Aww, this makes me sad because I love the Final Fantasy games, although, to be fair, I haven't really played any before VII so I'm actually just a band-wagon jumper. I think there's always a fair amount of grind in these sort of games - at best it's rather zen-like, at worst it's tedious. I think as games have grown more sophisticated (gosh, that's an inadvertantly contentious status) it's easier to hide the grind but I usually find I can't play older games precisely because I'm completely intolerant of anything that isn't fun. Which, I guess, is fair enough because games are meant to be entertaining.

I'm very new to the Final Fantasy series, but I suspect I really ought to be playing the later ones - as you point out, the more sophisticated a game is, the easier it is to hide the grind. The Pools of Radiance series were meant to be the best Dungeons & Dragons-based computer RPG series ever back in the day, but I think anyone who's played Planescape: Torment or Baldur's Gate II would find them incredibly frustrating.

Hmmm. Nintendo DS looks pretty.

This is the problem with old games - I tend to revere them in my mind and then realise that I can't actually play them. I don't know if you ever played the Ultima or Ultima Underworld games but I thought they were *amazing* but my recent attempt to re-visit them has failed horribly. Horribly. Even the first Baldurs Gate Game is drifting slightly out of my patience zone, it just seems to horrendously unsophisticated these days. All the quests are fed-ex quests with no attempt to disguise them whatsoever: "Ho there adventurer! Fetch my boots." "Oh, okay."

I don't know if you ever played the Ultima or Ultima Underworld games
Ooh, I remember those! I can't help but be reminded, though, that the kind of machines those were designed for had about the processing power of DS, without any of the graphics know-how. So even DS games should be noticeably more shiny...