Surviving the Devil Grind

I went to China a week back and my only form of gaming was to play Shin Megami Devil Survivor on the DS. I made my way through days 3 to the last day during my trip however I have yet to finish it. On the last chapter - the last day of the game, I can barely beat the enemies in the levels. In this game like in some other Shin Megami games, you can fuse the monsters you get. Fusing these monsters generates monsters of a higher level - though not necessarily higher power. Fusing creates a stat advantage as some stat bonuses are carried over from the previous 2 creatures. Also, trying to level up low level monsters to a high level requires godly amounts of experience points. Yuzu, one of the characters in the game, had a King Tyrant (the king of all snowmen) all the way to the last day. Sadly, the large snow man could not stand up to the horrors of the last day even though the monster was already to level 40. I had to mash the snow from his body to create a new creature to keep up with the sheer difficulty of the last day.

On the last day of my trip to China, I spent most of the day in the airport waiting for the flight back to the Philippines. Well that was around 1:00 in the afternoon and the flight was 9:00 in the evening. All I did during that time was slave drive my monsters to reach high levels but in the they weren't really good enough. I had to rely on some strategy if I wanted to progress like using Chaos and Evil wave skills (skills that give a huge range advantage against the enemy). Yet my enemies had the same tricks up their sleeves, they had skills that could target the whole map making my own extra range useless. My super physical character (a mistake which I regret now) can do no damage against physical reflect and immune monsters.

Why are JRPGs such a grind always on the last boss? I recall the same thing in the old Final Fantasy games but then I had more time to grind considering I'm not working. I used to have months of time during the summer to play these 100 hour RPGs (ahh Disgaea... 200 hours of fun grinding). Why can't they create RPGs which constantly gives you a challenge and not making the first 70% a breeze and when the story gets interesting up the difficulty to impossible.

I actually like the old school western RPGs where the start was actually the most difficult since you were just a weak party. You'd get killed pretty quickly so you had to grind a bit to gain levels. Eventually once your party got stronger and had the right skills, you would then easily crush your enemies.

So back to Devil Survivor, it appears that I need to level up my main character so that I have the level to fuse higher level monsters. I'm stuck at the probably the last boss who can target anywhere in the map (and kill off your 4 characters really quick). I can't think of any real way to beat the guy besides getting a higher level and tailoring one character to be the guy that kills him. Considering I have an hour's commute home, looks like I have an hour of grinding everyday...wonder when will I finish? Will I survive the grind or will I give up on these super long games?