How to Beat GROW RPG Without a Walkthrough

Most people searching how to beat GROW RPG have already lost to the devil a few times. The knight walks out, the fight starts, and it ends badly for reasons the game never spells out. The quick fix is a walkthrough. This page is the other option: how to work out the order yourself.

We are not going to print the sequence. Partly because a copied order turns the puzzle into an animation you watch once, and partly because the method below is what carries over. We built our own order puzzle around the same idea, and the method below is how we solve it too.

What does it take to beat GROW RPG?

You need to place all eight items in an order that leaves the hero strong enough, and the world ready enough, to defeat the winged devil. Every item levels up after each placement, so the order decides everything.

GROW RPG is On Nakayama's July 2005 entry in the GROW series, published at eyezmaze.com. You drag eight items onto a small green sphere, one at a time. After each placement, everything already on the sphere tries to advance a level, and items react to each other according to fixed rules. Jay Is Games noted that some items stop at level five while others climb past seven.

Once the last item goes down, the story plays out on its own: a hero, a shop that sells health and weapons, a dungeon with hidden treasure, and a fight against the devil. You do not control any of it. Like every main GROW game, it has a good ending, many bad ones, and a secret one. Your only move was the order.

Why does the devil keep winning?

Because at least one item was placed too late to reach its useful level, or too early and got damaged by something placed after it. The fight only plays back those levels. Nothing in it tests your reflexes.

When the hero dies, something upstream did not grow far enough. Maybe the item that equips him arrived with too few turns left to level. Maybe something he depends on was hurt by a later placement. The game shows you the loss and leaves you to trace it back.

That tracing is the skill. Beginners change three things at once after a loss, win nothing, and conclude the game is random. The same order always gives the same ending, which means every run you play is a clean experiment if you treat it like one.

How do you read a failed run?

Watch the ending and ask which item looked unfinished. A missing building, a weak weapon or a damaged structure points at one item's slot. Note it, then change only that one next run.

Before the story starts, look at the sphere. Items that reached their final form usually look finished. Items that did not are visibly stuck partway. That picture is your scoreboard. Write down, even roughly, how far each item got.

Then watch the story for the moment things go wrong. If the hero is under-equipped, the item behind his gear did not climb high enough. If something collapses, look for what was placed after it that could have hurt it. The review at the time mentioned that badly timed placements can damage the tower. That kind of interaction is what you are hunting for.

We wrote up the general version of this in the order puzzle strategy guide. The short form: a failed run is a labelled data point, and the label is the weakest item.

Which item should go first?

The one that other items wait on. If placing it early makes several others start growing, it earns the first slot, even if it looks minor on its own.

This is the one general rule that holds across the series. Some items do little by themselves but unlock growth in their neighbours. Everything that depends on them stays frozen until they arrive, so placing them late wastes turns for the whole sphere.

Next, look at level ceilings. An item with many levels needs many turns after it lands, which means an early slot. An item that tops out fast can go late without losing anything. And anything that seems to harm what is already there should go as late as you can afford. Those three rules will not hand you the answer, but they rule out most of the 40,320 possible orders before you play a single run.

How do you find the order without a walkthrough?

Start from a reasoned guess, change one item per run, and keep a written list. Every run then rules something out, so you close in on the order instead of guessing.

Start with a guess built from the rules above. Play it and note the weakest item. Move that item one slot earlier and play again. If it got stronger and nothing else got worse, keep the change. If something else broke, you have just found a dependency, which is worth more than the win would have been.

Once an item is clearly in the right slot, stop touching it. The search space shrinks fast when you lock things in. By the time five items are fixed, only six orders remain for the last three, and you can try them all in a few minutes.

The mistake to avoid is swapping two items at once. If the result changes, you will not know which move caused it. One change per run feels slow, but it gets there sooner.

Is it worth using a walkthrough anyway?

Only if you want to see the ending and not play the puzzle. A GROW game has no content after the good ending, so copying the order skips the only part that was a game.

GROW RPG is more opaque than most of the series, because the devil fight hides which item failed behind an animation. Guide writers have called its order harder to work out than the other entries, for exactly that reason. If you are stuck on the last two or three items, checking a single slot is a reasonable compromise.

But try the method first. The habit of changing one thing per run is useful far beyond this game. If you want to see the series as a whole, what GROW games are covers every entry, and our GROW RPG history covers where this one came from.

Where can you play GROW RPG today?

On phones, through GROW RPG Σ, a remake released for Android and iOS in April 2015. The original browser game also survives in an HTML5 form.

The full story of what survived is in what survived after Flash. If you want the same kind of puzzle in a browser tab, with no account and nothing to install, Island Evolution is built on the same mechanic. You place eight items on a deserted island, and the evolution chart tells you what each one needs. The scheduling is left to you.

Curious what a perfect score looks like? The best order section explains how scoring works without giving away the answer, and the game FAQ covers the rest.

Where do these facts come from?

• The GROW (series) entry on Wikipedia, for the release date, the Σ remake and the endings structure.
• Jay Is Games' July 2005 review of GROW RPG, for the eight items, the shop, the dungeon, the devil and the level ceilings.

Island Evolution is an independent game with no affiliation to Eyezmaze or On Nakayama. GROW RPG is their work.