While it is true that the Japanese have finally stopped "dumbing down" the international releases of their games, leaving most of the bite in, they're still significantly easier than the majority of the games I played back in the 1980s. I'd say it has to be by a pretty fair margin too, because when I go back and play a lot of my old games, I feel a pretty fair difference in difficulty between those and the majority of games that are released now. Of course, I also never cheated in my RPGs - I remember using GameShark to do crazy stuff in all kinds of titles, like ultra jumping in Mario, but I guess it never occurred to me to use it for Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest, Crystalis, etc.