I don't care for it myself, but I gotta be honest: following the YouTube walkthrough by HCBailly really took a lot of the work out of it for me. I HAD beaten the game once without it, but he really does a great job of showing you what's necessary and what's not, and how to really reduce the grinding you'll do.
Ironically I once played and RPG Maker game that used a system that was all but lifted from this game, and it worked way better :P