It’s time to do the drill, LEVEL POWER UP TIME!

In any properly-designed and adequately balanced RPG you shouldn't be able to level up so much you just whomp a boss on virtue of pure stats alone. FF lets you do this for some godforsaken reason, but most of the better RPGs I've played have a point at which you can level up so as not to be COMPLETELY eaten for lunch, but at which point you are also forced to employ strategy as the boss isn't getting any easier. Whether by stat-matching (FF8, Lunar) or by giving the boss certain elemental advantages and disadvantages (Megaten, LoD) or a secret-weapon attack to employ against cheesiness (DDS secret boss, FUCK YOU Gaea's Repast).

It was a real bitch, too, finding that out after transitioning from Final Fantasy over to real RPGs, as I was still expecting to out-level and subsequently decimate bosses. Rude awakening.

Now I level up in cases wherein I lose in 3 turns or less as I'm quite obviously not ready for the boss. I still, though, pay attention to what exactly the boss is doing and see if I can figure out patterns or stat weaknesses to employ against him.

Nowadays Final Fantasy bosses piss me off as it's too often a case of "figure out the super-damaging secret attack that will let you summarily pwn every boss in the game and finally stand a chance against this one." No. Fuck the you. Fortunately, other Squaresoft franchises don't have this problem (SaGa Frontier/Romancing SaGa comes to mind).

Jam it back in, in the dark.