I kinda figured. Does part 1 and 2 entail a lot of grinding? I tried it a while back. Couldn't get back the first slime boss. I barely scraped by the regular ones.
The amount of grind has varying factors. Difficulty, what characters you want to use and how much you care about synthesis. On hard and using few characters the grind would be about the same as slightly grindy jrpg's. Even with heavy synthesis focus. On paradox difficulty and switching out characters the grind starts to build up. Though it does become more manageable later in the game especially as you unlock more jobs that help with grinding. Also, multiple times you will gain characters who will already be fairly well built up and either take little or no investment to be helpful (when they join).
While I like doing things myself I decided to use two mods, The Cheese and the difficulty exp mod. Playing on paradox, doing all synthesis and building up multiple people would have been pretty grindy otherwise. I've been able to use these mods to keep the grind at a normal level and through my own choices I haven't used them to become overpowered.
The cheese gives you several options like adding gold and items. I used this to get job and race xp seeds and if I'm missing weapons after being extremely thorough in exploration and doing synthesis I use it for that too, except part 3 has synthesis weapons you can only obtain by going through both routes so I didn't use cheats there.
The difficulty exp mod has options for increasing base xp, race/job xp, and gold gain (you have to make sure it's set on the same difficulty you're using). I used this in conjunction with xp seeds so I could cut down on optional grind without actually feeling like I'm cheating too much because of all the optional grind I did take on.