Final Fantasy 30th Anniversary: The Worst of Final Fantasy - Part 1: FFI, II, III

Well...I think the early FF's (1-7) were the best ones, so I guess we wait for my article

But this part sounds wrong: They're guaranteed to miss an attack at least 2/3rds of the time, stretching otherwise trivial battles to the point of absurdity
Were you in the back row?  It shouldn't be like this.

The NES version of FF1 didn't have rows. The party order determined how often certain characters would be targeted. Heavily-armoured characters would be moved to the front, while mages were shuffled to the back.

Anyway, yeah. the hit-rate is ridiculously low in the first few hours of FF1. I don't have screenshots handy, but classes had a startling low chance to hit. I'm talking 10-15% for a monk and 20-25% for a fighter. It smooths out after several level-ups, but the first few hours are still annoying with the near-constant misses.