I will say the game's writing is definitely its strong suit, but the gameplay especially around combat is just where its weakest, almost every single fight in this game boils down to slap fights where 2 opponents are essentially damage trading there is no variety pressing the same button repeatedly until the other goes down with pressing a different button to avoid doing that even more with its "struggle mechanic", its just boring and I feel the game also tries to replace what could have been combat encounters with just gambling skill checks, like cassie's rescue is a prime example of this, you just save the game and load it repeatedly until you succeed and advance through the story, that's not very fun there is no actual challenge to overcome.
Eventually items become redundant to use in combat simply cause you start taking more damage than they restore.
Regarding grinding, I would like for a way to add personal gyms to locations, basically have the grinding spots close to rest areas, a little more base customization than just a dungeon
on a side note something that actually surprised me was the inclusion of gender-neutral pronouns but enforcing genitalia, so your character can't be agender with a poor excuse at the body workshop, I can only chalk this up to just making writing more complicated since you would basically have to account for nulls which is super niche