When the NES came out 1000 years ago, gaming was predicated on pure skill. Getting through anything from *Super Mario Bros* to *Contra* required you to have the hand-dexterity, game knowledge, and precision to complete them. That aspect of games has never really gone away, but there wasn't really a way for people of all skill-level to enjoy most games without practicing. I would argue that changed in 1986, though, with the creation of *Dragon Quest*. Created by Yuji Horii, with character and monster designs by the legendary Akira Toriyama (RIP), *Dragon Quest* was a revelation for a lot of reasons. It's heralded as the first ever JRPG, a genre that would go on to be one of the most loved in games - particularly for me! Everything about me as a person can get traced back to *Dragon Quest*, from my love of swords and sorcery, to the games I got interested in thanks to DQ's existence. But one aspect that I think we forget about, because people hate it, is that *Dragon Quest* is also an inspiration thanks to introducing the concept of grinding. ## Tabletop Vibes *Dragon Quest*, like a lot of PC RPGs from the 1980s, was inspired by tabletop role-playing games like *Dungeons & Dragons*. Everything in the game is a series of dice-roles and equations, from the damage you take to the damage you deal to how often you dodge attacks. And all of this happens in turn-based order, letting you take your time to decide what you wanted to do next whenever you engaged in an encounter. Like I said before, this was wildly different from what you got from console games that were coming out back then. There was no test of reflexes in *Dragon Quest*. So where do you get difficulty from? Making the numbers go up. In *Dragon Quest*, an enemy is only ever difficult because its stats are higher than yours. You have to gain experience points from defeating enemies at your level of strength or lower, then level up for your numbers to go up. Once your numbers are bigger than theirs, you may now ~~move about the cabin~~ trounce the boss that was giving you trouble and move on to the next section. This was ground-breaking in a way, because with enough time, theoretically *anyone* can get strong enough to beat *Dragon Quest* by just playing it, without that need for raw, real-world reflexes. Grinding represents a path forward for those players. As the years have gone on, grinding has been given a pretty negative connotation, a test of patience for a player when they hit a wall in a role-playing game where it's the only solution. I don't particularly agree with that. For some people, exercising is tedious, tiresome experience. The same could be said of grinding. Your patience might get tested, but there's almost always a reward for doing so. But there's one other big reason why I think grinding is good, the reason that got me writing this piece in the first place: pacing. ## Sea of Snores I've gotten into why *Sea of Stars* sucks. It is not a very good game at all for a lot of reasons, but one of the biggest ones to me is actually the combat. The combat in *Sea of Stars* does what a lot of indie games inspired by JRPGs do, which is "fix" what they perceive is a problem with the genre: namely that encounters in JRPGs are trash mobs you can delete in 20 seconds or less. To me, that aspect is key to JRPGs, not a problem with them (unless the encounter rate is really high of course). Consider *Chrono Trigger* - that game has battles that are basic affairs, where you can just delete enemies quicker than the time it'd take to read this sentence. Despite this, it's considered one of the greatest JRPGs ever made. *Dragon Quest V* encounters can be blitzed through so quickly that they're - as one user commented when I first brought this up - "akin to a sensory experience." Comparatively, *Sea of Stars* combat encounters feel like a puzzle game. Every fight has to be approached in a very specific way, where you're breaking locks to do damage. They're too long, while also not allowing for any sense of openness, experimentation, or just straight up good pacing that I like with typical JRPG battles. You can't fast-forward your way out of the pain. This is bad, because battles are the core of JRPGs - well, that and usually a dash of melodrama. And that's why I think grinding is, for the most part, *good*. Let me get powerful. Let me try out silly strategies on weak enemies, and lock-in on difficult bosses. Not **every** game needs to be like this - *SaGa* games are literally built around the idea that God put you on this earth to suffer - but if you're going to remove grinding from your JRPG, then you better have an incredible, strategic battle system to compensate.