Quote Originally Posted by Dark Dragon Knight
Personally, FF2's character development system was simply the worst I've ever seen. The Sphere Grid was a completely different thing, you knew you HAD to use it to move on (of course, those who did that No Sphere Grid Challenge don't apply...). But FF2 gives you too much freedom, and I truly don't like it in a RPG. It's hard to know if you're ready to move on or not when you start very weak and simply HAS to train for your own survival...Otherwise, you'll die (that happened a lot in my first game)...

To make it short: I found it to be very disturbing.
It's one of the hazzards of the insufficient documentation Square provided with the games. They REALLY didn't explain the system behind the game well enough, so many people play with a "what the heck is going on?" mindset. I've been playing this game for quite a while and I can safely say that I know when to move on to the next area now. It's really just a matter of learning how the game works, and Square stopped providing good documentation of their games when FFVII came out.