The Cave of Dist is one of those places where you'll just learn to hate random encounters, especially when they're frequent and hard. Two Hill Gigases or eight of those Fire8-casting things ambushing you and practically casting it 16 times on everyone before you get to make a single move is really annoying (in NES, that would probably make me hate the game for years without the turbo boost since you have to watch the slow spell animation 16*4 = 64 times). I found Mysidian Tower to be another equally annoying place.