I've been playing this game for a fair number of hours, despite it seemingly just getting started.  Nice to see someone IS trying to build a real epic.

But I have... so many problems with this game.  When you were designing the combat to be challenging, you succeeded, it is challenging, but not in a good way.  It's not a matter of preparation or understanding mechanics or anything like that.  It reminds me of old school D&D a bit, where you are so weak that it's largely down to RNG whether you end up dead in your first battle.  For a small party of lv1s, you might lose to a pair of random goblins, all it takes is a bad first round and everyone sucks so if they land the first crit that's it.

This game has that in spades, whether I can win any of the fights or not is largely down to whether I get unlucky and 2-4 enemies target Feyule or Wisest in a turn or two.  The items given are few enough in number that the long fights lead to endless attrition and while there's ways to steal MP and lots of MP items the items are small and you go through 5-8 of them in one long fight.  I'm starting to wonder if I was supposed to grind out another 40 or so battles in an easier zone before the random encounters got really difficult.  The reality is, I'm pretty much out of heal items now, I can't keep going fighting and every set encounter and boss battle has a maybe 30% chance of wiping half my team.  There's no heals in the closed set and very, very long dungeon segments, beyond items you pick up which aren't enough to overcome the attrition from random encounters.

You clearly have talent writing and I can see that this is written in a specific way that it could be novelized or used as a movie or serial script easily.  You work descriptive action into it regularly, people act a certain way, and it all builds the scene in your head such that you can kind of understand it.  I'm not sure whether I like the fantasy or not, it's still too early to tell what the point of the fantasy elements are, beyond maybe a reason for things to happen that aren't entirely understandable. Here comes the but, but I can't stand that constant pauses.  Even with the button held down, which by default puts RPGmaker games into a sort of fast forward of skip text, continue, skip text, continue, etc, the text displays one line at a time, there's usually four or five stop pauses in EVERY paragraph, it's intended to introduce a natural pause a la the end of a statement as you'd experience in conversation but when you have literally several hours of non-combat "cutscenes" at a time it's infuriating I'm not even allowed to read at my own pace.  I don't need there to be pointed pauses every time Feyule does... really anything, I understand the intent with the character being naive and stopping to consider everything all the time but every single conversation I have this stop and wait and I'm waiting for the conversation to end so I can do something and that's NOT good for any RPG.  The point is the narrative, that doesn't mean it's a good idea to make dealing with the narrative an extra chore like we have to put up with a plodding pace in order to be allowed to enjoy the story.

Sorry if this comes overly critical, you clearly put a lot of love into the game, and you have a lot you could teach to a lot of people making these games.  I think, honestly, that someone like you could easily direct a team to make a full realized modern game, but I feel like you should recognize that it feels like you have an idea of what the RPG audience is and you're trying to punish them for being that way. 

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.