AARRRGH ridiculously high encounter rates is what makes it so maddening for me to play anything pre-FFVI. Maybe I was behind, but they tended to be rather difficult too. The others were nice, you ran into plenty of monsters, but not enough to make you pull your hair out trying to get from point A to point B. I liked how there was no transition to another map in FFXII. If you got swarmed by a lot of enemies it was like "o" because if you had to run away you could potentially take the whole map with you xD