I appreciate the battle system but the mainline games themselves were primarily designed for a younger audience.
What? You don't want to breed 100 pokemon in the same lineage to get one with the perfect (hidden) EV/IV stats, attitude, and moves? How lazy!!! At least do it for 8 pokemon so you have one good team!!!! Get off your ass mate. /s
Yeah I can't believe they thought this was a good idea lol. Glad they are making the system easier. But way too japanese games have grinding mechanics just for gear.
I don't think they originally intended to make players minmax entire teams, but to give an edge to those who spent some time training and breeding the right way.
Anyway, most people I've met who played at tournaments either admitted (privately) to using hacked Pokémon or denied it while blatantly using a full perfect IV team with some shiny. (I've think they're cracking down on hacked teams harder now, though.) So I think anyone still grinding for their dream team is actually doing it for fun.
I am thinking:
1. most bioware games
2. most fromsoft games
3. RTS games
4. tower defense games
5. bethesda games since morrowind
Minmaxing there is a natural outcome and often makes the game funner (because otherwise the difficulty is a lot).
Souls games have the community agreed level cap of ~125 for PvP matchmaking, so minmaxing makes sense here - but there barely ever any RNG involved in making a Dark Souls build and you just level up and beeline for the things you want while playing the game "normally" (beating levels and bosses, sunbro'ing to get additional XP along the way, etc..). That said, there's an argument to be made that when ignoring the multiplayer aspect that getting to level 300+ to beat NG+7 is way more fun than minmaxing a 125 build and trying to beat NG+7 that way (my preference, of course).
If there was additional RNG involved with weapon stats or anything like the EV/IV system in a souls game I would never play it, for sure. It's simplicity is what makes it amazing. It's why I hate the bloodgem and chalice dungeons in bloodborne, despite it otherwise being my favorite souls game.
RTS and Tower Defense games I'll give you, since the meta strategy is efficient resource management and maximizing damage to obliterate your opponents with as little resources used as quickly as possible.