I never liked the 3D Final Fantasy games as much as the 2D ones. I remember FF 1 having a lot of bugs and glitches like powerlving by fighting high level monsters that spawned on a low level area, or the fact that all the "weapon of slaying X monster" didn't work, and many other buffs and stats didn't work.
I didn't know they were bugs when I played it, I thought those buffs were minimal and those monsters were supposed to be there, so I enjoyed it anyways.
It's not polished at all, you get lost easily without a guide, farming XP it can get boring sometimes, and there's a lot of reasons to say it's a bad game... but this is where all Final Fantasy games come from, and it was 1987, Square didn't know any better, nobody did. I was told by people that played it on release date that it was lifechanging to have graphics on a RPG game, they were used to play them on plain text, and that's why there's a screen that explains what's going on when you fight. I find that amazing and it's the main reason why I think this game is actually pretty good, even if it's bad by today's standards, in 1987 this was the best RPG on the NES.