This game is hard, but not as hard as I used to believe...

Funny story I thought you guys might appreciate.

As a kid, I played everything with Game Genie.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...-Genie-NES.jpg
^That thing. Right there. Nothing was ever in my NES without being stuck into that first. It made everything awesome...infinite lives, infinite health, infinite energy/ammo, all that kind of stuff. Well, usually. There were a couple of limitations. First, you could only have 3 codes at a time. Second, not every game had total game-breaking codes like that. For FF, you would've hoped for a "Never lose HP!" code.

No such luck. Instead, the best codes available for FF would increase attributes like HP, hit, damage, evade, absorb, and luck to vastly higher levels...but they were class-specific. For example, the more-HP code allowed the Fighter at level 1 to have 206 HP instead of 35. Similarly, the damage code drastically bumped up your kill-things-itude, and evade made you nearly unhittable. That was the trio I always played with: extra HP, damage, and evade. But because each code was class-specific, I had to play with only one class of character, and of course, I chose Fighters.

With those codes, it was completely trivial to blow through the first half of the game virtually untouched. Only around Gurgu Volcano did things start to get tricky, and Floating Castle and Temple of Chaos were absurd. Why? Well, I didn't learn that for a long time.

See, the evade-increasing code only works if you don't equip armor. If you equip armor, your naturally ultra-high evade gets replaced by the armor's crappy evade. So I went buck naked through the game. However, once enemies start using MAGIC on you...like Fir2, or Cremate, or Blaze...it's all downhill. You may not know this if you've only played the game the right way, but Cremate does about 80-240 damage to an unarmored Knight. You run into four Red Hydras in the Floating Castle, or a few Chimeras in Mirage Tower, or some Ice/Gas Dragons in the final temple, and you are...I believe the term on this board is "SMURFED".

But as a kid, I never realized this! I just thought the game got super hard! Much later in life, I decided to try the game with a mixed party and under normal conditions, and I realized many fascinating things, like...Armor is actually REALLY HELPFUL at preventing damage! Black Belts are unbelievably powerful after level 10! Magic can really change the amount of time it takes to kill 4 Scum in the Marsh Cave! And so on.

Nevertheless, I love the game and always have.

TL;DR: Game Genie inadvertently makes the game harder to finish, lol @ me for never playing it right.

There were a few times when I boosted my experience to reach level 10 at the beginning with a game genie, then flew through until class change, then boosted my experience up to level 50. That's about it.