Final Fantasy Legend III: Defeat

I have reached the point in Final Fantasy Legend III where I believe I can no longer make progress. My ship which was once able to travel between time periods broke and stranded me on another world. This is normal. The game was designed taking this into account. You're supposed to be able to get things done and complete the game from this point. Unfortunately you run into a strange race of beings blocking the way. The only way to get up the stairs they're guarding is to cast the morph spell. A spell you can only obtain in the future. Which you don't need to get to the other world. Which I don't have. Which I can't get.

I was thinking this game was better than the previous ones in the series. They mostly got rid of consumable weapons. They switched to a MP system. They allowed you to swap between character types on the fly so you could experiment without getting permanently screwed. Robots still seem like the best and monsters feel a little underwhelming but it wasn't way out of whack. Every fight felt like it moved the party closer to being powerful. The story felt a little more coherent but still pretty surreal.

And then it took a page right out of the Manders' RPG. I didn't pick up an item I didn't know I needed and can no longer beat the game. Maybe I should restart from scratch. Maybe I should check to see if I still have a save state from before I left the future. Maybe I should try to hack the game and add the morph spell to my inventory. But I just don't care enough to do so. I want to move on to the next game in the marathon. I'm playing through all the games and can no longer make progress in this game thanks to terrible game design and I'm going to count that as good enough. And give this game the worst rank thus far.