Skimming over prior posts, it looks like most people are as, if not more, disgruntled about the EXP requirements. I'd like to be a bit constructive though:
Strictly speaking, the problem isn't necessarily the EXP rate or numbers, it's the lack of meaningful progress once you step up to the beach. I found it mildly annoying that I found a quest to hunt orca raiders, *after* I had already completed another quest for the same, and I could have been getting progress to both at the same time.
More to the point, there's a few ways you could approach the problem. Better gear options to help equalize the DPS gap between area shifts, more meaningful/longer lasting buffs, or tweaking the skills to be more adaptive and useful such as scaling with level more, or some skills/items that are high flat values for early game, that you'd ditch for percentage values mid/late game.
For a few examples:
-Maybe warn the player bosses are immune to stuns, *before* they get crushed by that fact? I walking into the wolf den boss fight with what had up to that point, been the most optimal fighting/farming gear: A ton of stun locking. I managed to use tactics to win on my 2nd or 3rd attempt, only to be greeted by a phase two. I remember thinking to myself that up to this point, the game had been pushing me towards the idea that bringing a bunch of units, and not being bothered by them going down as long as I win the fight, maybe meant that as long as I triggered the 2nd phase, maybe the boss would still be in it when I came back healed? Nope! Start over from phase 1 again like any other game.
Which in turn meant that with the scarcity of gear, skills that don't improve, and no other quests to do, the ONLY solution is to grind like a motherfucker until my unit's levels are equal to hers? That always is going to taste like shit to the player. Yes, grinding should always be an option, a nice safe fall back, but it should be the thing you resort to because you can't, or don't want to, use the more efficient methods. Such as learning the tactics and strategies the game wants to teach you, or exploring and taking advantage of all the resources available. It's the complete lack of alternate options that makes the current state of the wolf boss so abrasive to everyone I feel.
-I was very shocked to learn that it wasn't just in my head, as soon as I added my third unit, my EXP gains went from already slow, to even slower. I had not noticed the EXP from the reward screens was being split between units. I would say the fastest and easiest way you could address the current grind issue would be to stop splitting the exp. With just some quick math in my head without actually calculating it, the drastic difference it would make to not have the EXP divided in 3 would greatly improve the leveling pace to catch up to the wolf boss. As it is, you're basically punishing the player for bringing a full team, by making it virtually impossible to level all of them at any speed greater than a snails. Which in turn, means you want the player to sit down, take a single unit out and grind them to the needed level, then come back and swap...and do that again two more times. Either way, you're more-or-less tripling the grind time requirements...for no reason that I can tell? Prior to this, I'd have said the game was encouraging us to bring a full roster, because units getting knocked out has no penalty at all as long as you win the fight, and now I'm not sure if the way the cow's healing skill revives downed allies was intentional design or an accident.
If every unit in the team got the listed EXP value on the reward screen as shown, instead of divided in three, not only would the grinding pace improve, but catching up new units to your current levels would smooth out as well. As it is, the fastest option is to ditch two members and go back to the start, and slowly grind them up the same path your current units used, only this time you aren't getting any rewards from quests to speed it up. Sure, you can bring a set of bronze equipment and dropped weapons to help speed it up a smidge, but those equipment aren't worth much to start with and have no better upgrades available, so the loss in quest rewards is far greater, not to mention that by that point, the player likely has the rare deer leader enemy randomly showing up, which means that while trying to catch up a new unit, they could easily risk getting their face caved in. That doesn't come with much of a penalty, just some gold loss, but it sure does feel like yet more ass to add to the pile.
-Speaking of skills, I would like to point out a potential source of further frustration. Since you've tied the Growth Type to a skill, and possibly stat growth as well (although I haven't actually checked and tested whether that is true yet, correct me if I'm wrong), you've created a scenario where a new player, much like myself, may very well choose the same type for all the units, and never realize they're crippling their options. Furthermore, with how you've set up the re-spec for growth type, it's even more punishing, because it wasn't until I hit the wolf boss that I encountered a roadblock strong enough to make me question if I was doing something wrong. The flip side of this, is that you may well have designed the game in such a way as to make players have to take a growth type they really don't like just to be tactically viable. The "Image Select" is a nice enough stop-gap measure for this, but even when I tried to change out one my units for another growth type, I was very shocked to discover that you've set it so when you do that, not only does it cost a huge amount of gold, but you also lose all of the characters levels? Even though it seems like you refund that into EXP boost, that still means YET MORE GRINDING, which as things stand, sets up a scenario where a player tried changing a units growth type to obtain more tactical options to avoid grinding, only to be slapped in the face with a yet harder grind, because if they want that EXP boost to get back into the same unit, they have to then ditch the team members to avoid it splitting 3 ways, and solo grind that unit back to pace with the current members as if you got a new unit.
I feel like either changing the growth type shouldn't reset the level if you're keeping the current grind-focused game pace, or the re-leveling aspect should be WAY easier than it is now, because if the player is doing it to rebalance the team for mechanical reasons instead of to see more art, it feels like shooting yourself in the foot to spite your face. You may or may not have actually helped yourself and have no way to know for certain until you've done a shit-load more of the very thing you were trying to avoid, and can test it against the boss when you've recovered what you sacrificed. Plus, since there's no where in the game that tells you what skill the growth types grant you unless you have them to see, it never even occurred to me that the second skill slot could be anything other than what it was for my entire playthrough until I hit the wolf boss.
If it's going to be such a major production to change growth types, then it needs to be more rewarding and transparent I would think. Tell the player at the start of the game, and again when choosing a re-spec what skills or scaling the growth type has an effect on. Since it's the skill the unit's growth grants, it should SCALE with that growth and become stronger, not just as a percentage of this or that, but the effect should expand or grant additional effects at each or certain growth stages, instead of a fixed single percentage. This would not only be more mechanically useful to the player, but it would be thematically appropriate to the games story as well, since the characters frequently point out that the mana fueled growth makes them stronger.
-Currently, there isn't any real trade-off between the ease of fighting weak enemies, and the challenge of fighting stronger ones. Usually, games would be designed to reward the player in some way for fighting stronger enemies. However, with the current mechanics of the game interacting with each other, the player is actually punished for this. To fight the stronger enemies that give more EXP, you have to bring more units and let them get knocked out to win even a single fight...only to have that higher EXP get divided by the number of units. In other words, if you weren't already packing a unit strong enough to solo the fight, trying to get that solo strength will be penalized and slowed down. This in turn means its more efficient to ditch as many units as you can, while still fighting the strongest unit you can defeat in 1-2 shots. Furthermore, because of how the EXP boost system works, this is even more efficient because it can quickly empty out the boost pool into a single unit, instead of diluting it through the 3-way split. However, this then loops back to the problem that only one unit is getting EXP, which means you need to then take this ENTIRE tedious process, and repeat it fully 2 or more times for each unit you have.
-On at least one layer, you could easily help relieve some of this burden by adding repeatable quests. Not only would this add more rewards for doing a tedious set of uninteresting fights you've already completed for the sake of grind, but you could use it to encourage the player to take those more challenging fights and engage with the tactics of your systems by having much higher scaling repeat quest rewards for set of stronger enemies. If I may though, I remember getting a quest towards the end of the game that only counted 2 out of the 3 sea raider types. Since the player has no influence over what enemy they fight, this is absurdly annoying and adds yet more tedium, especially since as far as I could tell, the escape button is useless against anything as strong as, or stronger than you. In other words, its useless against the #1 thing a player would want to use the escape button for. Please always have quests for an area accept all enemy types from that area. It's fine if it doesn't count the rare spawn enemy types, but all of the common types should always count towards quests.
That more or less sums up my best suggestions for taking the edge off the grind that more or less completely halts player progress at around level 30, when you get a third unit, run out of quests, and don't have anymore equipment or items you can obtain to improve.
My more nitpicky ideas:
-Please improve the mechanic for feeding the shark lady on the beach, Maris? Having to slowly drag a single fish at a time wasn't great. Off the top of my head, if the idea is to prevent using a fish the player didnt want to give away on accident, set it up so you click a fish, and then a 'feed' button pops up next to it. Then, when you click it, the fish just animates over to her instead. Or double clicking. Not sure which of those is easier to set up in the games engine, given its originally a VN system.
-I would personally like being able to switch between the AI and Drawn art on the fly, instead of through a series of menus. It's fine if it doesn't immediately update in most places, but especially during level ups, it would be great if I could toggle it to see both sides. This would also be a good opportunity to explicitly point out to the player that a given growth stage doesn't have a Drawn image yet. That would be good in general.
-Perhaps set up the Image Select system in the team management menu, to have a fully visible slider bar with nodes on it for each growth stage that exists? Then, only allow the slider to go up as high as the player has unlocked. It would provide a quick and easy location for players to see how many more growth stages they have left, and whether they have art yet or not. For instance, you could have a D above a node, and an A under it, each representing what art, if any, a growth stage has currently. If I remember what I read while skimming correctly, currently the stages are every 5 levels, and then slow to every 10 at some point? In the event you later decide to add more 5-increment art, it would provide an easy to see and review location for players that either already have that level, or for players who stopped developing one of the characters growth stages to quickly notice that new art was added for a particular path. It would also help for when there's a gap between Drawn art for stages, that only have AI art currently.
All together, I like most of the game, but the lack of options to progress besides some of the worst EXP grinding I've ever experienced, has rather brought my interest to a halt.
Note that I also say that as someone who loves a slow burn, both for stories and art shifts, and is still to this day quietly grinding away at the first Disgaea game's item worlds. I am by no means opposed to grinding...but I would prefer it to actually be fun while I'm doing it, y'know?