A potentially great game ruined by the atrocious difficulty curve.

It's beautifully presented with gorgeous pixel art and great music. The map is well constructed, with lots of interconnections, secrets to find, and varied areas. I appreciated the ability to mark locations on the ingame map, which makes backtracking when you unlock new abilities easier.

The battle system seemed promising at first, with room for experimentation, easy swapping and catch up mechanics, and promises of every creature being potentially viable.

Unfortunately, the developers' ideas to escalate difficulty absolutely soured my experience. First, enemies scale, though surprisingly not by level, but by number of potential encounters discovered. So, if you actually explore the well-made map that you are encouraged to, you are punished by enemies that rapidly increase in difficulty.

Worst of all, rather than making higher level enemies more difficult due to deeper strategy, they just make them scale faster than you in damage dealt and absorbed. By mid game, battles became a slog that I wanted to avoid. By end game, you at best can do chip damage, while a bad roll means you can easily get one-shotted. The promised viability in different playstyles is gone, and really only one type of build is works: focusing on debuffs, because you absolutely can not keep pace with dps.

Once you outfit this build, the game becomes completely trivialized, because there is a level cap you'll hit only two-thirds through. Not only are battles no longer enjoyable, now you are completely disincentivized in engaging in them at all, as they no longer provide any benefit.

These are mechanics that are designed to punish you if you engage with them. Do yourself a favor and don't.