I appreciate your feedback. I'm aware of how meh the game is, as I made it as my "first RPG maker game". While the sequel will be a lot better, I'm planning on saving most of the fun stuff on the third and final game. I intentionally held back on making the combat better for a few reasons: I didn't want the project to be so ambitious that it becomes impossible to complete, I originally wanted to make the combat sort of like OG Phantasy Star, and I have so many different plugins to play around with for future games that I kind of wanted to use this game as an opportunity to gradually learn how to use them rather than just use all of them at once. The combat is a bit grindy, but the game isn't really that difficult having play tested it myself, especially if you use Eleanor, the 4th party member you talked about, correctly. Her multi target magic skills can do quite a bit of damage to enemies and can be super useful mid game, especially in the frost region if you're using fire skills. Fun fact, all enemies have elemental weaknesses, except there's no bestiary or anything to tell you this, so you sort of have to figure it out. If you stay on top of your gear the game is pretty easy. Don't immediately go for Trinity and instead do a little exploring for better gear. I managed to beat the game in 5 hours while playtesting it. Also, don't sleep on Jaqueline's poison skill. The sequel will have much more skills for the mage class, as well as more mages in general, meaning the skill tree system will be used more. The chests being empty or booby trapped is inspired by Phantasy star, though I agree I could have mixed in a few more chests with actually good rewards. Three more things: enemies do drop items, it's about a 1/20 chance usually, which is higher than you think considering you'll be dealing with troops of between 2-4 enemies. The sequel will have an additional equipment slop dedicated to accessories that help add resistance to certain status ailments as well as reducing elemental weaknesses. Final point is balancing, balancing is extremely hard and I'll admit that I had to use a guide otherwise making this game would have taken forever and the end result would have likely been worse. This is probably why the overall balance of this game felt familiar to you, as I doubt I'm the only one who used this balancing strategy. I will try to improve the overall balance over the next two sequels. I apologize if this game didn't quite meet your expectations, but I greatly appreciate the fact that not only did you try it out, but played it for a good amount of time. Any feedback, even negative feedback, is valuable in my opinion.