Final Fantasy II is a game for the patient. If you're gonna beat it fair and square (no pun intended), without using emulator savestates and such, you're gonna have to to a lot of levelling up. That's what I did. And to not die of boredom, I simply turned of the music, found my favorite radio channel and mindlessly leveled up while listening to some nice music (of course, FFII has some GREAT music, but you're gonna get pretty tired of the battle-theme after the gazillionth time or so).