Looking at this topic makes me realize how few JRPGs are releasing nowadays... my thoughts on some of the common ones here. I will say that grinding is a little weird in how it can be implemented in games, even more older RPGs were generally balanced in a way that if you just sorta naturally fought every encounter on the way to an objective your level and resources would be on par with what you would need to progress, with true "grinding" reserved for if you were interested in end game content. But there are plenty of games where even doing the basic "fight every random encounter" stuff can feel like grinding even if you're not just sitting in one location repeatedly chaining encounters. There are also plenty of RPGs where the act of grinding in and of itself was not just farming something over and over but trying different builds/strategies.
I think DQ XI for me is a game without a traditional definition of grinding. Even on harder difficulties you pretty much never really need to sit in one location and fight enemies over and over, but the game does push you towards having a large number of fights naturally with huge zones, big dungeons, tons of enemies, etc. It does FEEL grindy to me since the individual random encounters are pretty rote outside of boss battles though. The formula pretty much never changes from town > dungeon > boss and cycle and it's the kind of game that you can literally feel yourself dozing off in during random encounters.
P5R is rightly well recommended since even though there are some areas where you're just moving through procedural generated dungeons these areas are short and the game is structured in such a way as you are constantly doing something different. It's easy to feel fatigued after tons of Princess-Maker style social sim and events, with long cutscenes, with grindy randomly generated dungeons, with persona building, with set piece dungeons and whatnot but the game bounces between them so often it doesn't feel repetitive. It also helps that P5R is really polished in a way most RPGs are not and tries very hard to make it a bombastic and appealing game. Since you're waiting for a PC version P4G is much the same though obviously much less visually appealing; as in yes there are areas where you are incentivized to grind if you want to and parts of the gameplay feel repetitive but it's so easy to change it out for an entirely different gameplay style at the drop of a hat and what is present is so well presented it doesn't FEEL like grinding.
For the mentions for Yakuza LAD, I think it isn't a bad recommendation but it feels grindy at times from poor pacing some of the time but the rest is amazing. Like the best way I can say it is that you have like 40 hours of really well paced RPG with almost no filler and some side content that has tons of variety and charm (there's a fully functional mario kart game, a million mini-games, an entire management game...) with this gigantic brick wall of a difficulty spike in this boring ass sewer dungeon that takes up like 5 hours of the game and more if you need to level or you chose poor classes. Like Yakuza LAD hour by hour compared to most RPGs has few areas of grinding, but when you do need to grind BOY do you need to grind in one of the worst grinds ever. So yeah, great game but it really depends on what you can tolerate. It should be mentioned though that Yakuza LAD if an amazing story, most RPGs still feel like they are targetted towards teenagers but Yakuza LAD honestly feels like it was written for a target audience of working adults who grew up playing RPGs.
