I suspect you reflexively cheesed the game, mainly because I absolutely recall that when we gave-in and looked up guides for this fight, every single one of them that we found at the time advised us to cheese the fight. Not one simply presented a strategy or alternative. They were all like, “Oh, yeah, that fight. You gotta cheese it.” We both found the idea of having to cheese a fight to win distasteful, so we just quit with a shrug.

That was our experience. It was a bad game for us because of that, and I thought I had made that clear.