Put over 20 hours into this game. There's a point near the end where it cranks up the difficulty in a way that's incredibly unpleasant. I went on forums and did some reading. There doesn't seem to be much you can do about it besides grossly manipulating some of the subsystems in a gamebreaking way for hours on end, in order to MAYBE squeak out enough EXP to bring you to the finish line.

I guess 90s RPGs had difficulty spikes that were part and parcel for the time, but I'm in my 30s and I'm not going to spend hours grinding.

I'll watch the ending on youtube.