I'm swinging a sword that's the size of a car and wailing on this itty bitty goblin for like twenty minutes while it barely reacts to any of my blows and in fact is dancing around on occasion as if to mock me.

That's the entire game btw. You pretty much fight these goblins. On occassion there's a boss and the boss will annihilate you if you tried to slack on grinding against the aforementioned goblins.