A significant boost in quality compared to the first NES/FC game with much less grinding outside the final area, more music and more unique enemy types helps with the repetition of tilesets and makes areas feel more distinct from one another.
The addition of party members and facing more than one enemy at a time drastically alters the combat dynamics compared to the first, which was closer to an RNG sort of puzzle box war of attrition where you needed to either outlast an enemy or get lucky with a sleep or fireball spell to deal with them appropriately as the game progressed, this one has a bit more strategy to it though it's a bit undercut by how many of the spells either become redundant or require that end game grind to use and aren't even that effective against the bosses in that end game dungeon.
The other big problem from the original that wasn't really addressed is the vagueness of many of the NPC hints about what items are required to progress, it's extremely unlikely that a player could stumble upon some of the items you need or intuit the advice they give without checking a guide to double check because it's just far too cryptic to aid you a lot of the time.
The end game dungeon is what really brings the game down from a solid 3.5 or 4 star experience though, it's just such a ridiculous slog even with speedup and I cannot imagine spending the hours necessary to do it legitimately when the enemies just don't give out enough XP to warrant how tough they are to defeat, not helped by the final boss being a massive difficulty spike in an of itself that I was at 1hp for my final party member before he finally died.
For those reasons I'd probably recommend most people just play one of the ports on SFC or GBC as they did rebalance the end game and other points to be less grindy and cryptic, but in its original NES/FC incarnation it's still got a fair amount of charm to it despite its relative simplicity and occasional bouts of head scratching and tedium.
The addition of party members and facing more than one enemy at a time drastically alters the combat dynamics compared to the first, which was closer to an RNG sort of puzzle box war of attrition where you needed to either outlast an enemy or get lucky with a sleep or fireball spell to deal with them appropriately as the game progressed, this one has a bit more strategy to it though it's a bit undercut by how many of the spells either become redundant or require that end game grind to use and aren't even that effective against the bosses in that end game dungeon.
The other big problem from the original that wasn't really addressed is the vagueness of many of the NPC hints about what items are required to progress, it's extremely unlikely that a player could stumble upon some of the items you need or intuit the advice they give without checking a guide to double check because it's just far too cryptic to aid you a lot of the time.
The end game dungeon is what really brings the game down from a solid 3.5 or 4 star experience though, it's just such a ridiculous slog even with speedup and I cannot imagine spending the hours necessary to do it legitimately when the enemies just don't give out enough XP to warrant how tough they are to defeat, not helped by the final boss being a massive difficulty spike in an of itself that I was at 1hp for my final party member before he finally died.
For those reasons I'd probably recommend most people just play one of the ports on SFC or GBC as they did rebalance the end game and other points to be less grindy and cryptic, but in its original NES/FC incarnation it's still got a fair amount of charm to it despite its relative simplicity and occasional bouts of head scratching and tedium.