Like I said, the story / quest itself doesn't give me EXP. Running around on my way to the boss is the part of the content I would actively need to fulfill my goal (being able to do the chapter 3s). So doing the other chapter 2s is actually less efficient than straight up grinding.
You guys are being pedantic here. If you take issue with me calling it grinding then fine.
Googling for a definition for grinding in video games brings up the following:
Yes, most commonly it is referred to running in circles to fight the same enemies over and over again but doing four chapter 2s just to gain levels sounds repetitive to me, hence my comparison to grinding.
Like I said, if people take issue with my liberal use of the word grinding then I won't bring it up again, but unless you are really lucky with Cait encounters and use Bewildering Dance regularly and get lucky with that, there is at least some grinding involved in getting the required levels to do the later chapters.
Again, I really don't mind it. I'm having a lot of fun with the game so far but as with most JRPGs, some grinding is part of the experience.
I don't really mind your use of the word, you're free to use whatever words you want, I just find it a bit confusing. In general there seems to be this "grinding" sentiment about the game that I'm just not seeing, and I guess that's because different people consider different things to be grinding. I was brought up on the Dragon Warrior/Quest series so I absolutely consider grinding to be mindlessly running in circles to trigger encounters. Or if you know where a Metal Slime spawns you can just walk around there and cut down on the rest of the grinding.
Hell, Dragon Quest 1 is about 85% grinding, 15% game. Octopath to me is almost 100% game in that sense, since you run into battles while you're on the way to tackle story content, which is typically the meat of JRPGs.
In fact, I started my Octopath playthrough with Cyrus and I still have not once enabled his Evasive Maneuvers skill because I
want to run into enemies on the way to towns/dungeons/bosses, I like to see the variety of enemies, learn their weaknesses, and in the process get XP and JP. I don't consider any of this grinding, because your purpose is always to advance the plot rather than to train your characters so that you can advance the plot later. I guess in your case it's just a plot you don't particularly care about.
Anyway, different strokes I guess.
