Grinding doesn't make a game hard. Infact, it makes the game a million times easier. The hardest part about grinding levels for 5 hours is trying not to realize what an incredible waste of time it is. I love hard games. I love hard JRPGs. The only way to make them hard is to eliminate any ability to grind. Killing monsters that are trivial for you to kill is the antithesis of difficulty.

The first Dragon Warrior was the worst for it. It dealt basically with grinding and colllecting gold and moving to the next area and repeat and to the next repeat with a limited story also.

I think RPGs should have sub-bosses that gives you massive gains in XP so that it'll suddenly open up "XP-inassessable" regions/monsters to you as the game flows, so that you don't have to do much grinding. I hate how some games were designed such that drawn out grinding is necessary to progress, it disrupts the flow of the game and its story.

Games like Final Fantasy should also allow playback of cut-scenes after you've completed the game (perhaps after having done it twice with the second time in a harder mode).

The characters will always remind you because the game wants to make sure you don't get stuck on the Full Moon with a party too weak to beat the boss. Usually, if you can manage to get to the top floor you should be fine come the next full moon.

Grinding or senseless random encounters are just simply stupid. Remember senseless encounters. Seriously how many bears can a cave support? in any sense the ecology would only handle a few at best. Though there hundreds by time you walk through the cave. Even if you don't walk around looking for encounters you end up grinding levels just cause there are so many encounters to the next place.

To prevent any unnecessary grinding, what I usually do in any RPG/JRPG is this: when I enter in a new area, I try to defeat all the enemies I can in them (depends if they respawn though, I'll usually defeat it only once). If it's an old-school RPG with random encounters, I'll defeat any enemies until a save point appears before a boss or I exit the area.

Usually, you'll be able to get through the game quite easily without being too overpowered, so there's still a little challenge in the game (RPGs are not the hardest games on Earth anyways, it sucks to make them easier by overleveling!!). Also, developers are not silly enough to add 20-30+ hours of boring grinding instead of adding more story material (at least I hope so).

Final Fanasy wise, I don't know why but I love the feel of the random encounters. It adds a certain atmosphere to it can I can't explain, and the latter FF games w/o random encounters have kinda lost this "feel". But many times it can get really annoying...I think they should had lowered the frequency of encounters so that people who are seeking out a fight has to do a lot more strolling than they normally would while just simply traveling through the storyline.