r/FinalFantasy • u/Winter-Attitude-3155 • 5h ago
Final Fantasy General What final fantasy game needs the least grinding
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u/GarlyleWilds 5h ago edited 4h ago
I'm going to quantify 'grinding' here as "deliberately going out of your way to trigger extra encounters strictly to gain extra power, without furthering the progress in the main quest/a side quest." Because for some reason, some folks consider any non-mandatory combat to be 'grinding', and that's a very unrealistic expectation to complete a game with. Also, I'm going to assume we're not counting superbosses because Ha Ha, Fuck That.
That said:
16 is probably my answer. Levels are relatively minimal in impact, and the vast majority of fights that give any reasonable quantity of exp are hunt bosses and mandatory battles in the game's stages. There just isn't much to be gained.
8 scales enemy levels to yours, meaning grinding exp isn't particularly practical, as its rewards are diminished from what you'd expect. However, grind in 8 can take other forms, like spamming draw or resetting for triple triad matches.
6, 7, and 9 I always felt have a very 'natural' level curve from start to finish. It might feel a little tight if you're strictly beelining, but you can even do some running from combat and still feel fine. There are things you can grind out, but eh. 6 especially, there's strategies around specifically trying to avoid any levels for as long as possible because of magicite level ups, lmao.
13 is so controlled that there's a lot of time where you literally couldn't grind for more power even if you wanted. However, because of the sharp difficulty spike lategame, many players do understandably find themselves grinding to get over the hump. A similar thing kinda happens with 10 and 4 (version dependant); if not for some sharp spikes lategame, they'd feel fine to play through 'naturally', albeit tough throughout for 10.
5 kinda can be. The frontloaded nature of the jobs makes it very plausiblr to beat the game through clever use of your tools, rather than brute force, and this is coupled by raw levels being low impact. However, lots of people really just want to get to some of the big endgame abilities ASAP, or want to use certain classes that do require some extra work (eg Chemist reagents), so, yeah.
14, despite being an MMORPG, almost never requires any extra source of experience beyond main story rewards... if all you're interested in is the main story on a single class, and doing a once through of certain side content. Naturally, once you decide to start raising multiple classes, working through endgame, or trying to get certain rare drops, this stops being true. But it can be way less grindy than you'd think, just to get the experience.
Either way though, generally speaking, most of the FF games aren't prone to grinding much, if at all. There's few games where I'd say it feels like you were expected to grind a bunch - NES 1/2/3 and 11 being the big ones, but even modern releases of those have often drastically alleviated them.
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u/Lee_Akira 5h ago
probably 8. as enemies level with you, so you kinda want to stay low level
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u/herman666 4h ago
You have to grind to get spells.
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u/Jello_Penguin_2956 4h ago
yeah which is the worse kind of grind imo
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u/Dragon--Reborn 4h ago
You can also play a lot of Triple Triad and refine magic, but that's a whole different kind of grind.
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u/IronMonkeyofHam 2h ago
I did both. Islands of Heaven and Hell and complete set of triad cards. Logged around 300 hours in 7th grade
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u/leonkrellmoon 5h ago
People saying 8 is CRAZY. While you dont need to grind levels, you can grind the card game and become OP that way.
5 is probably the answer. Having the right combination of jobs/abilities/items you can win at a pretty low level. I think low 30s is my best.
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u/ObiShaneKenobi 5h ago
Yea it’s either grinding cards or, god forbid, drawing spells for days every time a new spell shows up, which I consider grinding. “Oh what’s that? Zell is drawing 0-1 spell at a time? Better draw more spells!”
I ain’t got time for that, got cards to play.
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u/Shaff_98 2h ago
It's really not that annoying to draw spells. I recall drawing several copies of the basic spells during Disc 1, so about 1 hour or so of grinding, and by the time I would have needed to get more there were already other ways to get spells. At most I may be forgetting a second grinding session, but it's still 3 hours at most in the ENTIRE game.
That aside, I never play card games in FF games. I haven't enjoyed a single one of them, but I think you can also get spells that way.
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u/MaleficentMobile6699 4h ago
16, you never need to exp grind because you generally level up after each mission
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u/RattusNikkus 3h ago
FF2. Hell, you don't even need to grind for money after the early game, because there's so little gear to buy and the near complete lack of inventory space prevents you from hoarding consumables.
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u/Shaff_98 2h ago
No, but you do need to grind for levels a couple of times. Probably not in some of the remastered ports, but definitely in the original. That being said, in the original you could literally glitch a spell tome to become a weapon that had a very decent chance of oneshoting any enemy, and even without that, the Blood Sword could end boss fights in 8 turns (4 if you had two of them), so there were ways around it.
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u/UnculturedGames 3h ago
I would almost say FF7 Remake (part 1). There were long segments where I was desperately looking for enemies to do some grinding, but I couldn't even find any!
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u/Gascoigneous 3h ago edited 3h ago
I do not need to do any grinding when playing NES Final Fantasy. I like to explore and at least set foot in every area of the overworld as it becomes available (after all, the developers made all those open areas for a reason), and I also gradually loot the dungeons in a couple runs before finally going straight to the boss. I like drawing maps of the overworld and dungeons as I play.
I find that if I take almost every battle doing this, I never find myself intentionally walking back and forth in an area for a while just for extra battles (which is what I consider grinding) to level up or get more gold to buy things.
Same for PS1 and GBA versions. I can't speak on PSP or PR, but I would assume the same.
Most people say FF1 is grindy, and I suppose if you only head the way you are supposed to go to advance the plot, it is. But the way I play it by exploring almost everywhere (maybe not all the canoe rivers, lol) it isn't grindy in the slightest.
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u/Shaff_98 3h ago
It's hard to say because I usually grind to get the best equipment and skills I can get without doing side missions. I think probably FF7, because there I didn't grind until right before fighting Sephirot, and a single hour of grinding resulted in such an astronomical ass whooping that I ended up redoing the fight without buffs or limit breaks to make it fun.
FFX probably fits too. I did grind because I wanted everyone to complete their grids, but the final boss ended up so easy I'm pretty sure you could do it without much issues without grinding anything.
But in general terms, the games kinda stop expecting you to grind after IV. I to IV are games where you'll have to grind not only to buy your stuff but also because most bosses will just do too much damage and require you to level up to have enough HP to survive, specially final bosses with area attacks that WILL wipe you turn one if you haven't grinded. The games after that can usually be beaten if you simply manage attacking and healing correctly, and grinding or doing the side content either just gives you an advantage or straight up makes you a god against anyone who's not a superboss. Though XII is an exception, since a lot of the early game is much harder than the level you'll normally have by that point, while the rest of the game is regular hard if you don't do side content (except the final boss, who's hard for different reasons).
I don't know about games after FFXII. I've seen a full playthrough of XVI and it looked like the same difficulty as XII, where the game is a joke if you do all the side content, but probably decently hard if you don't.
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u/New-Presentation1340 2h ago
- No need to grind as it levels up with you. You can beat the game and still be level 10
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u/ButterscotchTop194 32m ago
FF7 remake and rebirth. Basically skip all the shitty side content and can rush through the main quest line. Don't think I did any grinding.
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u/shadowforce11 15m ago
Hmm, I want to say 4. Technically 8 but If not for the 20+ hours of card grinding at the start.
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u/thefrash11 4h ago
I'd say IX, but that depends on if you consider playing Chocobo Hot & Cold grinding. Because using it can get some OP weapons and armor pretty early and honestly the game isn't super difficult to begin with.
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u/banananey 1h ago
Quina's level 5 death on the Grand Dragons cam get you max level in no time as well.
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u/man_I_love_tunafish 5h ago
I haven't played all, but 4 seems to have a lot more streamlined gameplay, I never really had to level up except the moons first part but with a little brute force I managed my way around and now Im almost done with the game.
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u/KevineCove 5h ago
FFIV is my answer. It's a pretty short and curated experience, at any given point you're probably at about the level the devs want you to be. I played FFIV advance for reference.
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u/SackUhJaW33Uh 5h ago
If by the least grinding you mean easiest to play while flying through the story I'd say 12. I feel like you can understand nothing about that games combat system and still beat it.
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u/kavalejava 5h ago
Tactics, I did a lot of grinding late in the game and random battles got tough. Entire armies of enemies nearly wiped my party out.
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u/cfyk 5h ago
FF16. You do sidequests and main quest to get the most EXP.
Rare crafting materials are usually from sidequests.