Worth noting that there is a failure state that's costly to recover from.

This game can be tricky at times, harder than typical for games of that genre and era.

Yes, That's what makes it fun.

This may be true. But i recently was replaying Breath of fire, and you got into a battle every 5 steps or so it felt like. So even if you don't have to go in circles to fight enemies before you can continue, it is indeed very grindy. Talking 60-80 hours, for a game that you might complete without combat in like 3 hours.

Chrono Trigger, i recall having to grind a little, but it never felt like a huge chore; unless you're trying to get stat boost items from the final dungeons.

Mhmm... There's a few patches to increase xp and gold output but i still had issues trying to get through a handful of battles and level up enough to leave the first area. Badly balanced. Though i think the PS2 remake(s) were suppose to be a little better.

The PS2 remakes, aside from being Japan only, appear to be different enough that I'd consider them to be different games.

There are some english patched versions floating around. But yeah those aside, they are suppose to be nearly 1:1 remakes. Though i'd heard the underground crawling areas is more annoying due to the 3D and stuff they used.

Also supposedly the encoding the programmer did to encode animated sprites was quite efficient (in order to fit in the limited space), however makes patching difficult and hard to tell if all the sprites can be extracted or worked with.