I'm glad to get some real constructive criticism on this game. Thank you for playing long enough to formulate it, and I'll try to explain the thought process a little bit, though it's a little too deeply-established for me to make any real sweeping changes. Thank you for being respectful about it as well.
1. The combat is supposed to be challenging because, like most things in this project, I want even that to be immersive. You brought up early game in DND campaigns which I don't exactly have any reference to, never played anything like that sadly. However, the world is supposed to be a very dangerous place, and with the very slow-rolling explanations of how the world became so hostile, and how it's becoming even more hostile, it's part of the experience to me. I have made large nerfs to many different things in the early game (believe me, it used to be much more unforgiving), and have added plenty of new skills/items/buffs for the early game as well just to get you rolling a little bit more. Every single fight has been play-tested and found to be clearable with minimal petal usage, so fully buffing your party with them should make it a little easier. I even added the "Easy mode" cheats at the start of the game to hopefully ease some of this, though I guess the first real fights only take place 5+ hours into the game, so it might not be worth it to go back if you decide the game is too hard. Again, the RPG elements of this game are very clearly secondary to actual writing. I want the world to be just as deadly to you as it is to the setting, if that makes any sense. I will consider nerfing a few things further due to this, however.
2. The little stutters in the text is a direct attempt to make the scenes feel a little more "alive" in a way. Basically I view this entire game as my bootleg way of making my own anime, not my own manga. Because personally, manga tends to bore me. I fly through it way too quick and can parse through text much too fast for it to feel like it's worth it to me, and originally every single message in the game was like that. Just a big block of text that you could mash through really fast, and from my perspective, that makes everything interchangeable in presentation, nothing sticks. This really does just come down to what you're looking for in the game, I suppose. When I'm playing a good RPG with good gameplay, I tend to mash through the text immediately if possible, where the whole block appears on screen for 5 frames then vanishes. Obviously gotta mash through those so I can get back to the cool gameplay. I'm realistic to understand that Mint Garden's gameplay isn't anything revolutionary, and would rather focus entirely on the pacing of the story in all of its annoying little details. In The Elder Scrolls Online, it's the total opposite. I mash through the gameplay so I can get to the story elements, I enjoy the world and delivery so much that even though the text all appears instantly, I sit and wait for the entire voice-line to finish before proceeding. That's just how I immerse myself, and trying to bring that style of immersion into this story.
I do wish I could figure out a neat and easy way to "skip" or even just "fast-forward" through scenes a little bit. Originally, I didn't even bring up the save screen before bosses, so if you died to it, you'd have to watch the whole 15-minute scene again. This was particularly obnoxious on the Monstrous bossfight, which is where I started reworking everything so you can at least skip directly back to the fight if you need to.