This game was so much better than FF1 in almost every way. You can see the first attempts at a narrative and story telling in this one that isn't "Save princess from evil dude". Wish the backstories of your three main party characters were explored, but the rest was interesting enough. The Emperor was weak as a villain though and I preferred the final boss of FF1 to this.

The mechanics get hated on for no reason. It's actually very fun to level up in this game. Putting a shield on all my characters to level up their evasion had such a great payoff for the harder parts of the game. I never attacked myself to gain HP the ENTIRE game. I don't know why you would do that and complain that you have to do that when you don't. You also get access to a location on the map to super grind if you wish to overlevel your stats and it's right next to a castle with a pub (FF1 also had this magic pixel area with harder enemies to farm but the pub was pretty far away).

The key word mechanic was also pretty cool. Didn't have issues with it personally.

Decent game but very far from the best of what FF has to offer.