Relax with some heavy grinding

 So I now have over eighty hours logged in Fire Emblem: Awakening. Those are real hours spent really playing, unlike the over sixty that I have logged in Etrian Odyssey IV, a second 3DS JRPG I’ve been playing lately.
 
See, while FE:A is a tactical game where you see all your pieces on a gridded map and you move some of them around like a very complicated board game and slam them into other pieces and make them interact in various ways until you get rid of some of the pieces while making absolutely goddamn sure that you don’t get rid of any of the ones that you can move and maybe some of the others that you can’t, EO4 is a first-person dungeon crawler based on the very old Wizardry games.
 
The big deal about the EO series in general is that it’s in the same vein as the very old Western RPGs, which I don’t actually think have a snappy little acronym for them. T…there’s no such thing as a WRPG, is there? Man, fuck it, I don’t care enough to look it up. The point is, you start off in a town where everything is done using menus. You create characters from scratch; characters who have no personalities or stories provided to you by the game. You pick a name, a class, and a portrait, and you move the fuck on with your life. The game tries to trick you into thinking that you picked a gender, but you didn’t. You just picked a portrait that looked like a man or a woman. The game never actually calls the character by a gender-specific pronoun. At least, not that I ever noticed.
 
Once you make enough characters to feel satisfied with yourself, you can use money to buy items to either wear into battle or use in other ways, and eventually you can enter a map. You are not given a map. You are given a grid on the bottom half of the DS, and an arrow showing your location on the grid, and you goddamn well draw your own fucking map. Each game has improved upon the map-making tools you’re given; in the first game, you could only move about the grid in a very slow and clunky manner, and the icons you could drag and drop onto the map were pretty limited. By EO4, the map can be moved smoothly, and the various icons and colors you can use really let you map things out in the way that you think is best.
 
Since the dungeons are not randomly generated, maps can be found online. You’re a fool if you think that I don’t check those maps online and copy them down dutifully into my own game every time I enter a new area. This doesn’t mean I don’t add my own icons and notes (you can totally drop a note icon onto your map and write whatever you want there, so you can write shit like "wounded soldier" on a square where you found a pile of old books used for a fetch quest you haven’t taken on yet (I said you can map things out in the way that you think is best, not that you must map things out in the best way)).
 
Here’s the best (worst) part, though: you can add arrows to your map that your party will automatically follow if you turn on an auto-pilot mode. In theory, this helps you to cut down on time spent dicking around returning to lower levels when you return to town and come back. In practice, this allows me, the guy who has played this game for over sixty hours so far and is only on the fourth labyrinth, to create a loop that my party will never leave. I then use a binder clip to squeeze down the A button on my 3DS, and whaddya know, I’m grinding for XP while leaving my 3DS plugged into its charger overnight.
 
There are, of course, risks. Holding down the A button means that all five members of the party just keep attacking over and over. There’s no way for them to heal each other, either in terms of HP or status effects. Just gotta hope that nobody dies, basically. There’s a skill that two of my party members have that lets them all regain a fixed amount of HP after a battle ends, and a skill one of them has that lets them all regain a fixed amount after every step taken on the map. Those, combined, mean that my party enters each new fight at full health. Still, I can’t send them into the toughest maps and expect them to live.
 
Using this trick, I pretty easily had a level 40+ party (where 70 is the maximum before you get into post-game content) in a single night of grinding. I then had them all retire and, I guess, go fuck off forever. Retiring allows you to remove a character from your guild’s roster and replace them with somebody who is half the level, maximum starting level of 30, as the retired character. This new character has a bonus to all of their starting stats equal to the tens digit of the retired one (or 10 if the retired one was level 99), as well as a number of bonus skill points equal to the same number. This means that the new guy starts weaker and potentially gets better than the old one.
 
I absolutely love this system, by the way; not just because it lets you make stronger guys if you’re dedicated to the idea, but because it suggests that your retired characters had been training new recruits in their downtime to take their place when they left. I fucking love that! It’s totally implied; nothing is stated. But to say "Your Sniper has retired. This new Sniper has appeared to take their place, and also they totally have stat bonuses based on the old Sniper" is to say "Your Sniper has retired. THEIR DISCIPLE STEPS FORWARD TO SHOW YOU WHAT THEY CAN DO." And that, my friends, is pretty fucking cool to me.
 
Anyway, like I said, I’m still only on the fourth labyrinth, or "stratum," which means that I don’t have access to all of the character classes just yet. You start off able to choose from a melee heavy-hitter with an emphasis on elemental "link" abilities that grant allies bonus attacks, a melee heavy-hitter with an emphasis on defense and defending the party, a melee lightweight with an emphasis on buffing the party in all sorts of ways, a melee welterweight with an emphasis on inflicting status effects, a ranged lightweight with an emphasis on paralyzing attacks and hitting whoever the fuck they want, a spellcasting featherweight with an emphasis on healing spells, and a spellcasting featherweight with an emphasis on attack magic. After the second stratum, you unlock a spellcasting featherweight with an emphasis on status-inflicting "circles" and added effects caused by dismissing those circles. After the third, you unlock a melee heavy-hitter with an emphasis on hurting themselves to pump up their damage output to crazy levels. After the fourth, you unlock a fourth melee heavy-hitter with an emphasis on doing explosively large elemental damage followed by a cooldown period.
 
Once I get that last guy, I’m certainly going to retire my entire level 70 party to work one of them in. You don’t need to have the replacement guy be the same class as the one they’re replacing.
 
I really don’t need to, though, I think! At least, not for right now. I know that there are some superbosses that you want to make goddamn sure your party is insanely strong to kill, but I’m fucking max level right now and not in the post-game content where you can unlock the higher level caps by killing dragons nine times larger than your airship (they are so big that if you attack them before post-game, they literally just effortlessly slap your airship out of the sky and your party is wiped out and you have to heal them all up in town before you can try getting back into a dungeon again). Level 70 is good enough. Having access to only 9 out of the 10 classes is good enough.
 
But it’s never really enough, is it. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have spent 80 hours deliberately building up the stats and relationships of my thirty-nine characters in Fire Emblem: Awakening. I’m only halfway through the game (I haven’t even started Chapter 15 yet, out of 25). I just really enjoy the grind. I like it when games make me feel like I’m accomplishing something as simple and yet as wonderful as getting stronger at a steady pace. I build up one character, then another, and then another. I now have close to a dozen characters with every single one of their accessible skills unlocked and all of their stats maxed. I’ve settled into a nice, smooth system where the already-maxed-out characters can help me bring a new character up to maxed-out status in only a couple more hours. So, by that logic, I have roughly fifty-four more hours to go before I tackle Chapter 15.
 
In EO4, though, it’ll just take one night with the binder clip. I don’t know if the game designers knew people like me would do that or not. It reminds me of how I used to level grind in Final Fantasy: Tactics by having all of my characters stand on one side of the map and have their AI set so that they just kept casting a free buff spell on each other while the enemies stood dumbfounded on the opposite side of the map. A friend of mine referred to it as the game masturbating.
 
Well, you know what, masturbation is fun, too, if you do it right.