Quote Originally Posted by Berserker View Post
It is a hard game, and it does have some poor design choices. The most egregious one to my mind is the hammer quest.

You need the hammer to progress in the game, and the hammer is in Death Mountain, which is filled with these awful hatchet monsters. There's no way to block their attack (at that point), and they back up when you try to jump over them. The only way to really kill them without getting your ass handed to you is to use the downward thrust... which is in a town you need the hammer to get to.

That's a design error.
I got around this by grinding. It was the first game where I recognized that killing a bunch of minor monsters would pay off later by leveling up and making me borderline invincible. At the time I thought I was a genius.