I actually had some of the crappiest augment setups my first playthrough, due to being ignorant of how the system worked -- I thought it was wonderous that I finally beat the game yesterday. It took 10 levels of grinding before I could handle the final dungeon (everyone was in the middle 70s, and I gave Cecil the HP +50% Augment) though.

Zeromus was a disappointment to me, considering I thought he was hard as hell in Advance.