Personally I played it through the GBA version using Tomato's translation and used the added easy ring to play. In terms of difficulty it still wasn't great, it was way too easy the whole time and suddenly became too hard near the end. So still sucked gameplay wise.

In general though, the game is pretty similar to EarthBound, and in some ways I felt EarthBound is just a heavily improved and refined version of the first game. The world is actually a bit more open in comparison to the other games which I found neat.

Here's some suggestions of how to play it