I played a bit of a FFIX level one game recently, and it's fun until you realise that essentially you're following a guide. If you can do it without one then fair play, but there's so much you could miss and only regret it ages after. It's not the kind of thing, sadly, that you can just recover from as you go.
Challenges are fun to issue yourself though. I do my best in games not to 'play by the numbers', that is, not to rely on knowledge of stats and things to play games. This is one of the things i don't understand about people who love World of Warcraft and stuff, the way you fall back on learnt formulae and so on. It's more fun, i find, to, for example, to use the weapons you enjoy using the most than to quickly switch to the one that'll make the area you're in as easy as possible.
This is one of the things that makes those challenge games on final fantasy stupid. It's not about skill or anything like that, it's about knowing exactly which very specific boxes to tick.
