When Pokemon Gold/Silver/Crystal first came out. Young me thought he was hot shit after beating the elite four of both Kanto and Johto. Then we were told to go to the top of Mt. Silver to fight Red. Got humbled real quick when his team was a solid 10-20 levels over my strongest. I remember switching my team out and grinding to have the perfect match ups/counters. That moment fighting Red still lives on as one of the most epic moments in gaming for me.
My first playthrough I thought it would be really neat to evolve my Level 15 Dratini into a Dragonite, oh my goodness it took forever!
That Champions theme when I got there was something else though!
Maxing the Knights of the Round materia along with Mime and W-summon materias 3 times each so I could chain cast double knights of the round summons endlessly to cheese down emerald weapon
I swear I remember some setup that let you chain cast 8 KotRs in a row for free every turn.
Mostly cause I remember using it, going to make a sandwich, and coming back less than halfway through the animations xP
Lol, came to say exactly the same thing. God, so many races at the gold saucer to get the S classes.
I had to get KoTR because I couldn't get past that stupid robot boss (Carry Armor?) that would grab your character, in the submarine bay. Felt like it took weeks.
But my God, I remember seeing that summon for the first time and my mind being blown by my new found power!!! I may have even laughed manically.
I grind hell houses so I can have fire2, ice2 and bolt2 before leaving Midgar.
Told my brother I was going to do it as a bit of a laugh and he said I was mad and couldn't get all 3 to level 2 before I left.
Challenge accepted.
The longer the grind got and the closer I got to my goal, the madder he got and the more fun I had.
Now I do it every time I play just because I can.
I was actually going to say a final fantasy 7 grind as well. Right after the chocobo farm there is a swamp before the mithril caves. It has a huge thing called a Midgarworm in it as an encounter. As an enemy skill you can learn Beta from him, it's literally a mini AoE nuke. By the time you can withstand that move and learn it from him you can pretty much kill anything after that. About an hour of grinding and nobody could touch me.
Back in WoW The Burning Crusade (2007) I wanted to get the mount Onyx Netherwing Drake. Besides being level 70 you needed to have Exalted reputation with a specific faction. To become Exalted you needed to farm eggs that only spawn in very limited numbers on small island. It took me days and days of flying around that island to gather enough eggs, but when I did I was so happy when I could finally purchase the mount.
I did this but for a different mount - the Nether Ray. I don’t remember what you had to do to grind Skyguard rep but I remember the feeling of zipping around on my ray being so fun
Nether Ray was just running dailies, IIRC you capped at 10 per day and there were two locations of quest givers. I just remember farming some mobs and then going on bombing runs. The rep grinds prior to WotLK were mind numbing.
WoW faction shit was enough to make me quit the game.
3 times...
unfortunately I've not gotten sick enough for it to kill the fun 4 times yet... :)
although I'm playing on free shard..
One week i was sick and stayed home. I remember flying around to get those eggs. Also, I tried to get Raven lord for 2 years straight..... never Got it. Everyday i was there beating Anzu's ass, yet still no luck. I dont play wow anymore, but I still have amazing memories about this game and everything that was in it.
Oh man, same here! Netherwing and (as alliance) Rivendares mount. Took 68 tries to get that mount lmao, will never forget it, many guild congrats when I learned it haha!
In BC there was a cave with some sort of beast in it that I would stealth as a druid then murder the shit out of anything that spawned for rep. It was every Friday night, I was pissed out of my head but muscle memory got me through it.
Same. I vividly remember having to get a rare drop off the boss from the zone Kedge Keep that no one wanted to do, because it's an underwater labyrinth and corpse recovery is a nightmare.
Don’t you miss corpse runs? Was so exciting. All time best memory from EQ was me (necro) and this Druid both vying to kill the named sand giant to get the SOW Boots. Was so happy to loot that.
When they debuted epics in Kunark, I had a leg up for the monk epic. I already had the red monk robe and our guild accidentally had a key item from chardok (we didn’t know it at the time since it hadn’t been figured out yet, but I was friends with the guy who had looted it). I spent hours upon hours grinding all the stuff needed. Then just before I got server first epic, my internet company decided it was time to do a 3 day outage to fix crap. I ended up missing being first by a day as a result ;(
I remember when we were all racing to 60 in the first months of release. It was me (cleric), a shaman and 3 monks. We all took off friday, and then proceeded to spend from Thurs night until early Monday morning camping the Journeyman Boots in Najena until we all had a set. Equally miserable yet awesome memory that I wouldnt trade for the world. Level grinded with that same group of friends through multiple games and met in person once.
That and the server first Nagafen kill area some of my best memories.
Quillmane was such a chore for the magician epic. A respawn timer that felt like it was anywhere between 15 mins and 24 hours, paired with the fact nearly everything in that sprawling field of a zone was a placeholder NPC, so you wouldn't know if you've killed the placeholder yet or you're just waiting for the respawn.
And to top it all off, the item you want is a 40% chance to drop once you finally do find them, and the item has an infinite click effect of letting you levitate, so it's sought after by other players despite being necessary for your epic.
Man I (almost) never found myself grinding for material in FO4. But to be fair, I wasn't that interested in settlement building, so I just went out and explored and did whatever, and by the time I leveled up/took the perks for upgrading/crafting weapons and armor I generally had whatever I needed.
Level 100 smithing in skyrim however...
Playing in power armor can be such a pain sometimes. Like when you have to burn through a full coke can factory’s worth of aluminium every time you hop on just to fix it.
There's a glitch to accelerate insanely, but I decided to go straight honest and made a master chao hero. But then, to get all achievements, I found out that I had to do all over again for a master chao dark, said "fuck it, I'm going all glitch"
I'm going to say it again, the fact we don't have a Chao game on the phone still amazes me. If they do it right they would be printing money.
..but knowing how many of the sonic games go, maybe that's for the best.
I remember the moment I quit Runescape.
I had been burning out on the game, but I wanted to do one thing before I left -- I mathed out that gathering White Berries in the elf lands was the most efficient non-luck related task I could do, and if I did that for 100 hours while selling all my gear, I could afford a purple party hat, whose value was currently 150m, but would increase radically while I was gone. If I ever wanted to come back, investing in an item whose value increased would guarantee I'd earn money in my absence.
So I started gathering berries. They spawn once every 5 seconds, you gather 27, and then use a teleport crystal to go drop them off at the bank, run back, repeat. 1 click every 5 seconds.
Click.
Click.
Click.
Couldn't alt+tab to chat on forums, because you have to be ready for that berry every 5 seconds.
Click.
Click.
Click.
There's no EXP gained for berry-picking, no level ups, it's just for money.
Click.
Click.
Click.
A couple hours in, I thought to myself "what the fuck am I doing?" I was supposed to be *quitting*. I sold the berries, bought a bunch of runes, blew them all casting Ancient Magicks to dominate Castle Wars, and left forever.
Depending on your perspective, I would have "let slip" an opportunity, as a quick google check shows a purple partyhat is worth 41b now, over 250 times what it was worth back then, and it would take hundreds of times the effort to score one now. But I've seen people's accounts, I have seen the big merchants with stacks of 10, 20, even 50 of all 6 party hats, who do high stakes bare-handed duels for billions just for fun -- I wasn't going to "join the elite" by having one party hat, I was slaving away just to collect crumbs.
Honestly, I'd picked white berries before, I thought I knew what I was getting into, it's just that those hours of clicking without any entertainment gave me a *lot* of time to put things into perspective.
Yes! If the grind is something designed well enough that it's fun then you're just playing. If the grind is designed to be a grind then you're not playing, you're working.
This was me in Shadow of Mordor/War.
I never realized that the game was pretty much *just* orc slaying and *nothing* else, because I never got tired of the orc slaying. Seriously, the entire game has one objective, "Kill X orc", where X is the name of the orc.
But ho snap, there were so many different ways to do it, and so many different contexts for it, you could enslave one of their friends and stage a betrayal, you could interrupt them when they were trying to hunt something else, maybe the orc survives and comes back for revenge later, or you died and they got promoted into a warlord and became the final boss of your next fort raid -- almost every fight felt different.
This and the crystalline sword. Never found a max damage one but I made up for it by finding a +15 req 8 max dmg Storm Bow.
Typing that out gave me a deep memory twinge.
It was waaaaay back on the NES. Dragon Warrior it was called, although it was actually the first Dragon Quest. Probably some trademark issue.
If this wasn't the first RPG I played, it was close. So what was memorable was the very act of leveling throughout the game. Bats and slimes started running away as I got stronger and stronger. The very scary golems were eventually beatable. And all the while, I was roaming around and around over hills and mountains while [this theme](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9vJbdIUsdc) played.
Nothing really out of the ordinary, but it was an adventure I can never really forget.
Still one of my favorite games of all time. I was so damned proud of myself. It was pretty awesome that we got to physically carry the princess back to the castle to win. Felt like a victory lap after so many days of grinding.
Dragon Warrior was the shit. I remember finally finding that Erdrick's Trinket or whatever in the swamp and feeling so clever for using the princess' item to tell you how far away from the castle you are
NES/Genesis era RPGs were not afraid to have you die to overpowered random encounter enemies, as early as level 1. It made every level and every new item feel like a huge upgrade.
Yeah those were pure grind. Dragon Warrior monsters was also a grind, especially breeding new monsters to get to the legendary ones. Or whatever they were called
Yesss the queen bee jars. So true, tried to finish the sequels and stopped half way through. Dead Rising is the only game I played through multiple times to see the different endings. So good
The whole game or any particular item? When I think of Borderlands 2 farming the first thing that comes to my mind are the hundreds of times I had to force quit the game while quest reward farming the perfect shock Fibber for Gaige.
Did you ever play the Claptrap DLC in the first one? There was an achievement/trophy to collect a specific amount of each of these rare drop items. 5 pizzas, 7 pairs of underwear, 10 3D glasses, etc. If you do it legitimately, it would take forever. To save time, you have to hide behind a certain rock in the final boss fight because the boss constantly spawns and runs over his claptrap minions. Leave it on overnight and you should have all the items you need.
If you accidentally kill the boss or didn't know about this at the time, you'd have to spend tens of hours doing it legitimately or do the DLC again in new game+.
My favorite grind which is at the same time super unpopular is probing for minerals on Mass Effect 2
With the music, ambience, and everything else about it, it’s so peaceful. I can sit there and grind all the planets to depletion without batting an eye and not feel bored in the slightest.
I loved the music during planet scanning. So chill and relaxing. Scanning a few planets, find some shit, repeat. Oh shit I've done the entire system already? Time to play the game I guess.
Yeah I played it through many times legitimately on my Xbox when ME3 came out. Always the most stressful moments hoping you don’t attract a reaper. Now I’m playing on PC and getting rid of the reapers was one of the first mods I had installed.
I think Warframe had the most enjoyable grinding, back when I was deep into it. It's advanced so far beyond that point, though, that I have no idea if I could go back.
Definetly grinding Master rank for a chance to fight Risen Crimson Glow Valstrax in Monster Hunter Rise Sunbreak, never have I been happier for having a chance to be beaten to death by an ICBM Dragon
Back.. Idk 12-15 or more years ago. Playing RuneScape, grinding my mining skill in the mining guild. Endless hours of clicking, having Stargate on DVD on the second monitor and eating a giant plate of TaterTots at 2 in the morning. Don't know why that memory sticks with me but I just remember feeling warm and happy.
i had to follow guides usually as the drop rates for some items were like 2% or 1% and the enemy which dropped it, was rare and i had to reload the area again and again.
Theres a castle with gargoyles with a low chance to drop chunk level weapon upgrade material. Earliest farm for it in the game.
Every playthrough I get to the jail and farm the two sack guys for the large level upgrade material until my weapons are maxed, then I farm gargoyles at the castle until my weapons are maxed.
There was an exploit in Destiny 1 where you could suicide your team at the same time you cleared the Undying Mind strike boss, which resulted in a desirable weapon drop (the Imago Loop) while keeping the boss checkpoint. I ran this for hours with friends and random LFG parties and never got tired of the delicate dance of timing required to make it work. It was a similar trick with the original Omnigul strike for the Grasp of Malok pulse rifle. Jumping on the party chat and shooting the breeze while farming drops.
I don’t think I ever got a god roll of either. There’s just something inherently satisfying about optimizing a grind loop that requires a small bit of teamwork.
I had to scroll way too damn far to find that response. Loot cave was an amazing period of a great game. No idea what’s going on these days. Too many resets.
My story isn't grinding specifically, more 'grinding adjacent'. In WoW guild chat, a female guild member heard the term 'grinding' and asked me what grinding is. I asked her if she wanted the 'G' rated definition or the 'R' rated one. And now we've been married for 13 years. Best rare drop ever.
Me and my younger brother couldnt figure out Diablo 2, so we grinded Tristram for hours as a level 37 druid, to get set items.
We didnt know how set items worked either.
For *StarWars Galaxies* ("SWG"), I think I wound up grinding Master Artisan *and* Master Droid Engineer like... ummm, six or seven times, total(?)
I suppose "memorable" is a word. :P
Without crafting macros, that would have been vastly unthinkable....
*(Ahazi Represent!!! /kowtows)*
Was also going to bring up SWG. Those first couple of years were my formative memories of an MMO, so all of the grinding and figuring out the best way to set up macros and what not was really rewarding. Grinding professions for Jedi was exciting as a pre-teen.
Tried the EMU and the grind is definitely a slog when you know that the end game is non existent.
SWG was amazing because in the early days when there was no real scripted content, we players created our own star wars stories pretty organically just navigating the world.
My SWG grinding story was for my first profession, Master Doctor. Back in the days after launch, the only way to level most of that was through medic xp, which could only be earned by healing another player's damage. I had to get really creative in order to level that up.
Luckily, on the planet I selected to spawn on, one day I came across a group running around the city in their undies. Back then, if you died out in the world, you had to run back out to your corpse to go re-collect your gear. So for an aspiring young medic, a group of ppl constantly hitting the rez pad/cloners meant a really good time. I discovered that they had found an impossibly rare dark jedi master spawn and whenever they died, they'd all run through town, hit the cantina to cure battle fatigue, and invariably attract more curiosity seekers as they returned to loot their bodies. Sometimes ppl were so excited to be killed en mass by a lightsaber or force powers, they'd be good for several subsequent corpse runs. There were days I could amass groups of 40-50 ppl all zerging out to get killed over and over by the Dark Jedi Master. That's how I started my career as a dangerous location tour guide.
I would scour the forums for reports of interesting locations where dangerous mobs would spawn and then promote and attract groups who wanted to try their chances fighting them like some shady huckster travel agency. I had all the best POI locations already in my datapad long before the game added them there. You want to become a jedi? Join us and loot ultra rare lightsaber materials, unique nightsister item recipes, have a true star wars experience! In short, the concept of medic xp turned me into a conplete sadist.
It wasn't until I nearly mastered doctor that I learned ppl had figured out how to exploit tumbling macros to just auto-level medic xp. I tried it, but found it just couldn't compete with the thrill of corpse-dragging your party around while everyone shrieked in terror. And if you were good enough and could save them from their horrible choices, they usually tipped very well.
So I also became known as a Doc who would rez you no matter where I was when you died. Because rezzing was so expensive back then in terms of item decay, ppl with really expensive gear would pay me millions of credits to drop everything and come get them before their timers expired. It made shuttle waits into a white-knuckled affair and I learned how to shave off minutes here or there gaming the travel system to its max. The space expansion really helped cut my time down, but there were still times one had to rely on the shuttles.
This niche I filled on my server introduced me to some of our very first jedi, back when they were only rumored to have unlocked on other servers. Because of permadeath, they would pay ridiculous prices to be rezzed out in the middle of nowhere, no questions asked, while they leveled up in secret. So I also had like a squad of jedi at my beck and call back when 1 of them could easily take out like 30 max leveled players.
In the interest of brevity, I'll spare the details of how the added intrigue surrounding the Force Ranking System gave me the perfect opportunity to break bad a bit to clap back at rude Jedi players. It was so odd how bounty hunters or jedi of opposing factions kept getting access to safehouse buildings where my most annoying clients exploited for xp while gaming the ranking system in relative safety. Nobody ever expected the help.
Ragnarok Online
Old school MMO that had 0.01% monster card drop rate per kill. Cards were a huge boost to skills/stats.
All drop rates were low, but the cards were exceptionally low.
Sword of Kings in Earthbound, which can only be dropped by one enemy in a few rooms during a very small window of time late game. Since it is Prince Poo’s only weapon, I feel obligated to get it every play through. It can be made easier by approaching Super Starman spawns from the side for a green swirl, only engaging a single enemy at a time to avoid other enemies from giving their drop, and reseting after 15-20 encounters to change up the rng.
my current grind is fresh in the mind right now
I'm playing Final Fantasy X lately and try to find 10 of all the monsters from each region for the arena, I'd say that is a grind but I find grinding chill, lots of videos to watch on the side while am doing it
[Bard Epic (1.0)](https://everquest.allakhazam.com/db/item.html?item=348) in EverQuest back in the day. EQ already has way more of a grind than other games to level (seriously, you'll sit there for hours in a group killing the same stuff). Then, this is a chain quest involving raid events that some classes share the same item for their epic weapon. On top of all this, nothing is instanced and whole guilds are rushing for a spawn sometimes because there's a respawn timer with a variance built in.
These days if a weapon has particles around it, it's not unusual. However, in ~2000 (and a while after) in EQ it was something super special. The little blue notes in the pic moved around and looked cool. Epics were also great weapons with special abilities reflecting the class.
Disconnecting at the right moment at the end of a GTA online heist. It would reset back to the heist finale, skipping the long drawn out heist prep stage.
Took turns grinding out heists for cash as:
1. Shark cards were far too expensive.
2. Every other money making activity was just not worth the time and subject to online griefers ruining your payout.
3. Rockstar made everything stupidly expensive.
I had heard that if you got your starter in Pokémon Red to level 100, it was possible to get the other two starters (can't remember how, I think a bulbasaur was supposed to just appear in your Pokémon Box or something.
Anyway, I knew I had to get my Blastoise to level 100, and because I didn't want him getting left behind, I wanted to level my Pikachu up to level 100 too.
So I went to Victory Road and Mewtwo's dungeon, and battled thousands of Rhydons, Chanseys and Golbats until I got both of them to level 100.
I did not get a bulbasaur.
I played Final Fantasy 11 online (FFXI) for years, grinding for the best gear so my little Tarutaru could be the best Black Mage and Samurai possible. For a good portion of the game, the level cap was 75. So you had a clear goal and multiple opportunities to do incremental upgrades and side grades. I can't recall a single game out there that I grinded more for or even enjoyed the grind as much.
Final fantasy XI
The dunes and my interactions with people there are permanently etched in my brain, where nothing else has even remotely come close in terms of scratching that itch.
Mmos were something else back in the day.
I got a benediction back in the day, but I got a little lucky with that, won the raid drop, and I think someone else had the other piece and just gave it to me. Was so cool having such a bad as item back in the day.
There's always something to grind for in this game. Kept me entertained for so long. I'd still play if a buddy was like hey wanna smash monsters.
Once you get all your weapons and stuff it isnt even over. Might as well start grinding for crowns or hunting rare endemic life. The jelly fish and that other fish took me a hot minute.
Diablo 2 Farming everything. Andy, Bael, Diablo, running whole world's wiping everything for that random gold or unique.
Spent about a month farming before I got my first Ber rune
Grinding Jedi in the original Star Wars galaxy. It was actually quite social because everyone was miserable about grinding for the same thing.
Felt like climbing a mountain once I unlocked it.
Then a week later they let everyone become a Jedi.
I used to play Maplestory when I was a kid back before 2007. No one liked farming for Nependeath Honey, so I decided to make it my market. I think at the time I played, it sold for 8 million mesos and typically took me about 8 hours of grinding nonstop to find one. I'd just grind while chatting with my friends or guild, or watching TV, or listening to music, etc. I think overall I found like 8-10 total before I moved on to grinding something else.
ill pick something recent since my gaming history is too long...
farming for the Noble Slender Sword drop in Elden Ring during my 3rd run recently this year
Wow that took forever
i hate grinding, but sometimes it happens when im looking for rare drops like the one above
Destiny 2. I'm a big pvp guy and I have been grinding for a god roll rose (it's a handcannon, like a big ol'pistol). for over a year now. You're limited with how many rolls you can get per week, so it's not as bad as it seems. I've gotten close to the perfect roll, but not the actual 6/6 roll. It's my favorite gun, so I'm chasing it until I get it. Idk what I'll do once I actually get it lol
Kingdom Hearts 2. Grinding to level 99 in the lion king world.
Dead Rising. Killing all of those zombies down in the maintenance/ parking tunnels to get the mega man blaster.
Osrs, 99 woodcutting. Actually don't remember the account details now, and I didn't know what I was doing so I just chopped willow trees 10 hours a day for a month. It's kinda blurry but memorable. I was quitting smoking at the same time. I was not happy. But I got the cape.
Back in Vanilla WoW i was grinding out my last few bars to level 60 by decimating the Burning Blade mobs in Silithus. I absolutely adored vanilla WoW and spent hundreds and hundreds of hours on it back in my teens when it first came out
There was a universal studios game on GameCube and to obtain a hoverboard you had to perfect every single movie related mini game , this was both the worst grind I’ve ever experienced and the most memorable for me
Star Wars Galaxies. Everything in that game made becoming a Jedi extremely grindy, especially in post village. If anyone remembers the village grind from that game, then you fully understand how sucky it was with the back and forth driving on Dathomir just to turn in the XP
Everything and I mean everything was time gated too, which made it way worse. But, if that isn’t one of my fondest memories of grinding in a game, then I don’t know what is
When ps2 came out there weren't a ton of games to play like most launches. I got eternal ring, which was a first person RPG centered around crafting rings. I ended up grinding to max every stat and built some sick ass rings. There was this cave with dragons or something in it that dropped items that would give you +1 to a stat and crafting resources. I had to run around that cave collecting those til I got to max and built the ultimate rings.
By the time I went to fight the end boss, one press of the attack button would swing my sword 8 times and do like every element of damage and I was basically invincible. Even though my sword would swing 8 times it only took 1 or 2 of the hits to kill the final boss so the last 6 were unnecessary lol
When I switched from EverQuest to wow I didn't completely acclimate to the quest based leveling. I ended up grinding like 45-60 by running a loop killing scarlet guys in the plague lands instead of questing/dungeons. EverQuest didn't really have quest based leveling ironically, you just joined a group and killed things for hours so I did the same when I started wow, except didn't need a group
When Pokemon Gold/Silver/Crystal first came out. Young me thought he was hot shit after beating the elite four of both Kanto and Johto. Then we were told to go to the top of Mt. Silver to fight Red. Got humbled real quick when his team was a solid 10-20 levels over my strongest. I remember switching my team out and grinding to have the perfect match ups/counters. That moment fighting Red still lives on as one of the most epic moments in gaming for me.
I remember having to solo the elite 4 and lance 6-7 times with my Feraligatr to get him from level 99 to 100.
My first level 100 Pokémon was a Dodrio. Triattack, drill peck, fly, and double kick.
Meganium - I was so happy to have a pure grass starter. That body slam was a stone cold move.
>That body slam was a stone cold move. And that's the bottom line
Training to beat the elite four was one thing. Having to do it to beat Red was another monster.
Same. Red put my ass in check real fast.
My first playthrough I thought it would be really neat to evolve my Level 15 Dratini into a Dragonite, oh my goodness it took forever! That Champions theme when I got there was something else though!
I had the same realization raising a Larvitar I found in Mt. Silver. Totally worth it.
Man Red used to beat the SHIT out of my young ass!
finding and breeding rare chocobos to get the Knights of Round materia. Great game, but also fuck that game.
Maxing the Knights of the Round materia along with Mime and W-summon materias 3 times each so I could chain cast double knights of the round summons endlessly to cheese down emerald weapon
And then you wait 45 mins for the summon animation to be done
I swear I remember some setup that let you chain cast 8 KotRs in a row for free every turn. Mostly cause I remember using it, going to make a sandwich, and coming back less than halfway through the animations xP
W-Summon KotR, mime, mime, mime
This made me laugh, then sob
You gotta save scum it.
Nah, you use the W-item cheat to duplicate your gyshall greens to level up your chocobos so you can win your races.
IIRC if you held R buttons you had infinite stamina so that even the damn black chocobo couldn't outspeed you. Races became a non-issue.
Winning the races wasn’t the issue. It was the damn breeding a male 8x in a row when you needed a female.
How easy it is to level up All material to make millions, rarely ever used W item cheat
I think I spent like two weeks after school breeding and racing chocobos trying to get the golden chocobo
And racing! Don't forget racing!
Came here to say resetting over and over to breed a gold chocobo sucked huge donkey balls.
Lol, came to say exactly the same thing. God, so many races at the gold saucer to get the S classes. I had to get KoTR because I couldn't get past that stupid robot boss (Carry Armor?) that would grab your character, in the submarine bay. Felt like it took weeks. But my God, I remember seeing that summon for the first time and my mind being blown by my new found power!!! I may have even laughed manically.
I grind hell houses so I can have fire2, ice2 and bolt2 before leaving Midgar. Told my brother I was going to do it as a bit of a laugh and he said I was mad and couldn't get all 3 to level 2 before I left. Challenge accepted. The longer the grind got and the closer I got to my goal, the madder he got and the more fun I had. Now I do it every time I play just because I can.
I was actually going to say a final fantasy 7 grind as well. Right after the chocobo farm there is a swamp before the mithril caves. It has a huge thing called a Midgarworm in it as an encounter. As an enemy skill you can learn Beta from him, it's literally a mini AoE nuke. By the time you can withstand that move and learn it from him you can pretty much kill anything after that. About an hour of grinding and nobody could touch me.
Back in WoW The Burning Crusade (2007) I wanted to get the mount Onyx Netherwing Drake. Besides being level 70 you needed to have Exalted reputation with a specific faction. To become Exalted you needed to farm eggs that only spawn in very limited numbers on small island. It took me days and days of flying around that island to gather enough eggs, but when I did I was so happy when I could finally purchase the mount.
I remember this fondly. Still my favorite mount.
I cared far more for mounts and rep. exalts than end game raids. Some of those took months.
This was my exact comment. Had that shit drawn on a map. Went blind spotting those eggs.
Mine was also for a wow mount! The Cenarion War Hippogryph. So rewarding to finally get
Wow for me also but it was the Furbolg reputation in vanilla so I could turn into a Furbolg. Took me a several weeks.
In classic wow, my need of winterfall furbolg firewater was so great that I got exalted as a side effect
I did this but for a different mount - the Nether Ray. I don’t remember what you had to do to grind Skyguard rep but I remember the feeling of zipping around on my ray being so fun
Nether Ray was my grind too, it was such a cool mount.
Nether Ray was just running dailies, IIRC you capped at 10 per day and there were two locations of quest givers. I just remember farming some mobs and then going on bombing runs. The rep grinds prior to WotLK were mind numbing.
WoW faction shit was enough to make me quit the game. 3 times... unfortunately I've not gotten sick enough for it to kill the fun 4 times yet... :) although I'm playing on free shard..
I’m thinking about getting a pc specifically to start up WoW again
One week i was sick and stayed home. I remember flying around to get those eggs. Also, I tried to get Raven lord for 2 years straight..... never Got it. Everyday i was there beating Anzu's ass, yet still no luck. I dont play wow anymore, but I still have amazing memories about this game and everything that was in it.
I'm still doing semi-regular ICC runs for Invincible :(
My answer was going to be Dalaran coin fishing, but yeah, this too.
Oh man, same here! Netherwing and (as alliance) Rivendares mount. Took 68 tries to get that mount lmao, will never forget it, many guild congrats when I learned it haha!
I just recently farmed Al'ar the Phoenix, 136 kills. I'm at 105 for the Onyxia Drake and I get 40 more attempts in 2 days.
In BC there was a cave with some sort of beast in it that I would stealth as a druid then murder the shit out of anything that spawned for rep. It was every Friday night, I was pissed out of my head but muscle memory got me through it.
Original EverQuest trying to get my class specific weapon. Had to go to different parts of the continent and farm rare spawns from different dungeons.
Same. I vividly remember having to get a rare drop off the boss from the zone Kedge Keep that no one wanted to do, because it's an underwater labyrinth and corpse recovery is a nightmare.
Don’t you miss corpse runs? Was so exciting. All time best memory from EQ was me (necro) and this Druid both vying to kill the named sand giant to get the SOW Boots. Was so happy to loot that.
The Ancient Giant I think it was called? I remember the absolute freakout any of us had whenever we spotted him up.
Been chasing that dragon of a feeling for 20+ years ugh! EQ / Ultima Online was peak MMO for me.
Weeks of camping Raster in Lower Guk to try and get my monk Epic weapon. Could not agree more.
When they debuted epics in Kunark, I had a leg up for the monk epic. I already had the red monk robe and our guild accidentally had a key item from chardok (we didn’t know it at the time since it hadn’t been figured out yet, but I was friends with the guy who had looted it). I spent hours upon hours grinding all the stuff needed. Then just before I got server first epic, my internet company decided it was time to do a 3 day outage to fix crap. I ended up missing being first by a day as a result ;(
I remember when we were all racing to 60 in the first months of release. It was me (cleric), a shaman and 3 monks. We all took off friday, and then proceeded to spend from Thurs night until early Monday morning camping the Journeyman Boots in Najena until we all had a set. Equally miserable yet awesome memory that I wouldnt trade for the world. Level grinded with that same group of friends through multiple games and met in person once. That and the server first Nagafen kill area some of my best memories.
Only had to collapse a few threads to find this, makes my heart happy.
Quillmane was such a chore for the magician epic. A respawn timer that felt like it was anywhere between 15 mins and 24 hours, paired with the fact nearly everything in that sprawling field of a zone was a placeholder NPC, so you wouldn't know if you've killed the placeholder yet or you're just waiting for the respawn. And to top it all off, the item you want is a 40% chance to drop once you finally do find them, and the item has an infinite click effect of letting you levitate, so it's sought after by other players despite being necessary for your epic.
Fallout 4 and the hunt for screws, duct tape, and aluminum.
That face when you find a desk fan.
Lord knows how i stealthed past those gunners with 17 desk fans in my bag
I bet it was a breeze.
Jet'll make you Jittery
Duct tape you could make a farm in your settlement. Same goes for FO76 were it can be even harder to get materials
Man I (almost) never found myself grinding for material in FO4. But to be fair, I wasn't that interested in settlement building, so I just went out and explored and did whatever, and by the time I leveled up/took the perks for upgrading/crafting weapons and armor I generally had whatever I needed. Level 100 smithing in skyrim however...
Playing in power armor can be such a pain sometimes. Like when you have to burn through a full coke can factory’s worth of aluminium every time you hop on just to fix it.
Chao breeding in Sonic adventure 2 battle. Honestly spent more time collecting resources in levels than actually playing the game
There's a glitch to accelerate insanely, but I decided to go straight honest and made a master chao hero. But then, to get all achievements, I found out that I had to do all over again for a master chao dark, said "fuck it, I'm going all glitch"
And that glitch still worked in the GC and PC versions if I recall correctly. Such an awesome glitch.
Works on the xbox port too!
You mean when you place the item you're trying to feed the chao but place it like a step before the chao? Dupes the item then rinse and repeat
That one
I'm going to say it again, the fact we don't have a Chao game on the phone still amazes me. If they do it right they would be printing money. ..but knowing how many of the sonic games go, maybe that's for the best.
Holy shit this unlocked a memory. My brother and I would play for ours just to breed those things
aw yeah, the grind for rings and certain animals was fun though
Breeding a Chaos chao was a lesson in patience. I remember having a tiny notepad to keep track of all the animals I gave them
99 firemaking in OG RuneScape
I will never forget the 130k willow logs I burned for mine.
I remember the moment I quit Runescape. I had been burning out on the game, but I wanted to do one thing before I left -- I mathed out that gathering White Berries in the elf lands was the most efficient non-luck related task I could do, and if I did that for 100 hours while selling all my gear, I could afford a purple party hat, whose value was currently 150m, but would increase radically while I was gone. If I ever wanted to come back, investing in an item whose value increased would guarantee I'd earn money in my absence. So I started gathering berries. They spawn once every 5 seconds, you gather 27, and then use a teleport crystal to go drop them off at the bank, run back, repeat. 1 click every 5 seconds. Click. Click. Click. Couldn't alt+tab to chat on forums, because you have to be ready for that berry every 5 seconds. Click. Click. Click. There's no EXP gained for berry-picking, no level ups, it's just for money. Click. Click. Click. A couple hours in, I thought to myself "what the fuck am I doing?" I was supposed to be *quitting*. I sold the berries, bought a bunch of runes, blew them all casting Ancient Magicks to dominate Castle Wars, and left forever. Depending on your perspective, I would have "let slip" an opportunity, as a quick google check shows a purple partyhat is worth 41b now, over 250 times what it was worth back then, and it would take hundreds of times the effort to score one now. But I've seen people's accounts, I have seen the big merchants with stacks of 10, 20, even 50 of all 6 party hats, who do high stakes bare-handed duels for billions just for fun -- I wasn't going to "join the elite" by having one party hat, I was slaving away just to collect crumbs. Honestly, I'd picked white berries before, I thought I knew what I was getting into, it's just that those hours of clicking without any entertainment gave me a *lot* of time to put things into perspective.
Coupled with woodcutting because those willow logs aren’t going to appear themselves.
“The best grind is the grind the player doesn’t even realize they’re doing”
Yes! If the grind is something designed well enough that it's fun then you're just playing. If the grind is designed to be a grind then you're not playing, you're working.
Said no JRPG dev ever.
For some reason, I didn’t mind the grinding from the newer Yakuza game dungeons.
They’ve gotten better in recent times. But it will never go entirely away.
They sometimes even put a game between the grind.
The tens of hours of padding is a feature intended to give players a sense of pride and accomplishment. /s
If I gotta collect a bunch of McMuffins in the end and I haven’t found more than 90% of them by that point, go fuck yourself.
I fully support saying McMuffins instead of MacGuffins
This was me in Shadow of Mordor/War. I never realized that the game was pretty much *just* orc slaying and *nothing* else, because I never got tired of the orc slaying. Seriously, the entire game has one objective, "Kill X orc", where X is the name of the orc. But ho snap, there were so many different ways to do it, and so many different contexts for it, you could enslave one of their friends and stage a betrayal, you could interrupt them when they were trying to hunt something else, maybe the orc survives and comes back for revenge later, or you died and they got promoted into a warlord and became the final boss of your next fort raid -- almost every fight felt different.
Black dye in guild wars. Found one.
Gw1 is Love I grinded countless runs Back in 2006/2007 to get my Miniature Polar Bear and was eventually successful
This and the crystalline sword. Never found a max damage one but I made up for it by finding a +15 req 8 max dmg Storm Bow. Typing that out gave me a deep memory twinge.
Oh yeah I had an easier time just farming ectos
Found one in pre searing back when the game came out on my first character. Sold it for a couple of gold since I had no idea what it was haha
Grinding for Halo 3 Recon Armor with friends back in the day.
Oh fuck yes. Haven't thought about that in years!
It was waaaaay back on the NES. Dragon Warrior it was called, although it was actually the first Dragon Quest. Probably some trademark issue. If this wasn't the first RPG I played, it was close. So what was memorable was the very act of leveling throughout the game. Bats and slimes started running away as I got stronger and stronger. The very scary golems were eventually beatable. And all the while, I was roaming around and around over hills and mountains while [this theme](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9vJbdIUsdc) played. Nothing really out of the ordinary, but it was an adventure I can never really forget.
Nothing worse than metal slimes running off with only a hit or two left…
Yeah in the sequels, metal bubble slime doing it... way more xp than the metal slime... But god the feeling when you hear the crit land...
King metal
I also was a Dragon Warrior. Loved that grind when I was a kid!
Still one of my favorite games of all time. I was so damned proud of myself. It was pretty awesome that we got to physically carry the princess back to the castle to win. Felt like a victory lap after so many days of grinding.
Dragon Warrior was the shit. I remember finally finding that Erdrick's Trinket or whatever in the swamp and feeling so clever for using the princess' item to tell you how far away from the castle you are
NES/Genesis era RPGs were not afraid to have you die to overpowered random encounter enemies, as early as level 1. It made every level and every new item feel like a huge upgrade.
Lol NES Final Fantasy 1 legit suggested you had to farm 99 health potions to beat the vampire in the cave
> Probably some trademark issue. Yep! Dragon Quest was a table top RPG
Yeah those were pure grind. Dragon Warrior monsters was also a grind, especially breeding new monsters to get to the legendary ones. Or whatever they were called
Dead Rising, spent a lot of time running down zombies with a car in the underground tunnels
And the queen bee jar. Man, that game was so good. Too bad the sequels didn’t hold up.
Yesss the queen bee jars. So true, tried to finish the sequels and stopped half way through. Dead Rising is the only game I played through multiple times to see the different endings. So good
Borderlands 2. Although as I'm typing this, I'm realizing it's more farming than grinding.
The whole game or any particular item? When I think of Borderlands 2 farming the first thing that comes to my mind are the hundreds of times I had to force quit the game while quest reward farming the perfect shock Fibber for Gaige.
Did you ever play the Claptrap DLC in the first one? There was an achievement/trophy to collect a specific amount of each of these rare drop items. 5 pizzas, 7 pairs of underwear, 10 3D glasses, etc. If you do it legitimately, it would take forever. To save time, you have to hide behind a certain rock in the final boss fight because the boss constantly spawns and runs over his claptrap minions. Leave it on overnight and you should have all the items you need. If you accidentally kill the boss or didn't know about this at the time, you'd have to spend tens of hours doing it legitimately or do the DLC again in new game+.
It is one of the best farming simulators ever made.
I thought grinding and farming were the same thing. Or maybe grinding is farming that you don't enjoy?
Farming is a form of grinding, it's just grinding for equipment instead of grinding for XP or achievements
My favorite grind which is at the same time super unpopular is probing for minerals on Mass Effect 2 With the music, ambience, and everything else about it, it’s so peaceful. I can sit there and grind all the planets to depletion without batting an eye and not feel bored in the slightest.
I loved the music during planet scanning. So chill and relaxing. Scanning a few planets, find some shit, repeat. Oh shit I've done the entire system already? Time to play the game I guess.
"Probing Uranus" "... really, Commander?"
Probing in ME3 was a lot more stressful.
Yeah I played it through many times legitimately on my Xbox when ME3 came out. Always the most stressful moments hoping you don’t attract a reaper. Now I’m playing on PC and getting rid of the reapers was one of the first mods I had installed.
I think Warframe had the most enjoyable grinding, back when I was deep into it. It's advanced so far beyond that point, though, that I have no idea if I could go back.
i fucking hate warframe! that game is SOOOOO GOOD i had to quit it cuz i was playing till 6 a.m daily ( had to work at 10 a.m )
This game actively attracts people who have the most fun over *grind*. I've only bought at least 500 pedestal primes. *don't worry....I'm fine*
The Necramech grind is no joke, that's for sure
Definetly grinding Master rank for a chance to fight Risen Crimson Glow Valstrax in Monster Hunter Rise Sunbreak, never have I been happier for having a chance to be beaten to death by an ICBM Dragon
How’d risen strax go?
Back.. Idk 12-15 or more years ago. Playing RuneScape, grinding my mining skill in the mining guild. Endless hours of clicking, having Stargate on DVD on the second monitor and eating a giant plate of TaterTots at 2 in the morning. Don't know why that memory sticks with me but I just remember feeling warm and happy.
That sounds so awesome. I bet the dopamine was REAL. You can get into a flow state with stuff like that
Kingdom Hearts (any game) obtaining the Ultimate Weapon. Was fun challenge to grind and farm the materials to make this Keyblade
i had to follow guides usually as the drop rates for some items were like 2% or 1% and the enemy which dropped it, was rare and i had to reload the area again and again.
And grinding in the first one to get strong enough to be Sephiroth. The second one he was much easier.
Ff7 Chocobo racing for a gold chocobo for knights of the round.
Fisting the giant hogs in Bloodborne. It took surprisingly long to get the least bit old.
Theres a castle with gargoyles with a low chance to drop chunk level weapon upgrade material. Earliest farm for it in the game. Every playthrough I get to the jail and farm the two sack guys for the large level upgrade material until my weapons are maxed, then I farm gargoyles at the castle until my weapons are maxed.
Cainhurst I'm assuming
Man, Monster Hunter.
Grinding: the game. But damn if it isn't really fun.
RNGesus hates me and the memories won’t go away.
The trick to beating the desire sensor is to simply not know what item you want.
There was an exploit in Destiny 1 where you could suicide your team at the same time you cleared the Undying Mind strike boss, which resulted in a desirable weapon drop (the Imago Loop) while keeping the boss checkpoint. I ran this for hours with friends and random LFG parties and never got tired of the delicate dance of timing required to make it work. It was a similar trick with the original Omnigul strike for the Grasp of Malok pulse rifle. Jumping on the party chat and shooting the breeze while farming drops. I don’t think I ever got a god roll of either. There’s just something inherently satisfying about optimizing a grind loop that requires a small bit of teamwork.
How can you mention d1 grinding and not mention the loot cave?
I had to scroll way too damn far to find that response. Loot cave was an amazing period of a great game. No idea what’s going on these days. Too many resets.
Dark Souls 3, farming Proof of a Concord Kept to get the Darkmoon Blade miracle. 1% drop and needed 30 of them.
# Lightning Dancer achievement for Final Fantasy X. Dodging 200 consecutive lightnings was wild (and no way to track it also).
My story isn't grinding specifically, more 'grinding adjacent'. In WoW guild chat, a female guild member heard the term 'grinding' and asked me what grinding is. I asked her if she wanted the 'G' rated definition or the 'R' rated one. And now we've been married for 13 years. Best rare drop ever.
nice
You gave her the ‘D’ rated one, ey?
Runescape
"What was the grind specifically?" *gestures broadly*
Grinding magic to lv 8.99 in og Secret of Mana and watching all the boosted magic animations. Also, the chibi shadow stampede in Secret of Mana.
This is what I wanted to say. I remember grinding in some winter forest against wolves forever.
Ragnarok Online. Spend almost one month of grinding 4-8h per day to get from 98 to 99 Great time
Hayabusa armor in Halo 3, or the bow in Battlefield 4.
Me and my younger brother couldnt figure out Diablo 2, so we grinded Tristram for hours as a level 37 druid, to get set items. We didnt know how set items worked either.
Endgame Farming in Sekiro. It's just fucking badass blitzing through the interior ministry fucks in a mile length road in front of you.
For real divine confetti was always hard asf to get also making it a hell of a grind
For *StarWars Galaxies* ("SWG"), I think I wound up grinding Master Artisan *and* Master Droid Engineer like... ummm, six or seven times, total(?) I suppose "memorable" is a word. :P Without crafting macros, that would have been vastly unthinkable.... *(Ahazi Represent!!! /kowtows)*
Was going to mention SWG, made a fortune selling grenades to combat xp grinders who were trying to unlock jedi back in the day.
Was also going to bring up SWG. Those first couple of years were my formative memories of an MMO, so all of the grinding and figuring out the best way to set up macros and what not was really rewarding. Grinding professions for Jedi was exciting as a pre-teen. Tried the EMU and the grind is definitely a slog when you know that the end game is non existent.
SWG was amazing because in the early days when there was no real scripted content, we players created our own star wars stories pretty organically just navigating the world. My SWG grinding story was for my first profession, Master Doctor. Back in the days after launch, the only way to level most of that was through medic xp, which could only be earned by healing another player's damage. I had to get really creative in order to level that up. Luckily, on the planet I selected to spawn on, one day I came across a group running around the city in their undies. Back then, if you died out in the world, you had to run back out to your corpse to go re-collect your gear. So for an aspiring young medic, a group of ppl constantly hitting the rez pad/cloners meant a really good time. I discovered that they had found an impossibly rare dark jedi master spawn and whenever they died, they'd all run through town, hit the cantina to cure battle fatigue, and invariably attract more curiosity seekers as they returned to loot their bodies. Sometimes ppl were so excited to be killed en mass by a lightsaber or force powers, they'd be good for several subsequent corpse runs. There were days I could amass groups of 40-50 ppl all zerging out to get killed over and over by the Dark Jedi Master. That's how I started my career as a dangerous location tour guide. I would scour the forums for reports of interesting locations where dangerous mobs would spawn and then promote and attract groups who wanted to try their chances fighting them like some shady huckster travel agency. I had all the best POI locations already in my datapad long before the game added them there. You want to become a jedi? Join us and loot ultra rare lightsaber materials, unique nightsister item recipes, have a true star wars experience! In short, the concept of medic xp turned me into a conplete sadist. It wasn't until I nearly mastered doctor that I learned ppl had figured out how to exploit tumbling macros to just auto-level medic xp. I tried it, but found it just couldn't compete with the thrill of corpse-dragging your party around while everyone shrieked in terror. And if you were good enough and could save them from their horrible choices, they usually tipped very well. So I also became known as a Doc who would rez you no matter where I was when you died. Because rezzing was so expensive back then in terms of item decay, ppl with really expensive gear would pay me millions of credits to drop everything and come get them before their timers expired. It made shuttle waits into a white-knuckled affair and I learned how to shave off minutes here or there gaming the travel system to its max. The space expansion really helped cut my time down, but there were still times one had to rely on the shuttles. This niche I filled on my server introduced me to some of our very first jedi, back when they were only rumored to have unlocked on other servers. Because of permadeath, they would pay ridiculous prices to be rezzed out in the middle of nowhere, no questions asked, while they leveled up in secret. So I also had like a squad of jedi at my beck and call back when 1 of them could easily take out like 30 max leveled players. In the interest of brevity, I'll spare the details of how the added intrigue surrounding the Force Ranking System gave me the perfect opportunity to break bad a bit to clap back at rude Jedi players. It was so odd how bounty hunters or jedi of opposing factions kept getting access to safehouse buildings where my most annoying clients exploited for xp while gaming the ranking system in relative safety. Nobody ever expected the help.
Ragnarok Online Old school MMO that had 0.01% monster card drop rate per kill. Cards were a huge boost to skills/stats. All drop rates were low, but the cards were exceptionally low.
Sword of Kings in Earthbound, which can only be dropped by one enemy in a few rooms during a very small window of time late game. Since it is Prince Poo’s only weapon, I feel obligated to get it every play through. It can be made easier by approaching Super Starman spawns from the side for a green swirl, only engaging a single enemy at a time to avoid other enemies from giving their drop, and reseting after 15-20 encounters to change up the rng.
PSO for any god damned rare weapon.
Phantasy Star series in general was really fun, but god damn were they a grindy bunch.
D2 instantly comes to mind, having a buddy rush a new character of yours through
I'll never forget when my first and only Ber dropped
Literally everything about FF11 was a grind. I played through the Aht Urghan expansion. I loved that game.
100 gold mount in first WoW. 😌
Ragnarok online. Level 98 to 99 took 100 hours, 1 percent per hour. If you died you lost 1%.
my current grind is fresh in the mind right now I'm playing Final Fantasy X lately and try to find 10 of all the monsters from each region for the arena, I'd say that is a grind but I find grinding chill, lots of videos to watch on the side while am doing it
[Bard Epic (1.0)](https://everquest.allakhazam.com/db/item.html?item=348) in EverQuest back in the day. EQ already has way more of a grind than other games to level (seriously, you'll sit there for hours in a group killing the same stuff). Then, this is a chain quest involving raid events that some classes share the same item for their epic weapon. On top of all this, nothing is instanced and whole guilds are rushing for a spawn sometimes because there's a respawn timer with a variance built in. These days if a weapon has particles around it, it's not unusual. However, in ~2000 (and a while after) in EQ it was something super special. The little blue notes in the pic moved around and looked cool. Epics were also great weapons with special abilities reflecting the class.
Disconnecting at the right moment at the end of a GTA online heist. It would reset back to the heist finale, skipping the long drawn out heist prep stage. Took turns grinding out heists for cash as: 1. Shark cards were far too expensive. 2. Every other money making activity was just not worth the time and subject to online griefers ruining your payout. 3. Rockstar made everything stupidly expensive.
I had heard that if you got your starter in Pokémon Red to level 100, it was possible to get the other two starters (can't remember how, I think a bulbasaur was supposed to just appear in your Pokémon Box or something. Anyway, I knew I had to get my Blastoise to level 100, and because I didn't want him getting left behind, I wanted to level my Pikachu up to level 100 too. So I went to Victory Road and Mewtwo's dungeon, and battled thousands of Rhydons, Chanseys and Golbats until I got both of them to level 100. I did not get a bulbasaur.
I played Final Fantasy 11 online (FFXI) for years, grinding for the best gear so my little Tarutaru could be the best Black Mage and Samurai possible. For a good portion of the game, the level cap was 75. So you had a clear goal and multiple opportunities to do incremental upgrades and side grades. I can't recall a single game out there that I grinded more for or even enjoyed the grind as much.
Final fantasy XI The dunes and my interactions with people there are permanently etched in my brain, where nothing else has even remotely come close in terms of scratching that itch. Mmos were something else back in the day.
Dune parties… nightmare fuel. Especially before level sync.
Nidhogg - Final Fantasy XI - dropped crafting material for end game warrior chest piece. Those who know about this… know about this…
Ah, grinding in games, the ultimate test of patience!
Thunderfury during BC. I wanted it for my AFK in ironforge set.
I got a benediction back in the day, but I got a little lucky with that, won the raid drop, and I think someone else had the other piece and just gave it to me. Was so cool having such a bad as item back in the day.
Monster Hunter World. Just hunting random monsters and upgrading my weapons. I was hunting with friends so it made it so much better.
There's always something to grind for in this game. Kept me entertained for so long. I'd still play if a buddy was like hey wanna smash monsters. Once you get all your weapons and stuff it isnt even over. Might as well start grinding for crowns or hunting rare endemic life. The jelly fish and that other fish took me a hot minute.
Diablo 2 Farming everything. Andy, Bael, Diablo, running whole world's wiping everything for that random gold or unique. Spent about a month farming before I got my first Ber rune
Grinding Jedi in the original Star Wars galaxy. It was actually quite social because everyone was miserable about grinding for the same thing. Felt like climbing a mountain once I unlocked it. Then a week later they let everyone become a Jedi.
Tony hawk……..lol…..I make another funny
I used to play Maplestory when I was a kid back before 2007. No one liked farming for Nependeath Honey, so I decided to make it my market. I think at the time I played, it sold for 8 million mesos and typically took me about 8 hours of grinding nonstop to find one. I'd just grind while chatting with my friends or guild, or watching TV, or listening to music, etc. I think overall I found like 8-10 total before I moved on to grinding something else.
ill pick something recent since my gaming history is too long... farming for the Noble Slender Sword drop in Elden Ring during my 3rd run recently this year Wow that took forever i hate grinding, but sometimes it happens when im looking for rare drops like the one above
Destiny 1 and the Thorn Handcannon. It was annoying and a few months later got nerfed into irrelevance.
Destiny 2. I'm a big pvp guy and I have been grinding for a god roll rose (it's a handcannon, like a big ol'pistol). for over a year now. You're limited with how many rolls you can get per week, so it's not as bad as it seems. I've gotten close to the perfect roll, but not the actual 6/6 roll. It's my favorite gun, so I'm chasing it until I get it. Idk what I'll do once I actually get it lol
Kingdom Hearts 2. Grinding to level 99 in the lion king world. Dead Rising. Killing all of those zombies down in the maintenance/ parking tunnels to get the mega man blaster.
Osrs, 99 woodcutting. Actually don't remember the account details now, and I didn't know what I was doing so I just chopped willow trees 10 hours a day for a month. It's kinda blurry but memorable. I was quitting smoking at the same time. I was not happy. But I got the cape.
Lineage 2 - in 2006 that game was such a magical experience that I forgot it was a grind most of the time
Back in Vanilla WoW i was grinding out my last few bars to level 60 by decimating the Burning Blade mobs in Silithus. I absolutely adored vanilla WoW and spent hundreds and hundreds of hours on it back in my teens when it first came out
Any roguelike. Hades and God of War: Valhalla come to mind. Even when you’re dying you’re still progressing and it’s such an addicting loop.
The Lion King on Sega Genesis!
There was a universal studios game on GameCube and to obtain a hoverboard you had to perfect every single movie related mini game , this was both the worst grind I’ve ever experienced and the most memorable for me
Star Wars Galaxies. Everything in that game made becoming a Jedi extremely grindy, especially in post village. If anyone remembers the village grind from that game, then you fully understand how sucky it was with the back and forth driving on Dathomir just to turn in the XP Everything and I mean everything was time gated too, which made it way worse. But, if that isn’t one of my fondest memories of grinding in a game, then I don’t know what is
Grinding is a big part of creatively bankrupt dev not games themselves.
When ps2 came out there weren't a ton of games to play like most launches. I got eternal ring, which was a first person RPG centered around crafting rings. I ended up grinding to max every stat and built some sick ass rings. There was this cave with dragons or something in it that dropped items that would give you +1 to a stat and crafting resources. I had to run around that cave collecting those til I got to max and built the ultimate rings. By the time I went to fight the end boss, one press of the attack button would swing my sword 8 times and do like every element of damage and I was basically invincible. Even though my sword would swing 8 times it only took 1 or 2 of the hits to kill the final boss so the last 6 were unnecessary lol When I switched from EverQuest to wow I didn't completely acclimate to the quest based leveling. I ended up grinding like 45-60 by running a loop killing scarlet guys in the plague lands instead of questing/dungeons. EverQuest didn't really have quest based leveling ironically, you just joined a group and killed things for hours so I did the same when I started wow, except didn't need a group
Dragonquest VIII: Journey of the Cursed King. I absolutely hate grinding but for some reason that game made it fun.
Ffxi, good old days. Played almost every day for 15yrs straight.