Spell Binders

I seldomy feel the need to review a game but while this experience wasn't terrible and there is plenty of artistic merit, so many things drag this game down to being a MESS. The absolute biggest gripe with this game I have is the gameplay. I tried for a long time to play this without cheating and got up to the basement boss fight without doing so. THAT WAS A MISTAKE. Yes I know you can turn the battles off but a) there is no obvious way to level grind other than fight the random mooks near a healing orb, b) boss fights are once only. The game has 3 main people you have to work with. I couldn't figure out how to get the ice mage, but frankly I don't care to make the attempt. Yes I got the spirit mage but his utility is EXTREMELY situational to the point where I only used his properly against bosses. But for the gameplay loop... Man is this miserable. The fights are very unengaging with few hint of originality. Even when you change the setting to fastest, they are a slog and it doesn't help at all that there is only 1 good character to play with when spamming the attack button and nothing else which is what you are doing for most fights. It is the most tedious way to handle combat because you just run into enemies and hold z for a while and wait and wait and wait. Rinse and repeat. This is the fastest way to get through battles bar the boss fights. That COULD have been manageable enough, but the maps quickly get mazelike further increasing the tedium dramatically because enemies respawn on screen transition and it is an in universe joke that we have to backtrack into these maze areas a lot. Avoid this game but in the slim chance that the dev is reading this then good sir or mam: Refine the battle system to have no random encounters but make every mook a puzzle, heavilly reduce the monster quanities that aren't bosses, give players a constantly updating quest log with a vague idea of where to go, give NPCs icons above their heads if they have more content, have a treasure chest log per area indicating how many treasures out of the total were gotten, reduce treasure chests with only items/gold, give players a good way to grind for gold, focus mostly on having new costumes to find, make everyone basic attack viable and specific magic use viable while giving players full heals after every fight which would allow for more interesting regular fights.