Leveling Up

To be honest, I'm not even sure we'll level up at all. ^^' I think we're doing more like stat ups. In that gameplay from the 3DS Conference, he got a HP+5 heart when he helped out a Toad, and I imagine it'll be similar to that. We've seen Mario when he seems overly powerful (doing like seven damage each hit), so I bet this is how it'll work. Sidequests and maybe a few main story quests look like the only way we've seen so far.

Grinding was kinda hard in the old games. You couldn't actually train - enemies would eventually give you one Star Point per battle if you were strong enough. So if you were having a ton of trouble with a certain area, it was an absolute monster to train.

quote Virtue

To me, it falls into that familiar category of "annoyances that slightly take away from the game, but I'll still buy it regardless".

Yeah, this is true. It's not like the leveling up system will affect the actual storyline at all, and I don't know about you guys, but the storyline is usually the reason why I buy games.

And also, wouldn't there have to be quite a bit of "quests" in the game then to get all of the stats? Maybe there will be another way to get stat-ups, like an item or something that can be hidden? That wouldn't really be a bad idea on Nintendo's part, since too many sidequests can really get in the way of the main storyline. Maybe, however, there will be a Trouble center or whatever it was called, like in TTYD, where you accept jobs and you go do them, then get rewarded.