For those who have played JRPGs for a long time, it was necessary to build a specific resistance to a very distinct element found in many games of yesteryear: grinding.
Nowadays, with accessibility options, quality-of-life features, and difficulty settings, grinding is almost nonexistent, reserved for those who want to take on post-game content or fight secret bosses.
10 JRPGs Reviewed Better Than Final Fantasy VII
Final Fantasy VII paved the way for the genre, and these JRPGs made the most of that opportunity.
But back in the day, grinding was practically a requirement to triumph in the main story. Even so, there were some JRPGs that punished you for grinding mindlessly.
These JRPGs sometimes directly penalized you, or created barriers, or put obstacles in your way that prevented you from making your characters stronger than they were supposed to be at certain points in the game.
12 Valkyrie Profile
Botching True Ending Requirements
One kind of punishment for taking your leisure time scouring dungeons and grinding away in JRPGs is when the game quietly impacts the narrative. That’s the case with Valkyrie Profile, a game infamous for having some of the most obscure requirements for obtaining its true ending.
Valkyrie Profile is divided into chapters, and each of these chapters has a limited number of periods you can use to explore dungeons, talk to NPCs, and recruit characters. In other words, this means you cannot grind as much as you want without advancing the game’s chapters, which will consequently affect the story and the endings you can get.
That way, those who want to recruit the correct characters to obtain the true ending need to weigh their actions carefully. It’s common for newcomers to waste the game’s precious time grinding, leaving them without the opportunity to explore essential locations and resulting in the worst ending without understanding why.
To be fair, it’s almost virtually impossible to get Valkyrie Profile’s true ending without a guide, so if that’s your intention, I recommend checking GameFAQs before starting to collect your Einherjar.
11 Pokémon
No Shortcut To Stardom
In Pokémon, I’ll use a looser definition of the term grinding, because here you aren’t punished for leveling your Pokémon too quickly, but for trying to take a shortcut by getting a high-level Pokémon without putting in the grind.
In the older games, if you were early in the adventure and a friend traded you a high-level Pokémon, chances are the little monster wouldn’t obey you in battle. To reverse that, you needed to collect gym badges. The higher the Pokémon’s level, the more endgame-oriented the badge required would be.
In the more recent games like Scarlet and Violet or Pokémon Legends Z-A, the trade system works similarly, but there’s now an extra mechanic to avoid shortcuts, which is catching a Pokémon at too high a level. In Z-A, each Rank increases a Pokémon’s obedience threshold by 5.
At Rank Z, if you capture any Pokémon at level 21 or higher, it won’t obey your commands. You’ll need to increase your Rank before it starts seeing you as the dominating species, and so on for Pokémon caught at higher levels. So yeah, here you’re punished for trying to bypass the grinding process.
10 Shadow Hearts
Avoid Being Too Malicious
Shadow Hearts features a kind of punishment through its Malice system. Plotwise, Malice is a negative energy accumulated from the souls of enemies defeated throughout the game. This energy gathers in a specific place, represented by four colored masks.
When the Malice gauge reaches its maximum, represented by the red mask, a mighty enemy known as Fox Face can appear in a random battle to face the protagonist Yuri, and only him. Although it’s possible to defeat Fox Face, the fight is neither easy nor recommended until the endgame, so grinding recklessly in Shadow Hearts may not be the best idea.
There is a way to reset this. If Malice is getting too overloaded, you can head to the Graveyard and fight a battle to purify it and reset the gauge. Otherwise, every random battle has a huge chance of triggering Fox Face and, potentially, a Game Over screen.
10 JRPGs That Take Forever To Complete
I really want to emphasize the “forever” in the title.
9 Persona 3
The Reaper Is Coming
Persona 3 and Persona 5 share the same mechanic that punishes players who take their sweet time exploring Tartarus and Mementos respectively. It doesn’t punish you for necessarily grinding, but for lazing around these areas. If you stay too long on a single floor, the sound of chains will echo through the area, and an enemy called the Reaper will spawn.
This monster is extremely strong, potentially even tougher than the game’s final bosses. It also usually appears when you’re unprepared, which makes the threat even more evident. The safest way to explore and grind in these Persona titles is to keep alternating floors, always moving forward.
Persona 3 Reload also features the Reaper, but it’s a bit more forgiving because he only appears after floor 63, when players are already more experienced and know the quickest way to flee from a battle.
8 Parasite Eve 2
Leading Enemies To Extinction
Another kind of obstacle some games create to mess with players trying to get stronger is the complete extinction of enemies. That’s the case with the Parasite Eve series. When you reach a new zone, the enemies you find there are fixed. Once you kill every enemy in that area, encounters with them will drop drastically.
In Parasite Eve 1, encounters simply become rarer, while in Parasite Eve 2, enemies just vanish. You’ll only find new enemies once you keep progressing through the area. This can be considered punitive because, if you’re struggling to move forward, you’ll need to be resourceful with what you have, since you won’t be able to get stronger.
So, if by any chance, you spent your points in a less-than-ideal way, learning abilities you didn’t end up liking, you’ll have to make do with what you’ve got. Thinking it through, maybe the punishment here isn’t strictly for grinding, but for making the wrong choices during progression. Anyway, the one who gets burned is the player, so prepare accordingly before driving the enemies to extinction.
7 Final Fantasy VIII
No Point In Leveling Up
For me, there’s nothing more counterintuitive and unrewarding than games where enemies scale alongside your characters, removing any motivation to grind and, honestly, to even bother engaging in battles. Normally, games do this to keep the difficulty balanced, and ok, that’s fair. But if implemented incorrectly, the balance becomes bizarre and promotes nothing but frustration.
One of the most famous cases in the JRPG scene is Final Fantasy VIII, a game that becomes easier the lower your level is. That is, at least for those who master the Junction system. I won’t go into detail about this progression mechanic, but it’s what truly strengthens your characters, not their levels.
So if an inexperienced player treats Final Fantasy VIII like a traditional JRPG and just kills enemies recklessly, leveling up without stocking spells through Draw and equipping them through Junction, the game will gradually get harder. Luckily, you can still work around it, because stronger enemies mean stronger spells to draw as well, which consequently fortifies your characters.
Yet if staying at a low level makes FFVIII easier, then grinding makes it harder, categorically labeling it a grinding-punishing JRPG. Look, I love Final Fantasy VIII, but I understand all the complaints about how convoluted and poorly explained its system is. However, once you learn the ropes of Card Mod, every playthrough becomes a breeze.
10 Best Final Fantasy Spinoffs, Ranked
Since you already know the first one, take a look at nine other great Final Fantasy spinoffs.
6 Romancing SaGa: Minstrel Song
More Quests, Less Battles
Many SaGa veterans will tell you the game doesn’t punish you for grinding, but that’s the key word here: veterans. They know how to handle the system and how to avoid both the Battle Rank and the Event Rank from skyrocketing. Now, for those unaware, games like Romancing SaGa: Minstrel Song can quickly become unbearable.
In this game, there’s an event timer that progresses as you win more battles. The ideal way to boost your characters is to alternate between a handful of battles and completing quests, because quest rewards efficiently power up your party, whether through equipment or more jewels to improve classes and field skills.
Winning battles raises isolated attributes for party members, but that alone isn’t enough to keep them effective against enemies found at higher Battle Ranks. So if you just grind while neglecting quests, chances are your characters won’t be able to tank the ever-stronger enemies. And if enemies are formidable, it’ll be hard to finish quests and earn rewards, trapping you in an exhausting loop of trial and error just because you over-leveled too soon.
5 The Last Remnant
Grinding Will Softlock You
Now, for those who say SaGa doesn’t punish grinding that much, let me present The Last Remnant, created by several veteran remnants from the SaGa team. The remastered version toned down the softlock potential, but the possibility is still there.
The Last Remnant also uses the Battle Rank mechanic, where enemies get stronger the more battles you engage in. The issue is that if you fight weaker enemies, your Union and members won’t get stronger, but your BR will keep rising. Then suddenly, enemies are much stronger than before, and your attributes aren’t up to par to deal with them.
It’s not uncommon to see players reporting they softlocked the game because they reached an insurmountable challenge and only had one save. They can’t progress nor go back. And what good would going back do, if grinding more will only punish them even further?
There’s an argument that mindlessly grinding is the main cause of softlocks here, and yeah, that’s the whole point of this prompt. Still, many players simply enjoy the grinding process, and punishing them so harshly that they are forced to reset their save is simply inelegant.
4 Suikoden
No More Experience For You
One way some JRPGs prevent you from grinding is by reducing the experience you gain once your level gets too high. It’s not as punishing as some earlier examples, but it kills all the fun for those who enjoy infinite grinding. That’s the case with games like Suikoden.
If you keep leveling your characters in a specific area, the experience gained from those enemies will soon drop drastically, preventing you from getting stronger until you advance in the game. It’s a more balanced way of tuning difficulty that doesn’t necessarily hurt progression, but it still punishes players who spent hours upon hours grinding by stopping them from pushing further.
One alternative in Suikoden is leveling your 100+ recruitable characters. While high-level characters will struggle to level up, low-level ones will have a much easier time, sometimes gaining multiple levels even in simple battles. Suikoden rewards those who want to even out the army instead of leveling only the same characters every time.
3 Ogre Battle
Becoming A Chaotic Evil Emperor
For all the praise Ogre Battle receives, it has an obtuse mechanic that players often chastise, even though some of the more sadistic veterans enjoy how it influences the game’s systems, namely alignment.
A character’s alignment, defined as Lawful, Neutral, or Chaotic, affects various elements in the game, from plot to class evolution. On the surface, it’s a creative mechanic, yet the problem lies in managing it, which is exclusively punitive for players who grind. If a character of yours defeats an enemy who is 4 or more levels below them, their alignment drops.
Do this repeatedly and you’ll end up with Chaotic characters, including your Lord. If you liberate towns while using a Chaotic character, your reputation will plummet, altering the entire narrative. Before you notice it, your habit of grinding, killing vulnerable low-level enemies, will turn you into a tyrant, and by the end of the game, only the bad ending will be waiting for you.
- Security Camera Installation – indoor/outdoor IP CCTV systems & video analytics
- Access Control Installation – key card, fob, biometric & cloud‑based door entry
- Business Security Systems – integrated alarms, surveillance & access control
- Structured Cabling Services – voice, data & fiber infrastructure for new or existing builds
- Video Monitoring Services – 24/7 remote surveillance and analytics monitoring
Author: 360 Technology Group
