Early Dragon Warrior games are really bad for this.. you continuously run into points during the games where you need to stop and grind on mobs for a few hours to get strong enough to progress.
I’d have to say the auto-battle and triple speed battle made Lunar doable. I would definitely have given up on the original release. You can grind so easily by just setting auto-battle, and then I half watched while talking to my kids or checking reddit or whatever. I only every played bosses manually.
Generally I find Chrono Trigger one games where you fight right on the regular map are better because they don’t need to load a separate scene for battles. Also killer battle music like Chrono, Superstar Saga and Final Fantasy VII really helps.
I have Earthbound and Final Fantasy III/6 on my to play list…