Grinding for metal slimes

Level grinding in RPGs is a curious thing.

Across the board, in just about every J-RPG, there's a location (or a handful of them) where tough or special monsters reside. Monsters that give you several times the experience points other monsters do.

Games that do this well, like Breath of Fire II and Chrono Trigger, have these monsters dominate or stand out in these areas.

Dragon Quest IX doesn't quite do the same, though.

The best way to level grind in this DS RPG is to seek out metal slimes. However, the tricky thing here is that metal slimes of all variations have a considerable tendency to flee. Not to knock your block off with some ultimate attack. Not to instant-kill one of your party members. But to run away. When this happens there is no way to save the fight as in the other two scenarios, you are simply forced to restart your hunt.

And sometimes it can be quite a hunt. Metal slimes will sometimes show up with other monsters, but most reliably you need to find them on their own. Even then, they're just as likely to run.

The slimes' tendency to run away can be very frustrating.

But, in The Bowhole at least, the non-slime monsters can offer around 1000 experience points per fight. Considering most of my party members need about 20,000 points to level up, that means I'll need to go through about 20 fights. That's not terrible, but it still makes for some pretty intense grinding.

I'm still hoping that I'll run into a heroic slime or two.