So you've spent three hours leveling up all of your units in the arena, and you have one unit left to grind with. He/she needs just one more level. It all comes down to this next fight, the stakes are high, if you win you gain enough experience to level up and gain some money, if you lose your unit will be dead. It's too late to back out now. What's going to happen?
Your opponent lands a lucky hit and you die. And gosh do I hate grinding! It's pretty much the one thing I hate about Role playing games and MMOs. It's so stupid. Yes game I get that you want me to be a certain level but it just feels like padding your game out.
Now I love Role playing games, they are awesome. A few of my favorite games belong to this genre, I love it. The main problem pretty much everyone has with these games is grinding. And with good reason, grinding makes you stop what your doing and have to sit through tons of pointless battles. For those of you who don't know what the heck I'm talking about, let me enlighten you.
So your playing your game minding your own business, and your going to fight the next boss or major enemy, and you get your butt kicked. So what do you do? Well your going to have to find some way to get stronger so of course your going to fight the enemies you've been fighting for awhile. And keep doing it, and the enemies start to seem really easy to kill and it begins to get boring. But you have to keep fighting the same stupid enemies so you can continue.
And I mean I get why they do this, it's so you get stronger and so there is a sense of progression. But it makes the game not fun to play when you're practically forced to do this. And believe me you will have to do this a lot.
I'm going to talk about a game that critics and fans love, Xenoblade Chronicles. This game is awesome, it's got an epic story,
A huge world to explore,
And fun gameplay.
Disclaimer: this picture is not of actual gameplay. But I liked it anyway.
And it seems like everyone loves this game, because it is pretty awesome. I just wish I knew how big it was going to be so I could have bought more than one copy. This game goes for more than a hundred bucks now, ugh. Why didn't I buy more than one?
Anyway this game is pretty awesome. But there is one really big problem with this game. I feel like I have to grind. There are several points in this game where you pretty much can't progress unless you grind, and that's bad. If your forcing this on they player they are going to want to play the game less, in fact this is the very reason I have yet to finish Xenoblade. Why can't you make a game where you level us up after you go through some of the story? That way you are progressing and enjoying the story at the same time. Wait Xenoblade does that?
So I've establish my views on grinding pretty well, but what does any of this have to do with Fire emblem? Well you can grind in Fire emblem, and they must be doing something very well because I actually want to grind in Fire emblem. What, how can that be? Let me explain again. Fire emblem is a very, very, very hard game. If a character is defeated in battle you can never use them again, unless you start they chapter over. And each enemy could deliver a killing blow to any of your characters, making the game be more about unit placement, and make sure your characters don't die more than anything else.
So on some maps there are arenas where you can send your units to fight. If they win they gain experience and money, if they lose they of course die. And you can't influence the course of the battle in any way. You send them to the arena, bet a certain amount of money, and hope they make it out alive. The only thing you really can do is push the B button to yield the fight, and not lose your unit.
So they've made grinding feel necessary and fun at the same time. Sure it really sucks if your unit dies, but man is it satisfying when they make it out alive.
So I don't really know what they got right, but man does it make grinding bearable.
Happy grinding. Wait did I just say that?
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