Games of the NES era would often use this simple trick of hiding something simply beyond your ability to see the route you would take to get there. Dragon Warrior does this ALL THE FRICKING TIME with Treasure Chests. Rarely are they simply placed right in front of you. Zelda 1 would also do this quite a bit, but it knew how to make it interesting; virtually nothing inventory-wise is wasted in that game.
It's frankly kind of an annoying feature of early RPGs that simply pads out the gameplay, and half the time, the boosts you get from such sidetracks are marginal at best, unless you're close to the end of the game.
FFII is kind of a frumpily designed game to stick something like this DIRECTLY at the beginning. FFI and III don't do this. FFII is basically asking too much of you, too soon. The idea in any game should be that it's simple to pick up, learn, and effectively play, but then grows steadily more challenging and (Hopefully) interesting.
FFII eventually gets there. But it takes quite some time. I'd say around the time you finally fight the first boss, the game starts to pick up. But it is most definitely one of the slowest burners of the series.