Why are old school games so grindy?

 The grind: every RPG aficionado is familiar with the term, and there's nary a single player who doesn't have a story related to grinding. For the two or three of you unfamiliar with the term, grinding is when you spend a long time gaining experience points and gold so you can be strong enough to pass through a certain part of the game. These days, it's rarer for Modern RPG's to force the plater to grind, but pop in an NES RPG and suddenly it's grindsville. Why is that?

I won't bore ya with a long winded explanation, so I'll get right down to the chase: old school games are grindy so they can seem longer. That's all there is to it. 

Alright, a deeper explanation, with examples. Take Final Fantasy 3, and it's second dungeon, the Sealed Cave. When you try entering the Sealed Cave, you run into some powerful enemies that take dozens of hits to bring down, EACH. Worse yet, they come in groups of four to nine. You just CAN'T go through the dungeon without grinding up to level 6, minimum! And that's not gonna be any easier, considering that grinding up to that level's gonna take you about twenty minutes, minimum!

By adding this grindfest, the game has added twenty minutes to your gameplay. Add to that the difficulty of the dungeon itself, which could take another eighteen to twenty minutes, and you've got over an hour of added gameplay to what would have otherwise been finished in TEN minutes if the level curve wasn't so steep. That would mean that you'd beaten TWO dungeons and TWO bosses in the game, in less than twenty minutes of gameplay. Back in the year 1990, this was not acceptable. Why not?

Because games were, and in many cases still are, expensive. Fifty dollars for a game back in 1990 was nothing to sneeze at; to give you an idea of how much of an expense that was, that would be the equivalent of spending one hundred US dollars on a single game today! And no, I don't mean a Deluxe Edition with some complimentary tat like maps and a hardcover game guide; I mean JUST THE GAME! So OF COURSE any gamer would be angry at buying a game at fifty dollars, and then beating it in under ten hours! That's not even a weekend's worth of gaming!

So to give you more bang for your buck, games artificially upped the difficulty by doing things like having a steep level curve, where enemies in one dungeon could easily be ten to twenty levels higher than the previous one. As if that were not enough, your equipment would likely not be good enough to handle the dungeon, so you HAD to buy new weapons, armor, items, and so on. And wouldn't you know it? These were MORE expensive than the last sets you bought! So, off to the grind we went for not just experience, but gold, too!

But grinding didn't come without a sense of accomplishment. There's a sense of getting stronger with every level you gain. A satisfaction in finally affording all those sweeeeeet new weapons and armors and spells, which not coincidentally, made you feel so much stronger. You got that sense of progression which made the grind feel oh-so-worth it.

It was worth it to spend twenty minutes grinding for all that money, because you could finally buy the sword that could kill all these enemies in ONE hit, or you could buy/learn that one spell that could deal double the damage you'd been dealing so far. It was worth it, just so you could go from the character who died in three hits, to the character who could tank twenty hits and still keep going.

Of course, since games tend to be long these days without the need for artificial difficulty, modern RPG's tend to be less grind-dependent and can afford to be more experimental with how they challenge the players. Some modern games prefer giving players a wide variety of crafting skills, so they can spend their time hunting and exploring the environments for materials and recipes. Some, likes Tales of Arise, give the player Ability Points after battle, and then give the player the freedom to choose which skills to spend those points on.

The main point, though, is that grinding wasn't just a way to artificially make the game longer; it was to give the player that sense of satisfaction of seeing their progress. It was honestly a win-win situation, as annoying as it was!