Grinding away (Dragon Warrior and Galations 6:9)

When I was a kid, my cousins from Tennessee came to visit once, and my older cousin brought the NES game “Dragon Warrior” with her. I hadn’t had any experience with RPG games, either electronic or not (Advanced Dungeons and Dragons for Intellivision was kind of a joke, though it was fun to play) so this was really a departure to what I was used to. I fell in love with the game so much that I asked for my own copy for my birthday, and despite it costing $49.99 – in 1991 – I actually got it.

If my parents were worried that I wouldn’t play it enough to justify the cost, they needn’t have worried. I played that game for hours and hours and hours. I had the map from Nintendo Power and pored over it until I had it memorized. (I had “laminated” it in packing tape to keep it from tearing apart!)

One of the things that a person can’t get around in the game play for this game is that there is a lot of “grinding” required to gain experience, skill, and to earn money. The following is a video of somebody just starting out who is running across the screen in the hope of coming across monsters to do battle with in order to level up:

There are different types of monsters in different areas of the map, and, depending on one’s level and what one needed (gold or experience points), one would learn the places on the map that made this grinding somewhat efficient – if you need 7700 gold for an item, hanging out with enemies who give 1-2 gold a kill is going to make it take forever. At some point, the map is hardly necessary, for as large as the world is, I had covered every spot on the map (as well as every dungeon, cave, and town) multiple times in order to build my skills enough to save the princess and kill the dragonlord.

The funny thing is, even on speedrun.org, the fastest anyone has ever finished the game is 5 hours, 15 minutes, and 7 seconds. There is just no way around wandering around a lot to get better facing the smaller adversaries in order to eventually beat the greatest enemy.

I don’t know; since about October, I’ve kind of felt a little bit of a melancholy about me; it has just seemed like this is one of those seasons where one is slogging along, hoping not to get too weighed down by everything. Galatians 6:9 sits as an admonishment to me with its imperative, “And let us not grow weary of doing good, for in due season we will reap, if we do not give up.” (ESV)

Somehow, though, my brain has made the connection that even when things get quite frustrating and it seems like it’s the same old annoyances coming up over and over again, there is a point to it. First off, it’s important to keep going and keep fighting the “daily” battles – on one hand, it may be wearing us down, but on the other, our response to adversity is being honed. Secondly, if we can have that patience to slay all the “little” monsters, the reward for that is only attained by not giving up. Yes, it’s going to feel like the daily grind often, and during some seasons, it will seem like all we’re doing is constantly battling everything. Even in Dragon Warrior, which I found to be a very fun game, the bulk of the game was running around trying to build up the right skills to be able to finish the quests and puzzles in order to come to the end of the game triumphant.

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