Unfortunately when you don't play some of these games as a kid, it loses it's sense of "discovery". As an adult, you take the most logical approach which would be to grind out the game to eat all the sushi and buy all the books you can to power up, then the game is super easy. As a kid you just eat stuff, see what they do and go back to power up some more when you realize beating the boss is too difficult or near impossible. The password system isn't that terrible. I thought of them as a cool feature that just took a little extra effort.