His level is over 9000

Back in the day game developers had to get their games fit onto a cartridge with limited memory. The result of this was a rather short game with simple graphics and a really thin plot. Every customer had to be entertained and since he spend a good amount of money, the developers had to add gameplay of some sort which could keep players on the game for many many hours. In order to do so the developers either added a hard difficulty, which made the player retry over and over again (especially sidescrollers like Ninja Gaiden had this feature), or really hard enemies which made the player excessively level up his characters, spending hour over hour.

This excessive leveling is also called grinding.

Now in the time of Casual and Social Games grinding is getting lesser and lesser used as a "feature", even though there are still new games which provide this kind of gameplay (like the Disgaea series).

So, my questions:

Do you like/play games which make you grind for hours only to be able to progress with the plot?

Is there an alternative system to grinding, which you prefer over excessive leveling (e.g. automatic levelup of passive partymembers, or games without leveling system)?

Which game is your favourite to grind in/to not grind in?


As for me: Fire Emblem: Awakening had a really easy way to grind, since you could abort whole phases of the enemy troops, speeding up the whole process of leveling by a lot. I literally grindet the heck out of this game. Right now I'm into Disgaea which provides a whole new (at least for me) grinding experience, since the level cap lies beyond 9000 and even then you can still reset and do it again. Yeah, I like grinding a lot and can spend many hours only doing that. :D

I actually like it at times.And i mean a lot(Just 5 more levels so everyone can be 40)
If the game has interesting battle animation(Super robot taisen like) i will keep grinding to just look at the characters' combos.Besides you never know what new technique you might figure out.

I grind a bit in Borderlands 2, just to get my level a bit higher than my enemies, althrough you level up easy doing all the side missions before doing the story mission

I play RuneScape, so of course I love grinding.

It's kind of hard to explain. I don't really love repetitive actions, but I like the feeling of progressing. It makes me feel awesome when I make progress. It's like I'm getting stronger. :)

I don't mind grinding in most cases since it's a way to kill time. It all depends on what grinding consists of. If I'm just fighting enemies over and over in order to level up because the leveling process is difficult, then it gets really boring after some time because the change isn't apparent. But if we're talking about games where you can level skills separately from the characters or if there's such an insanely high level cap that gaining 500+ levels at once is possible, then it's really fun. Seeing that change is my whole reason for grinding, so if I continue to see it then I'll continue to grind.