I've only done one bit of grind, and that was simply to see if it would be worth doing for my brother, who has a thing for Katanas.
It's not a grind, I haven't found that increasing my levels has helped me through any battle, just learning what the enemies were doing, which ones I could take down without doing anything special and which ones really needed my attention. Prioritising targets, avoiding traps & luring enemies to areas where I'm not going fall off the edge of the world.
I'm a bad player, Tor can tell you of my grievances that I whined at him about, but there isn't a grind, unless you count the time spent learning the enemies.