you can potentially have in single playthrough). So, just go to the Dalish camp, buy an inventory full of Elfroots, return to the party camp and grind.

** PVP functions as an alternate levelling process, but you only have a scant handful of battlegrounds to do repeatedly in order to level up. Once at level cap, you do endless repeat of same old battlegrounds to farm your PVP gear.

** Players have discovered a way to basically "farm" the best subjects for grinding. In 0.0 security space (Free-for-all PVP and player owned) NPC pirate ships can pay anywhere from a few hundred thousand ISK to over a million. By wiping out spawns until one with multiple high-bounty battleships appear, and then only killing the battleships, corporations with 0.0 space can basically create a perpetual money factory. This is due to the fact that there a few set spawn compositions the game loads whenever a spawn has been completely cleared. But when a spawn is only partially destroyed, instead of changing the makeup of the spawn the game just "refills" it, ensuring that high profit spawns stay high profit.

* All the Digimon World games sans the first one fall into this. The DS games, however, take this to never seen extents. The random encounter rate in these games is fixed, but very high, and no way to repel enemies. The areas you explore are very large, with no map whatsoever. Plus, the enemies give very low experience, while the experience needed in order to level up grows exponentially (ironically, beating the weakest enemy in the game is enough to level anything from 1 to 3). The later bosses have much higher stats and skills than you'd have without Korean MMORPG-levels of grinding. A simple test of beating the game with no random battles and following the right paths in the maze-like dungeons shows that the main story can be beaten in two hours or so, and the post-story mandatory missions in another hour or so. In a game that a proper raised PvP team may require over 100 hours of gameplay, just by playing random battles and Farmville-like training.

* The basic premise of the descriptively-titled ''LightNovel/IveBeenKillingSlimesForThreeHundredYearsAndMaxedOutMyLevel'': the protagonist reincarnates as an [[CompleteImmortality Completely Immortal]] witch in an RPGMechanicsVerse who kills a few slimes every time she goes down to the village, with her killing around 25 per day as exercise and to earn money. When she finally thinks to check her stats 3 centuries later, it turns out she's level 99, has a dozen apocalyptic spells she never knew she'd learned (she'd only used the ability she started with, [[KnowYourVines identifying plants to make medicine]]), an additional ability that doubles the amount of exp she gets from killing slimes[[note]]It simply adds 2 exp points to whatever exp she gets from killing a monster, but since slimes are only worth 2 exp to begin with, that means it doubles how much she gets from them[[/note]], and her numbers are so high that she curbstomps a dragon while trying out one of those spells for the first time. To give an idea of just how long she grinded for, the guild receptionist she talks to calculates that an adventurer would have to kill ''4380 large dragons'' to reach max level.

* The basic premise of the descriptively-titled ''LightNovel/IveBeenKillingSlimesForThreeHundredYearsAndMaxedOutMyLevel'': the protagonist reincarnates as an immortal witch in an RPGMechanicsVerse who kills a few slimes every time she goes down to the village, with her killing around 25 per day as exercise and to earn money. When she finally thinks to check her stats 3 centuries later, it turns out she's level 99, has a dozen apocalyptic spells she never knew she'd learned (she'd only used the ability she started with, identifying plants to make medicine), an additional ability that doubles the amount of exp she gets from killing slimes[[note]]It simply adds 2 exp points to whatever exp she gets from killing a monster, but since slimes are only worth 2 exp to begin with, that means it doubles how much she gets from them[[/note]], and her numbers are so high that she curbstomps a dragon while trying out one of those spells for the first time. To give an idea of just how long she grinded for, the guild receptionist she talks to calculates that an adventurer would have to kill ''4380 large dragons'' to reach max level.

* ''Literature/IveBeenKillingSlimesForThreeHundredYearsAndMaxedOutMyLevel'' has what is possibly one of ''the'' most extreme examples of this, where the protagonist Azusa accidentally maxes herself out by casually killing slimes every single day for ''300 years straight.''

* The basic premise of the descriptively-titled ''Manga/WhileKillingSlimeFor300YearsIBecameTheMAXLevelUnknowingly'': the protagonist reincarnates as an immortal witch in an RPGMechanicsVerse who kills a few slimes every time she goes down to the village, with her killing around 25 per day as exercise and to earn money. When she finally thinks to check her stats 3 centuries later, it turns out she's level 99, has a dozen apocalyptic spells she never knew she'd learned (she'd only used the ability she started with, identifying plants to make medicine), an additional ability that doubles the amount of exp she gets from killing slimes[[note]]It simply adds 2 exp points to whatever exp she gets from killing a monster, but since slimes are only worth 2 exp to begin with, that means it doubles how much she gets from them[[/note]], and her numbers are so high that she curbstomps a dragon while trying out one of those spells for the first time. To give an idea of just how long she grinded for, the guild receptionist she talks to calculates that an adventurer would have to kill ''4380 large dragons'' to reach max level.

** VideoGame/GoldenSunDarkDawn one-upped TheLostAge, with [[spoiler:Tua Warriors, relatively weak monsters, that are the only randomly encountered monsters in the final area of the final dungeon]], by taking advantage of the extra experience from unleash-killing monsters, it is possible to go from the mid-40s (the level you're supposed to be near the end), to the max level in two hours

* ''VideoGame/EarthBoundBeginnings'' is hit pretty badly with this; because the game was never tested for balancing purposes, it suffers from an annoyingly steep difficulty curve that forces the player to grind experience each time the plot advances to a new area.