It's a very numbers based game, it little grinding in the right areas can go a long way. There's like 2 caves you can exploit, and a small piece of land that can be exploited to get a hefty sum of XP to make the game a lot more manageable. Rather than entering a dungeon 5 times and having to retreat because you couldn't quite make it to the end

I played the original a few years ago and it only took me about a week or so to complete. It went by really quick and ended up being easier than I thought, but I had already known about the "peninsula of power" and a spot in I believe the volcano or some early dungeon where you can fight a ton of genies which I believe are some of the monsters to give the highest XP at that stage in the game. Stuff like that