I haven't grinded in a jRPG in years.
Either you have been extremely lucky with your choices or you have already been psychologically conditioned to accept this bad practice. By grinding I don't necessarily mean having to backtrack for the sake of leveling up - I mean bad pacing which is
"fixed" by means of combat.
JRPG's are prime offenders in this regard, not all of them, but the great majority. There's a difference between providing an acceptable level of challenge and throwing enemies that the player has no chance of defeating at him. One of the more commonly-known JRPG tropes are so-called
"invisible enemies" or
"random encounters", in some games you can't make two steps without running into a bunch of baddies.
This is a remnant of the olden days when video games were unable to show an excessive number of detailed sprites, today it serves no purpose other than extending the gameplay time and preparing you for possible upcoming boss battles. Running from those encounters will lead the characters to be underpowered when the time for the final encounter comes, not running from them is a massive waste of time.
This is poor pacing - the game should establish a balance between combat and exploration. Role-playing games are about playing roles - throwing enemies at the players at completely random times, especially overpowered ones is a sign of poor DM'ing in real life and bad game design in computer games. There's more to adventure than just combat while you're getting from one place to the other.
There are JRPG's which nullify this problem by introducing visible enemies or visible groups of enemies so that the player can avoid them when the purpose of entering the world map is not leveling up but exploration - this is done in
"Ni No Kuni" or the
"Dragon Quest" games. There are also games which introduce items that allow you to avoid battles when you do not wish to run into them, such as
"Pokemon" and its
"Repel", however this begs the question how well the game is actually made if it has items specifically designed to combat its own battle system.
With good pacing, a moderate number of battles should be able to prepare you for the boss you're about to encounter. This is because in a good RPG experience isn't only gained from battle, but primarily for questing and other interaction the DM deems worthy of rewarding. Moreover, a good RPG gives the player rewards not only in the form of experience but also items.
With JRPG's, especially early on, I find myself grinding outside of a town ahead of schedule either to build up my stats or my abilities or to gain enough gil for the most expensive weapon in the town's store - as a player I shouldn't be doing that, the game should offer me opportunities to gain these abilities and equipment by a variety of means.
Of course this is just the tip of the iceberg - you could write a whole essay about common JRPG problems. You might say that this is a few isolated cases, but you and I both know that's not true. In a lot of ways, this kind of structure is somewhat expected, this is what the target audience actually
"likes" - I suppose it stems from the traditional
"systematicness" of Asians in general. These
"problems" are especially apparent in Korean MMORPG's which are more often than not completely fixated on the idea of
"grinding outside of the town", or at least that's my impression.
