Depends on how hard you want the game to be and how good you are at putting together effective strategies. You never have to grind -- people have beaten the game doing low-level runs using only the starting job (Freelancer) -- but some fights can be very difficult and will require specific strategies and a bit of luck.

Beyond that, how much you grind also depends on how smart you are about it. Running laps around the lap and just fighting enemies one at a time is a waste of time; if you're smart about how you grind, you can master a job in 15 minutes, and there are a handful of jobs that completely break the game's difficulty after you've mastered them.

The game also has a fast-forward feature for combat and while there's no auto-battle to go with it, you can have each character replay their last action (say, attack all enemies x 4) with a quick confirmation for each turn.

Once you get your team off the ground, the average random encounter through most of the game can easily last less than 5-10 seconds (if that) so if you do get to a point where grinding seems like the easiest way to proceed, I'd say it's never particularly painful.

Not very. I beat the game at lvl 30 and everybody was a Theif. It's an incredibly easy game.

Depends on the difficulty mode and your class combinations. I've found that on normal difficulty it's rarely too grindy if you just fight each enemy in your path as you progress through the game. You'll know you're leveled up enough when most enemies in a dungeon run away from you

This game has difficulty settings; put it to easy and you should be able to breeze through it.

Actually even with Casual the game is quite hard, definetly compared the the first 2 games. This one is quite rough, or I just plain suck haha.

Originally posted by TSVStriFe:

Actually even with Casual the game is quite hard, definetly compared the the first 2 games. This one is quite rough, or I just plain suck haha.

Every boss makes me question my entire life's choices.
Currently up to the guy in the red suit who can stun, sleep, stop and slow you while attacking like 4 times a turn. I dont even know how the hell I am supposed to fight him.

Originally posted by Gittons:

Originally posted by TSVStriFe:

Actually even with Casual the game is quite hard, definetly compared the the first 2 games. This one is quite rough, or I just plain suck haha.

Every boss makes me question my entire life's choices.
Currently up to the guy in the red suit who can stun, sleep, stop and slow you while attacking like 4 times a turn. I dont even know how the hell I am supposed to fight him.

Yeah I'm fighting the beast tamer right now, it has been a struggle. I beat the previous by whittling them down and them brave spamming the last like 2k hp. I beat the first duo by basically running them out of mana.

I'm playing on hard, so I expected to see increased difficulty, but most fights are basically enemies taking multiple turns doing over half your entire teams health. I struggle to even consider it real difficulty.

Something to keep in mind is that you should play defensively against most bosses. It's very common for them to have counters that give them BP, which means that if you're attacking every round, you're just feeding them BP. Early on, it's best to first default your entire party up to 3 BP, then spend a few rounds buffing, then do as much damage as you can in one round, then default again and get ready to recover from their attacks. You get a lot more options for defensive strategies later on after you get some of the more defensively-oriented classes.

Also, Thief's Godspeed Strike is ridiculously overpowered and will kill most bosses in a few rounds.

I just beat red mage boss in CH2 on hard but only after leveling a few times and only after he ran out of MP and couldn't heal himself for 2000HP per turn multiple times in a row. Pretty wild. Still better than original BD that was too easy and I guess didn't have hard mode.

Originally posted by Gittons:

Every boss makes me question my entire life's choices.
Currently up to the guy in the red suit who can stun, sleep, stop and slow you while attacking like 4 times a turn. I dont even know how the hell I am supposed to fight him.

They counterbalanced unbalanced mechanics by adding more unbalanced mechanics in hope that it will balance somehow.
It's quite frustrating to have a boss "counter" you healing one of your character and get a BP. You feel like you will soon meet a boss that will "counter" you breathing. u_u
It's like all boss have a second job "boss" with all cheat passives. And you counter that by using exploits (like Phantom+Salve-Maker >.>).

In previous Bravely games (from previous studio), the boss only had their job skills and passives and simply used them well (particularly when they started combining several boss to create completely new fights).
The only difference with you using the job is they had a lot more HP.
It felt so much better designed.

Originally posted by Tyrant:

Originally posted by Gittons:

Every boss makes me question my entire life's choices.
Currently up to the guy in the red suit who can stun, sleep, stop and slow you while attacking like 4 times a turn. I dont even know how the hell I am supposed to fight him.

Yeah I'm fighting the beast tamer right now, it has been a struggle. I beat the previous by whittling them down and them brave spamming the last like 2k hp. I beat the first duo by basically running them out of mana.

I'm playing on hard, so I expected to see increased difficulty, but most fights are basically enemies taking multiple turns doing over half your entire teams health. I struggle to even consider it real difficulty.

Kill the Slyph first, then kill the snake especially if you have mages. I had 3 and rip, silence for days, then flan or flan second if you don't have many mages.
I'm on normal though and it was still kinda rough because of the Worm thing that occasionally gets used lol.

Also after that fight, go to the a casino for another job. It gets unlocked after Beast Tamer fight.

Originally posted by Gittons:

Originally posted by TSVStriFe:

Actually even with Casual the game is quite hard, definetly compared the the first 2 games. This one is quite rough, or I just plain suck haha.

Every boss makes me question my entire life's choices.
Currently up to the guy in the red suit who can stun, sleep, stop and slow you while attacking like 4 times a turn. I dont even know how the hell I am supposed to fight him.

Actually I'm now in Chapter 4 and some bosses gave me alot of trouble. Thing is though why it's so hard is that bosses give a good amount of JP and I mostly use Jobs I want to level to try them out, only if I fail it twice I switch to my maxed/main jobs, but I'm not happy as above 12 there's no JP Increase heh, ofcourse the biggest advantage is that the battle isn't much long haha. I mean for example in a fight I used the gambler and the rank 3 skill (Sure it costs 2k+) but it was my main damage as it did 2.6k per use back then.

Originally posted by TSVStriFe:

but I'm not happy as above 12 there's no JP Increase heh

Without spoiling more that's not entirely true as you may find out later.

But yes mastering more job is often a good choice, especially if you want to later break the game with the freelancer specialty that allows you to get a close to max stat character late game (and with Swordmaster being able to access its subjob specialties when dual wielding you can put 2 and 2 together and get one of the many ways to break the difficulty)

So i was playing it on normal, and it's pretty rough. You gotta grind quite a bit leading up to the bosses. I'm in the sand area now, and grinding to beat the music guy. I'm gonna try switching to casual to see if it's at least less grindy.