Fire Emblem is my favorite RPG series because of that. There's no grinding, everything you achieve is through your own tactics since there's a limited amount of EXP in the game.
FF4 on DS has pretty fun grinding though compared to most JRPGs. Tales has the better solution imo, have the enemies clearly visible on the map.
Skies of Arcadia is a fantastic game, but the random encounters are ridiculous. There's an area in that game where you literaly have an encounter every 5 seconds.







