It was Final Fantasy 7 that gave me my first taste of grinding in RPGs. Towards the end of the first disc, in the Temple of the Ancients, I encountered a notorious boss called Demon's Gate. If you've played it, you'll remember this jerk: a giant, clawed demon vaguely reminiscent of an H.R. Giger painting, poking its gross schlong-shaped head out of a wall. It's the first really tough boss you fight in the game, and catches a lot of players off guard.
Demon's Gate destroyed my party effortlessly. It was my punishment for skipping so many battles earlier in the game, and I realised that the only way to beat this thing was by levelling up—a lot. I found a long corridor in the temple and ran up and down it repeatedly, for hours, fighting monsters until I'd gained enough strength to show Demon's Gate who was boss. I was an impatient teen back then, and I found it frustrating. But now? I love the grind.
There's something about repetitive tasks in games that I find strangely soothing. Whether it's solo questing through a World of Warcraft zone, mining asteroids in EVE Online, dismantling ships in Hardspace: Shipbreaker, or driving long distances in Euro Truck Simulator 2—things that should be boring—I can't get enough of it. Doing long distance cargo runs in Elite Dangerous while listening to music or a podcast? Bliss.
Recently when I played Final Fantasy 12, I partook in some primo grind. In the Lhusu Mines in Bhujerba, there's a bridge called the Shunia Twinspan. Fans of the game often refer to this as the Skeleton Bridge, because as you walk back and forth across it, countless undead skellies spawn around you—and they keep on coming for ages, making this an ideal spot to farm some gold and XP. If they stop respawning, leave and re-enter and they come back.
I queued up a few episodes of a podcast, sat back, and enjoyed some quality grinding. I killed so many skeletons—and I barely had to lift a finger thanks to FF12's Gambit system. This lets you program your party's AI, assigning them simple tasks like healing themselves if their HP dips below a certain point. This, combined with the HD remake's ability to speed up time, made grinding the Skelly Bridge a real treat. I was stinkin' powerful afterwards.
And rich too. Slain skeletons drop bones, which you can sell to a vendor at the dungeon entrance for a tidy amount of Gil. When I finally got bored, Vaan had about 200,000 fantasy bucks stuffed into his tiny pockets. Does playing like this ruin the experience? Was I cheating the system AND myself? Eh, maybe, but I don't care. It was fun, and watching all those lil numbers ticking up and up and up as I murdered skellies was enormously gratifying.
There's something hypnotic about repeating a fairly simple, undemanding task and being rewarded for it—whether it's a cargo hold full of minerals, a satisfying trickle of XP, or a nice big pile o' bones. Of course, grinding isn't always good. If it gets in the way of the story and interrupts the flow of the game, like in the recent Assassin's Creed games, it's just annoying. But given the choice to grind it out for a couple of hours, I'll always take it.
The modern world is a relentless nightmare of noise and overstimulation. Every nanosecond of the day there's some new nonsense bombarding your senses, vying for your attention, wrestling for space in your brain. Maybe that's why I love grinding so much. It's a rare chance to slow down, step back, and space out. It's taking your hand off the mouse in your brain and letting the Windows screensaver kick in. Some people smoke weed. I kill skeletons.