>>15177737
If someone's "grinding", it means they've hit a point where they need to get shit and farm shit in order to progress. This shit should be avoided in design. Most RPGs give you enough tools to progress past boss points if you don't skip fights, or work on mechanics that discourage grinding.
Some examples include Valkyrie Profile's Hard Mode where everyone starts at level 1 and there's equipment that adds level up bonuses that increase the strength of the character or add points to an objective so that when you release those characters you can appease your boss.
In Final Fantasy X the only grinding needed is once you hit the bonus dungeon and enemies vastly outstrip you, but you can get "Overdrive => AP" equipment to powerlevel into other characters' skills and stats to pass through, or just use out of the box tactics to proceed and at this point you can customize an array of equipment to deal out status effects and protect against certain statuses to proceed. This is where the game tosses the "Character A is good at beating Enemy A" pattern, and now you have to figure out how to deal with the new enemies that don't fall into the former categories and throw crazy gimmicks at you.
This is where grinding becomes "fun", because it's not just fighting enemies over and over again, it's creating a plan to efficiently get you from point A to point B in as little time as possible using the game's mechanics against itself and "breaking" the system you've familarized yourself with.
There are sections in EVERY RPG with a bonus dungeon circa 2011-ish and down that do this. The real shit always starts postgame. Hell Disgaea, a game you might be familar with, is based entirely around exploitation grinding, the first one was about exploiting the Item World, the second one had exploits that allowed you to steal a middling level 9999 character from a previous lt beaten story level to carry your characters up to that level, etc.
Now none of the games YOU are referring to have this sort of grinding. What you're thinking about is
Skinnerbox grinding
This is a sort of grinding that should not EXIST. It doesn't even have much of an appeal, but the point of it is to attract people with addictive personalities, people who are prone to addiction mentally. It's meant to attract whales. Whales being a marketer code for "people who pay 10,000 dollars on a phone game because they're mentally ill." IE the big fish you want to hunt.
TL:DR
DON'T PLAY MMOS OR MOBILE PHONE GAMES IN THE MODERN ERA.
NOTHING THAT IS "FREE TO PLAY" IS FUN IN THE SLIGHTEST.
IT IS MADE TO BE ADDICTIVE THROUGH SMALL AWARDS AND BEING BARELY FUN.
IT IS NOT MEANT TO ENTERTAIN YOU.
That's the answer you wanted and needed. Grinding is shit. You got confused because the games you played before the modern era used grinding as a tool to force you to find a better way to proceed, be it through skill at low levels or efficiency in resource gathering, to test you, not to hook you.