Level Grinding / Role-Playing Games

Level Grinding is a staple of Role-Playing Games so it's unsurprising that it would have enough examples to warrant its own list.

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• As a general rule, in any RPG where an enemy can summon reinforcements to back them up, prolonging the fight to constantly take out the reinforcements while leaving the summoner alive will often drastically increase your gained experience and money, assuming the extra encounters are worth XP/money. Sometimes this will be limited by the summoner's mana points or their equivalent, but when it's not...
• This is as old as the first role-playing video games, like the 1974 dnd game for PLATO computers. Enemies are deadly, you need 10,000 XP for a level up, and you only level up when you backtrack to the first floor of the dungeon, so the only safe way to level up is to kill weak enemies over and over on early levels of the dungeon and exit. If you press on and get a ton of XP on the bottom floors of the dungeon, odds are you're going to die fighting your way through a dozen levels of dungeon again. This guy's playthrough offers a good insight into how necessary grinding can be.
• The 7th Saga for the SNES is known for the insane amount of time it takes to level up — the monsters are difficult and the experience is low. Plus if you level up too much, the game is Unwinnable due to an oversight: the other potential PCs level up as you do. At level 42, the cleric learns a spell that restores all his HP — and for no good reason, also all his MP. He's essentially immortal at that point. The other potential PCs also sometimes steal your Plot Coupons, requiring you to duel to take them. If the cleric ganks one late in the game, he's literally impossible to beat, since the AI isn't dumb enough to forget it has healing spells.
• You won't come out of Albion's first big dungeon alive, unless you spend a few days on the previous island, doing nothing but slaughtering the local wildlife, and visiting the local healer for occasional free potions you can sell later.
• Baldur's Gate 2: Throne of Bhaal has one of the easiest level grinds in RPG history. It doesn't even need the player be there to kill the monsters. Once you reach the city surrounded by attacking giants, go to the ramparts near the gates. Equip all the infinite ammunition items you have available and have those characters set to attack automatically with ranged weapons on aggressive creatures using the game's script feature. Other characters in your group should be set not to attack (no sense in wasting ammunition). Once they start attacking the offscreen (and defenseless) giants and killing them unopposed, go watch a movie. Return later to see all of your characters now at the level cap.
• The first game in the Bard's Tale series features an egregious midgame level-grind. A repeatable encounter with 396 midlevel fighters — certain death for a low-level party, but no particular threat to a party with good armor and group-effect spells — nets the party 65535 experience points for a victory; as that suggestive number implies, XP per battle are capped and no other battle even comes near the cap. It thus becomes an obvious strategy for players to repeat this one encounter over and over instead of seeking out more dangerous and less rewarding fights.
• As the battle system of Baten Kaitos: Eternal Wings and the Lost Ocean is card-based, it's not nearly as important to have a high level or great stats as it is to have a well-rounded, efficient deck. However, since most of the best cards are only randomly dropped by enemies, the net effect is the same: a lot of time spent wandering around in the wilderness killing random monsters until your deck is up to par.
  • You can also explicitly grind 'recipes' in order to cause specific cards to appear. This is the only reliable method to acquire good revival items (such as the absolutely vital Sacred Wine: 100% Revive + 500 HP).
• Capella's Promise doesn't require too much grinding to beat the main story, but the postgame will require the party to use Recursion stones, which lowers their level by three if the main character is at a high enough level. The party essentially has to use these stones to level up far more than the cap would normally allow, all to beat the insanely powerful superbosses.
• Chrono Trigger allows the party to access 65,000,000 BC as soon as it reaches the End of Time. Once there, the party can go to the Dacytl's Nest, an area that the party won't visit on the One True Sequence until several dungeons later, and fight enemy parties that give out twice the experience the enemies in the dungeon the party is supposed to visit next. The combination of tricks like these and non-random enemy encounters make Chrono Trigger a very easy game to level grind on.
  • Chrono Cross, the sequel manages to avert Level Grinding hard, you gain stats and bonus's whenever you defeat a boss, ensuring that you are always at the level you need to be to take on the appropriate boss (on the first play through anyway).
• Contact has this out the wazoo. Potentially, anyway. If you want 100% Completion, 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.
• In Crystalis, you will find yourself unable to advance to certain parts of the game or damage certain enemies unless you have achieved a certain level.
• Played with in Dark Souls and Dark Souls 3. Your souls are money and XP, and are dropped on death. However, if they're recovered before dying again, they're reclaimed, along with any you've collected since. This means that if a player struggles with a particular segment of a level, they'll keep piling up the souls of everything between that section and the nearest checkpoint, passively accomplishing this. It's also something that can be done actively, with locations in each game that are favored for farming souls.
  • Dark Souls 2 limits the player's ability to level grind by limiting the number of times that enemies will respawn after being killed to 12. This allows a player to slowly scrape foes away from nasty areas, and is especially common in runbacks (enemies that spawn between a boss and the nearest checkpoint). Using a Bonfire Essence on said checkpoint will reset the counter, but also increase the challenge (and rewards) of the area as if the player has progressed through one New Game Plus cycle.
• In Digimon Story: Cyber Sleuth, the higher-tier Mega Digimon require a high "ABI" (Ability) stat to reach the form, which can only be raised by Digivolving and de-Digivolving your mons over and over (which is a significant time sink). Thankfully, the Nintendo Switch version of the game allows your mons to passively gain levels in the farm while your console is in sleep mode and you're off doing other things, reducing the overall grind.
• 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.
  • It shows something when, even if you use the code to start the battle with only 1 EXP point remaining to the next level, it still can take more than one hour to have a digimon reach Lv. 99 ONCE. Because if you want to max you stats, you'll be leveling from 1 to at least 70 several times, to say nothing of using the cross DNA evolution to learn skills you normally wouldn't be able to.
• The Disgaea series keep grinding entertaining by use of the Item Worlder, which provides unlimited randomly generated dungeons while also boosting your character's equipment. You also have some choice in the level of the enemies you fight since they are relative to the power of the item.
• Dislyte: While Espers automated gain EXP per battle, there are dedicated practice stages designed to earn additional EXP and Experimon, which as their name suggests, help level up Espers. There is one practice stage per story chapter and they can be unlocked upon clearing the third stage in a story chapter. Using the Multi-Battle feature and the XP Boosters on the practice stages is ideal for getting as much EXP as possible.
• Dragon Age: Origins 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 Final Battle. 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. Not that there's much reason to do so, as you'll probably be about level 20 by the time you unlock this option and the cap is only level 25. The Grey Warden, in fact, is probably better served by not leveling (or at least not spending the skill and ability points gained by leveling up) until you progress on to the expansion so you can buy more of the powerful new abilities that get unlocked.
• Dragon Quest:
  • In Dragon Quest, 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 Dragon Quest IV. Due to the unique chapter set-up, you'll have to do the pre-journey grind five separate times.
  • Dragon Quest 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.
  • Dragon Quest VI's Job System uses the number of battles won rather than experience to increase a job's rank, but the catch is that these battles have to be against a challenging enemy (no going back to the very first area to beat on slimes, unless you somehow recruited a level 1 character). This is done by giving every region a hidden Level Cap where battles no longer count for characters of that level or higher. The earliest location where the cap is 99 is the Spiegelspire, itself reached late-game.
  • Dragon Quest IX takes this up to eleven. 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.
• Elden Ring works similarly to Dark Souls as described above. However, its nature as an open world dissuades this to some degree, motivating a player who's hard stuck on an area or boss to simply explore elsewhere. That said, the Palace Approach Site of Grace in Mohgwyn Palace quickly gained notoriety as a prime spot for farming Runes (combined XP and money). Using a bow or shortbow and entering precision aiming mode, a player can hit a huge bird creature beside a bottomless pit. This will cause it to aggro, running toward the player and into the pit, killing it; the player then rests at the Site of Grace a few paces away, causing the bird to respawn. The reward is about 33000 Runes per kill, more than most bosses if accessed at the earliest opportunity (in Liurnia of the Lakes, the game's second biome). And even then, each loop takes only a few seconds, meaning even higher level characters can benefit. One site calculated the throughput to be approximately three million runes per hour.
• The Elder Scrolls
  • In general, with a few quirks varying by game, the series' leveling system follows the logic of having successful uses of a skill go toward increasing that skill's level. (Sneaking around will increase your Sneak skill, casting Destruction spells will increase your Destruction skill, etc.) Then, every ten increases of a skill level goes toward increasing the character's overall level. However, some skills (mostly those outside of standard combat-related skills) require intentional grinding, such as Enchanting and Alchemy. If you want to grind them, you'll need to acquire/purchase all of the necessary components and then use those skills over and over.
  • Oblivion's horrifically broken Level Scaling system adds a major complication. Unless you go the full blown Munchkin route to Min Max your skills and keep careful track to avoid deadly Empty Levels (which severely weaken the Player Character in comparison to the world's enemies that scale only to your level), it's recommended that you follow the strange practice of deliberate under-leving. IE, increase your skills up to and beyond the point where you could level up, but don't. Enemies will remain scaled to your level, but your skills will be far beyond what you should have at that level. As sleeping is the means of leveling up, this leads to the world being saved from a horde of feeble Legions of Hell by a strangely competent insomniac. Additionally, a first-level character in Oblivion can become the Archmage of the Mage Guild, Master of the Fighters Guild, leader of the Thieves Guild, Listener of the Dark Brotherhood, and Grand Champion of the Arena. At the same time. The disadvantage to this is that the equipment and rewards available will always be of the lowest quality, but it sure beats leveling up only to find yourself getting demolished by suddenly-even-stronger enemies.
  • Skyrim overhauls the series' standard system to focus on skill grinding AND ONLY skill grinding. There are 18 skill trees; 6 for each of the Fighter, Mage, Thief classes, one of each for crafting, and two of each for defense. To level up a skill, players simply have to perform a successful application of a skill (hit the target, deal or deflect damage, buy, sell, and craft items, etc.). Each time a skill is leveled up, the player character gains an experience point; get ten of these and the player character levels up, getting the option to increase 10 points of Health, Magic, or Stamina, and earning a skill perk. Once again, leveling up non-combat skills alone can lead to Empty Levels, but it is much harder to accidentally do than in Oblivion. In the 1.9 patch, players are given the option to "Legendary" any of their maxed skills, resetting it back to 15/100 but retaining the experience points and perks earned from the skill.
• In Etrian Odyssey, trying to "skip" to the labyrinth's next floor without having explored a substantial amount of the one you're on will ensure swift death. And the only way to earn money in the game is to sell off items dropped by monsters. A game where sidequests are a time-consuming practical necessity for the rewards, loot, and exp potentially gained by completing them. You'll need the lot.
• Eye of the Beholder: Some actions or locations will spawn monsters regularly and predictably. This can be used to grind XP pretty quickly with a party properly prepared for the specific enemy, if you're patient enough.
  • EotB1:
    • The most useful place early on is the kenku (bird-men) level. They're worth a lot of XP but are not terribly dangerous once you neutralize their main attack (magic missiles) with a pair of mages protected by a shield spell in the front row. They also spawn regularly in a level you can easily leave to rest in a safe place and return.
    • In the deepest level, there's a spot where you can create stone golems at will, as long as you have black spheres, stones and potions (any potions, including some pretty useless ones by this level like healing or counterpoison, or even poison potions). Golems are dangerous because of their immunity to offensive magic, but are slow and can be handled with projectiles and your mages focusing on Status Buffs instead.
  • EotB2:
    • There are spots where a Will-o'-Wisp or a bulette will automatically appears as soon as you step in. Dangerous monsters in either case, but once again worth lots of XP, and easily handled by a well-prepared party.
    • Deeper in, a specific corridor automatically surround the party with a pair of mages. Trickier, but since they're Squishy Wizards and always open the hostilities with magic missiles, you have a good chance of killing one and getting out of the way before the other pulls out the Fireballs.
• Final Fantasy and its remake 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 Fira^note FIR2 in the NES translation and Diara^note HRM2 in the NES version, many of the encounters provided quick experience boosts. Later on, the best Level Grinding was available in the Cavern of Ice, where a fixed battle with the Evil Eye^note EYE in the NES version mini-boss could be repeated for thousands of easy experience points. Another location is the "Giant's arm" in the Cavern of Earth, a certain bend in the cave where every single step you take results in an encounter with Hill Gigas^note GIANT in the NES version or Ogre Chiefs^note GrOGRE in the NES translation.
• Final Fantasy II: The game's difficulty meant grinding was the only way to survive the first real mission. This is partially because the PCs start out as weaklings who get offed in the first battle, and partially because FFII has a unusual leveling up system: The team only gets HP bonuses if they take damage in battle, so grinding usually revolves around party members beating each other up in order to grow stronger.
• Final Fantasy IV:
  • Like the first game, this one also has a Peninsula Of Power north of Mount Ordeals where, if you fadangle yourself around some mountains you'll reach a patch of land where enemies from the Troia world map area can be encountered. They can slaughter you messily if you underestimate them, but by having Palom spam Bio you can wipe them out and comfortably get to around level 35 or so. If you're lucky you'll also get your mitts on some Cat Claws for Yang.
  • The Passage of the Eidolons has Summoners who can summon one of several enemies, and will always summon an enemy if its turn comes up and it's the only monster on the field, and one of the enemies it can summon is the relatively weak Hellflapper^note RockMoth in the SNES translation. Once you've beaten the Sealed Cave and are down to 4 party members, you will be at a level where two of your party members can each comfortably one-shot a Hellflapper with a standard attack, each time for 3200 exp a pop. You'll be killing two moths a turn, taking next to no damage (the Summoner will occasionally get an attack in), and can pump out almost 200,000 exp in about a half hour of this. A patient player can get your party to the mid-50s, enough to comfortably beat the final boss, with no challenge at all.
• Final Fantasy VI:
  • Players can force 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. However, this will leave the party with awful base stats, since the absence of Summons means no 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 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 boosts experience points 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.
  • In the World of Balance, once you have your (nearly) complete party and Global Airship, returning to the Phantom 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.
  • 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!
• Final Fantasy IX:
  • Because there is absolutely no Leaked Experience, you will find at least one point in the game that requires some serious grinding (looking at you, Disc 3 Steiner and Freya). Luckily, the Level-Up passive ability makes it a little less painful.
  • The way the game's ability-system works (passive abilities like Auto-Haste and Auto-Regen are learnt from armor and accessories and AP earned in battle) actually provides some incentive for doing this, as you will want the most beneficial abilities (again, Auto-Haste and Auto-Regen) for your characters before entering a dungeon, and will generally only have one of the item teaching the relevant ability at a time.
• Final Fantasy X: This game uses Stat Grinding via the Sphere grid, but level grinding for your blitzball team.
• In Final Fantasy XII, with a lot of phoenix downs and a little patience and dexterity, one can advance 30+ levels and rake in a small fortune before even completing the first mission. What's more, once you finally decide to advance in the plot, all these levels carry over to the new members of your party. If you do all this with just Vaan, it's like leveling up six characters for the price of one.
  • Later in the game, you can find Negalmuur, a monster that summons other, weaker monsters. You can set Gambits on your characters to attack the summoned monsters and defend yourself from Negalmuur's attacks, go to bed, and wake up to three level 99 characters and a shitload of dropped loot.
  • There's also a place in the Henne Mines with a set of four jellies that, as long as you set your gambits up correctly, will spawn forever.
• Unlike the Fighting Fantasy gamebooks, Fighting Fantasy Legends and Legends Portal has your characters gain experience. Level Grinding becomes a huge part of the game as the first few points of improvement will be neglible, while useful equipment might take a while to find. Grind enough and you'll even be able to smack down the bosses with brute force alone.
• Ginormo Sword. You spend more time level grinding than you do fighting bosses, upgrading equipment, and moving around the map combined.
• Golden Sun:
  • It can become this at times. At least as an inexperienced player who may not collect all the djinn, you will require Level Grinding in Golden Sun. In Golden Sun: The Lost Age, 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.
  • 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 trident sequence that by the time you meet Isaac's team you're ten levels past him.
  • Golden Sun: Dark Dawn one-upped The Lost Age, with 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.
• In Granblue Fantasy, it is fairly easy to level-up characters who are at their early levels by placing them at the back-row and having your higher-level front-line party members do the killing, all of them get the same amount of EXP otherwise. Combine this tactic with repeating the quests mentioned in the Peninsula of Power Leveling entry, and you'll be able to easily grind out the levels of your newly-acquired characters at the same time.
• In Gyromancer, you're going to have to do considerably more than just chase the objectives if you want to get to the end. Stages refresh themselves when you leave, so you can fight the same monsters repeatedly. Somewhat unusually, the grinding actually occurs — and is used — in the Puzzle Game component, not any of the RPG mechanics.
• In Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories, both Sora and Riku max at Level 99. Thing is, both the main story and Reverse/Rebirth are beatable at about half there for anyone reasonably skilled with the card system. So if you're someone that likes to max out levels, get ready for lots of level grinding, pointless for anything other than just getting the levels, since there are no superbosses to fight. Not only that, but there are no really quick leveling strategies such as the tech points that the original game has, and eventually the bonuses you get for leveling up stuck having any practical effect in speeding up battle completion. (Riku's attack points max at 30 and Sora doesn't even get attack points.) HD 1.5 ReMIX ups the pain by linking Trophies to max levels for both Sora and Riku.
• To keep up its parody status Linear RPG does make you grind. Going straight will cause you to die. Best to end the game at level 40 which means there's a bit of running back and forwards. No really.
• Monster Hunter:
  • The series, while not having explicit character levels, forces you to kill the same monsters over and over to get the weapons or armor made from their parts. Also, one gains experience in the form of real-life experience in killing the monsters, such that extremely good players often take on a high-level monster with no armor at all, just to show off.
  • The now-defunct multiplayer quests in the home console installments prior to Monster Hunter: World required you to grind "Guild Points" to unlock the more next "level" of quests and monsters; this technically also holds true for the handheld games (whose multiplayer quests can still be played today for only supporting local play, though this changed with 4 and Generations), except for the need of a Hunter Rank grind because it only increases by one after completing each urgent quest. But in all cases, since you use the same character for both single and multiplayer, a maxed out singleplayer character will find the early game multiplayer trivial since you have already grinded the same monsters in the singleplayer. In turn, it also makes the singleplayer trivial since a maxed out multiplayer character fought advanced forms of the same monsters as well as multiplayer exclusive monsters and unlocked equipment far better than anything in the singleplayer. Lesson to be learned? Jump straight into multiplayer, come back later and curb stomp your way through the singleplayer. Starting from Monster Hunter 4, while the quests are still separated for single- and multiplayer (except in Monster Hunter: World which merged the questlines into one branch, whereas Monster Hunter: Rise only keeps them separate in Low Rank), there are now incentives to play the former campaign first, such as unlocking items and features that serve as rewards for completing single-player requests (such as trading monster parts in 4 or Hunter Art skills in Generations).
• Mother:
  • EarthBound Beginnings 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. This is particularly necessary when Lloyd and Ana join the party at level 1: those characters will need to gain some levels just to have a chance of surviving areas that are unlocked at about the same time.
  • While it's for the most part unnecessary in EarthBound, the game gives several good opportunities:
    • After defeating a sanctuary guardian, all the enemies in the area flee from you regardless of your level compared to theirs. Engaging an enemy from behind (practically a given since they're running away) either guarantees an extra attack or an outright free kill, and since the enemies are still giving decent amounts of experience it's a golden opportunity to gain a couple levels.
    • Foppys and Fobbys, which attack in large groups, are weak, respawn readily, and give sizeable experience and money rewards and often a rather useful Psy Caramel upon defeat, were put into the game intentionally for this purpose to bolster your level before facing Master Belch and Electro Spectre, respectively.
  • Mother 3 requires level grinding during the first three chapters of the game, due to switching between different characters and restricting what items you can buy or equip. Chapter 3 suffers from this the most, since the player character of that particular chapter is not only laughably weak, but the chapter also contains what is considered one of the games' hardest bosses. Afterwards, the games tones down the need for level grinding, but there are still a few increases in difficulty and bosses here and there that will make grinding a necessity.
• Parasite Eve has a pretty average leveling curve as you progress in the story, but the amount of EXP required to level up gets insanely high by the late 20s to early 30s. However, due to either a quirk in the programming or intentionally made this way, the amount of EXP needed to level up is much lower once you are past level 38. This makes reaching the cap far easier.
• Phantasy Star Nova: For the most part you don't need to grind to complete the story. However, there are two exceptions: With four classes and the ability to switch at will, any class you want to level beyond the first (for cross class skills) is basically a grind. Additionally, patches have added new content to the game — new content that starts at level 110. You will have to grind to level 110.
• Pokémon:
  • The series accentuates this trope through "switch training", in which you start a battle with a high-level enemy with a weak Pokémon, then switch in a Pokémon that can actually knock it out, allowing both Pokémon to earn experience points. At least one "Trainer Tips" sign encourages this. On the downside, you need to have battled your way to the higher-level locations first. Later games remove the need for this method, as all non-fainted party members now gain a fraction of the experience points, regardless of whether they participated.
  • The Nintendo GameCube side-games, Pokémon Colosseum and XD, actually avert this trope for the most part — while you can have level grinding, the Pokémon you can catch are as high a level as the area opponents, meaning you can go through the game with just using Pokémon as you catch them rather than training them. The only real point where it does require leveling is against the penultimate and ultimate bosses, which take a leap of levels over the next best opponents.
  • Pokémon Legends: Arceus requires you to do Pokédex tasks to earn enough stars to access new areas to survey, preventing the player from rushing through the story.
  • The rom hack Pokémon Crystal Enhanced has the level curve set so high that you must grind for a large amount of time wherever you go. This is made easier in the post-game, where you can find a cave that contains only the exp-rich Chansey and Blissey for easy grinding to level 100.
• Rengoku: Leaving a floor and returning brings back the enemies, which is the way to get strong enough to challenge endgame bosses.
• Return to Krondor will have you doing this a lot, especially in the first four chapters. You can easily spend hours going through doors and getting into random fights, in the hopes of getting to the next level. At least by going up a number of levels, you will have a higher number of weapons strikes, and more effectiveness with weapons and magic. There are less and less opportunities to level grind as you progress through the game, which may or may not be a good thing.
• Riviera: The Promised Land has a grinding hell. Your characters' stats increase via "Skill Up" from using certain weapons or items for certain amount of time. Your items are breakable, so you have no choice but to spend countless time grinding in a training room to preserve them for real fights. Worse off, your inventory is very limited and you quickly have to discard some of your items away. This means that you want to frequently grind everyone as soon as you have grindable items in order to open up the room for newer ones
  • Your full party has 6 members, two that don't join until the end of Chapter 2 and the beginning of 3. Because you never know what item teach which skill to them before they join, Serene and Cierra may end up losing some grindable stats forever if you've discarded wrong items.
• The Rune Factory series of games require Level Grinding and Stat Grinding, because your HP and stats go up, and in Rune Factory 3, your RP (basically "do anything" points) go up by level. And, the higher a skill is, the less RP it takes to use the skill.
• This can be abused in Secret of Evermore as soon as you defeat Aegis in Nobilia and gain access to the Oglin Hideout (the cave that was submerged). You can't fully explore it yet since it's actually a dungeon for much later in the game, but the few areas of it you can explore are crawling with Oglins who are Fragile Speedsters and Sons of Anhur who are Degraded Bosses. Both have comparably low HP yet give tons of experience and money, in fact the Son of Anhur gives more money than any other enemy, making this the single most economic place to level and Money Grind in the entire game. Since you're making so much money you can brutally spam formulas like Crush, Drain, Heal, and Flash, leveling up your fomulas like mad and raising your character's levels well beyond even where they need to comfortably fight the final boss, then go back and stock up on ingredients and still walk away with a profit.
• Septerra Core has a wonderful level grinding spot — the Smelting Complex. It's accessible as soon as you get the airship, but you aren't intended to go there until much later. Since all the enemies are mechanical, Led and Grubb can tear them apart with Repair, earning you large amounts of gold and EXP in the process.
• Shining in the Darkness A First person view game where you and your 2 partners Milo and Pyra spend most of the time in the 3D dungeons fighting random battles and Level Grinding. The monsters get progressively harder as you enter floor areas. You get item rewards at the Item Store on Special Deals if all 3 characters are over level 60 for The Earth Hammer, at level 70 they get The Shock Box, level 80 gets them Ogre Flute, and finally level 90 gets them The Black Box. Good luck spending hours to getting those items. Especially when you fight Crystal Ooze monsters on floor 5.
• Shin Megami Tensei:
  • The games tend to discourage this, except when it comes to facing superbosses. Taking the appropriate skill set and immunities into a fight is generally vastly more important than having a high level. Obviously, this can lead to skill grinding instead.
  • The Answer in Persona 3:FES is pretty much a forced level grinding session to get yourself back into the 70s, due to bosses that have high chances of evading their weaknesses and very hard hitting attacks, and the lack of a persona compendium that makes covering and exploiting weaknesses much harder.
  • Can be played to trope in the offshoot, Digital Devil Saga. The skills you need to survive the combination kill of the random encounters in the Karma Temple are near the end of one of the branches of the skill tree. Lack the skills, and you're forced to grind your way to them.
  • Persona 2: Innocent Sin doesn't really require much level grinding, and you can finish the game with your characters in the mid-60s of levels (out of a possible 99), but if you want to see the high-level content like the Armageddon fusion spell, be prepared to grind. By the end you will need hundreds of thousands of XP per character per level, and the highest-level area (which is optional) provides enemies who offer maybe 3,000 XP to each character per encounter. One encounter, Alice, offers a lot more XP... but she is painfully rare even when you do everything to manipulate encounter rates. The "easiest" trick to grinding is to let all but your leader die so the XP doesn't get divided up, and then he can gather all the high-level stuff for everyone else.
  • 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).
• SoulBlazer allowed level-grinding. While monsters that spawned from lairs would stay dead once killed, some monsters did not spawn from lairs, and these would respawn every time your character left and re-entered the dungeon. Because the requirements for each successive level increased roughly exponentially through the game, however, spending several hours of grinding in one area would be completely negated by a few minutes of grinding at the start of the next area (where the monsters would generally suddenly offer 5-10x more XP).
  • Its Spiritual Successor, Illusion of Gaia, did not allow level grinding at all. Each permanent stat increase was gained after clearing an area of a dungeon, and there were a finite number throughout the game (any missed stat increases were granted anyway on arrival at the dungeon boss, so underlevelling was avoided too).
  • Terranigma allowed level-grinding even more freely than Soulblazer did. ALL the monsters would respawn when Ark left the current area of a dungeon, and the XP requirements were nowhere near as exponential as before; less than an hour of grinding in Tower 5 would mean that Ark was capable of Cherry Tapping the first boss, Shadowkeeper.
    • On the other hand, since your current level is a major part of the damage formula, it's extremely easy to end up doing Scratch Damage to every enemy in a new location if you're not sufficiently leveled up.
• In Star Ocean: Till the End of Time, the highest level your characters can reach is 255, so it goes without saying that much Level Grinding is needed to achieve this level without the aid of a cheat disk. Luckily, for normal gaming purposes, there is no need to reach such a high level unless you plan on taking on Freya.
• In Super Mario RPG, you might have to level grind at the most rewarding easy spot available, which, by the time you reach the Factory, happens to be Star Hill.
• One of the easier (if patience-wearing) methods to employ in Wizardry: Labyrinth of Lost Souls if you don't want to die as one hit kills (for the Hayate and harder enemies in the above floors) by the fourth floor of Shin's Dungeon, considering the Nintendo Hard nature of the game. Doesn't hurt to have a Bishop either, as they gain a very useful ability in later levels.
• In Tales of Phantasia, the best place for grinding would be Moria Gallery, were the toughest and roughest monsters dwell (and also the ones who give more experience/money). You enter as a little more than a boy of 50 or 60 in level, and come out as a full grown man of level 90-ish with enough money to ignore all the trading sidequests and minigames. Besides, the Infinity +1 Sword is on the Gallery's last floor, plus a couple of powerful summons. If you are up to the challenge, no matter how many Cruxis spells Daos uses against you, you will be able to kill him with a butter knife.
• Undertale encourages you to do a Pacifist Run (which is necessarily also a Low-Level Run) by having the tagline "The friendly RPG where nobody has to die" and a few characters in the first area explaining how to placate the Random Encounters peacefully. If you instead decide to do exactly the opposite of that, and level grind in every area until there just aren't any monsters left, you get an entire alternate story as a Villain Protagonist.
• Level Grinding appears to have found its audience: a Gamespot review for Valkyrie Profile 2 points out that the game seems designed for fans of the process.
  • It's not really necessary though, as clever usage of skills and accessories will work far better in combat than level grinding. The bonus dungeon, Seraphic Gate, is a very good example of this.
  • Even so, there comes a moment in the game where four of your main characters (two in one chapter, two in the next) leave your party. Depending on how high their level is, you can get some pretty powerful equipment. The problem? You can get game-breaking equipment this way... but you need to level the characters to levels 40 (for the first set) and 45 (for the second set).
• In Various Daylife, what gives you the experience points that can accumulate enough to level up the main character comes from doing the paying jobs said main character performs inside the city the main character calls home, whereas defeating enemies outside the city limit yields NO experience. As for the friends who can be selected to go on expeditions with the main character, you have to manually select the "Train Ally" icon to get them to level up, for a fee.
• Willow for the NES requires you to be at least level 13 to uncurse Fin Raziel so she can upgrade your wand into the Wand of Plot Advancement.
• Wizardry 1 to 7 and Gold are just jam-packed with grinding. In fact, if you don't want to get pounded just by going through doors, you'll spend hours just 'hanging' on the first floor, killing rats, bats, rogues and plants until you CAN go through doors.
  • The exception is Wizardry 4, where there's no real reason to go back and level some more because the monsters you summon increase in power with each Level of the dungeon you go up.
  • Wizardry 8 allows it, but discourages level-grinding by throwing geometrically difficult opponents at the party the longer they hang out in a particular area; in particular, the noob cave monastery and the roads between settlements.
• Every Xenosaga game has noteworthy grinding spots. Xenosaga II in particular has the Dammerung, an area in which only Shion is usable the first time you go through. Because of how the EXP is normally divided, in this particular dungeon Shion effectively gains 300% EXP — and everyone else gains 225%! Naturally an excellent place to gain some extra levels. It's a nice option to have.
  • It is also worth noting that everything in the Dammerung is weak against Shion's attacks; it doesn't take very long until she one-shots everything with her basic attacks. And don't worry if you passed that area up before you discovered it — you can go back to it using the Encephelon. One might wonder if the devs did this on purpose.
• X-Men Legends has the Danger Room accessible from any safe point wherein a player can spend a lot of time grinding by purposefully losing teamwork missions. The mission simply restarts with all of your newly acquired goodies and XP intact with none of the damage. In relatively little time, you can use it to level up enough to beat whatever boss that gives you trouble.