After you are able to repair Norende I highly recommend that you folks level up your accessory shop all the way. You'll get two items at level 8 you get the Golden Egg, which allows you to get double the pg but lose both the JP and the EXP, and then the Growth Egg which allows you to get more EXP and JP. It'll take some time, but again I highly recommend it if you're the type of person who likes to level up early in the game and whatnot.

Thanks for the hot tip. Now I just need to get more villagers

I've heard rumors that eventually you fight things that give you the max JP available in one fight. Sot it may be worth waiting to grind job classes til then.

@oscar__explosion: Yeah getting the villagers are pretty helpful. Makes the waiting less annoying, but no problem!

Oh shucks! I wasn't sure of this I just caught myself in a pickle and then legit grinded for about 15 hours. When I hit a certain level (Around 90 and like 4 max classes) I just turned off my encounters and went through the end of the game easy pz. Thanks for the information though!

I feel like they're maybe making grinding a little too easy. I mean grinding isn't great in general, but here, I can just set combat to auto, put it on full speed and just run around in an area with monsters I can defeat in one turn. I'll just sit back, watch a movie or something. I've only gotten to the second city recently and I'm already way overleveled.

Yeah, I'd definitely recommend that you just go through it without grinding but at a certain point if you get stuck or whatever just go all out with it.

To me it seems like they made grinding easy because they knew people would want to max out the job classes and develop interesting ability combinations towards the end. While being underleveled hurts, being somewhat overleveled won't help you all that much if you don't strategize for later bosses. You'll still run into bosses you can't roll over.

And even with the speed up options, grinding isn't all that effective with the XP/JP/pg scaling - each chapter seems to have a huge jump in the amount you get such that it's very inefficient to go more than a few levels above the appropriate levels, especially the high up job levels. Unless you dump a ton of time in, you're not going to be able to do more than get a few extra levels in any given area. If you spend a dozen hours grinding, sure, but at that point you're making your own bed.