I've been playing a lot of Fire Emblem recently, and absolutely loving it. One thing I'm especially loving about it, is that there are no random encounters, and there is no backtracking and grinding to level up.

I really love the RPG genre, but I often find myself bored of a game. I have a terrible sense of direction, and easily get distracted by side quests or shiny things. The result of this is I face a lot of random encoutners, when I finally get round to doing the main quest, I am a bjillion levels higher than I need to be and it is too easy.

An RPG with grind in it must then either have really interesting combat, or a good plot to keep me going through the really easy main quest. If the combat isn't outstanding I will just give up.

I'm starting to question if random encoutners, and this focus on grinding is really so good.

Anyone else agree?

its better if itslike kingdom hearts. fake real time. u c the enemie and if u get to close it initaies the fight scene without changing the scene. no what i mean? liek if u go around an enemy less spawn

Thats why AJRPG's or JRPGs with Interactable enemys is the best.

Like SO4 or IU. though IU has many other issues so...

Yeah I agree, random encounters can be annoying as hell sometimes. That's why I prefer games like the "Tales of" series or Kingdom hearts. But some games like FF VI keep me going despite the random battles.

I totally agree, it seems like a lot of RPGs and games in general feel there has to be a certain length to them and so they shove in extra random encounters especially towards the end which tends to result in my either not finishing the game or not finding the ending segment all that enjoyable.

Although personally I don't find the Fire Emblem tactic of forcing you to repeat an entire level or lose characters level repeating technique all that enjoyable either.

The 'grind' in JRPG are a relic of the past. Games used to be meritable if they provided a large number of hours worth of gameplay and were marketed as such. This was because the consoles back then could only sport a limited amount of content due to technical limitations while the gamer always consumed content faster than the developer could produce them. As a result, developers made their games superficially repetitive, ramping up the hours of gameplay a game can be had.

The introduction of grinding itself is not fundamentally flawed gameplay. Gaming itself can be described as an extremely tedious and repetitive medium to interact with but that we find it enjoyable to do so. I hope in the future, grinding could be more purposeful. For example, a player chooses to grind in order to unlock the next power which add extra layer of depth to battles. Compare this to, player is required to be level 32+ to beat boss of dungeon otherwise impossible.

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.

You should give Suikoden DS a try. There's no grinding.
I find it rather easy, however. Should take you ~40 hours to blast through first time.

There are supposed to be 108 characters in the game that are playable. Have fun looking for them :)

Random encounters suck, big time. The only game I will ever accept random encounters for is Pokémon game, and even that gets annoying some times.

Which is also one of the reasons I loved Valkyria Chronicles, no fucking grind!