Role playing games have gone a long way. The natural setup for an RPG video game today is a large, expanding, and intriguing world where you are a hero or the villain that determines the fate of the civilians and yourself. One cliché that spans most RPGs is the constant stat-grind. Why do it? Isn’t it getting old to exp-grind for hours and hours before fighting that major boss or does it make the games that embrace it more immersive?
Japanese RPGs are usually the culprits who still employ stat-grinding into their gameplay. Games like Final Fantasy and Chrono Trigger are titles that gamers need to stat-grind in order to progress. These are two classic titles, one of which survived with the times and have changed its formula a bit. Recent titles like Mass Effect and Dragon Age, both massive hits from developers Bioware, have changed the RPG recipe and minimized the stat-grinding ingredient.
The Final Fantasy series started out with stat-grinding. Anything you did, you had to stat-grind five levels to do it. It was simple yet extremely complex with all the commands you gained throughout the game which included magic spells and item-use. If players even attempted to play the game by burning straight through, they would fail miserably. Games like that are made in order for you to fight monster after monster in order to become stronger and persevere to the end where you brought temporary peace to the world. Final Fantasy XIII stream lined the series for audiences they didn’t have before, being the non-hardcore players who just want to get by, but not that much. They still have players needing to stat-grind in order to proceed. The game was a great adventure to partake, but the fighting got tiring and boring after fighting so many enemies.
Final Fantasy XIII points out one of the major flaws that stat-grinding has being players would soon lose interest in all the fighting because after hundreds of fights in order to progress, the combat system doesn’t seem so fresh anymore. The battle system was very streamlined and very action oriented, which was a departure from what Square Enix produced before, but the battles just seemed to be annoying after 30 hours of fighting in order to defeat the boss which wouldn’t die because you were too low-leveled. When players feel that the meat of your game is becoming too much for them to handle that they want to stop playing, that’s a bad sign, to say the least. This is not true for everybody though. Some people are hardcore RPG gamers who don’t mind spending the extra hour fighting random monsters in order to progress. It just seems like stat-grinding can be such a tedious task for some that it is a waste to make players who want to treed through a title quickly spend their time fighting weak enemies who barely give any benefit to beating them.
Mass Effect did not get rid of stat-grinding but hid it in small side stories that kept its identity as a role playing game with a mixture of action and succeeded immensely. The first Mass Effect was not as action-packed as most action games get, but it was still full of excitement and kept it partially fresh with almost dead simple 3rd person action shooting. Players could plow through enemies and become a powerful bad-ass. Mass Effect 2 just added to the action as it made moments where gamers really care about their characters and gameplay that grabbed from classic role-playing games while making its own. The action-packed sequel let gamers once again burn through the title or experience all that Bioware created in the huge universe. The way that they secretly planted stat-grinding was by giving it a coat of story and immersion that gave players enjoyment while not soiling the combat.
Dragon Age: Origins was another Bioware hit that did the same as Mass Effect where it has a Diablo-like feel that gave gamers loot which made them powerful enough that even if he or she was at a low level, they can still progress. Stat-grinding was still available as it allowed gamers to wield more powerful weapons and armor, but it did not hinder your advancement as much as games that surround their gameplay time with grinding for hours in order to overpower a ridiculously difficult boss.
Stat-grinding can be extremely tedious, annoying, and hindering to a story that is supposed to be epic. It can also be the reason why some games prosper the way that they do and gain the followers that they have. Stat-grinding is for the hardcore who will invest hours of time in order to see the ending that developers want them to see. It is kind of a way that we as people gain fulfillment out of a video game. We spend so much time invested into our characters that when we become the powerful being who saved the world from an evil, we feel a sense of pride that builds from this achievement which only stat-grinding can accomplish.
