I'm sorry to say this, but I abandoned my playthrough - after having tried this game out for about 2 hours - due to the following issues:

- Battles take forever and are badly balanced, and since this issue is apparent in many games made with RPG Maker MZ, I suspect that party member and enemy "templates" have simply been copied & pasted.

- Party members have only few skills at their disposal, and most skills are either weak/useless or learned too late. There's even a whole skill learning sub-menu in the menu, yet it's empty and doesn't even let the player learn a single skill (with regards to the first three party members, though at least the fourth party member can - and must - learn skills this way). The first three party members don't have any healing skills, which means the player must invest money in the (weak and overpriced) healing items, but that's not an (immediate) option, because it's more important to buy the overpriced - and rather subpar - equipment upgrades.

- Speaking of equipment: There are only three equipment slots for each party member. If that wasn't bad enough, equipment variety is practically non-existent. As mentioned above, you can buy overpriced equipment with its meager stats boosts, but RNG and the bad balance will ensure that you don't feel any stronger. The same applies to the level-ups, which take forever to achieve and don't make much of a difference (if any at all).

- Another variety that's practically non-existent: enemy variety. Be prepared to always fight the same few enemy types for a long time (and in quick succession thanks to the high random encounter rate). What's even worse: Enemies don't seem to drop any items (defeating them only yields EXP and Gold). So you can either use your Gold to buy healing items, yet burn through your resources quicker than you can earn Gold to buy the next batch of healing items, or you can backtrack to an inn after 1 to 3 fight(s). When the fourth member, which finally sports a weak single-target healing skill (if you choose to learn it first), joins the party, you're tempted into thinking the experience will suddenly become smooth from now on, but it's just a scheme to make the player waste even more time on playing this game.

- Most of the dungeons feature limited visibility, which gets old pretty fast. There's only a very limited number of treasure chests to discover - most of them contain only Gold, some of them are empty or even "booby-trapped" (upon opening them, the party takes damage).

- Most houses in villages can't be entered (or to be more precise, entering them opens a menu instead of letting the player explore the interior).

- Apparently, there aren't any hidden items to discover (poor barrels, your purpose has been denied).

I have a high tolerance for grinding, but this game - and especially the battle system - simply isn't fun. My recommendation is to rage-quit a playthrough of this game rather sooner than later (or, preferably, not to start any at all).

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.

As for the skills for the non-mage classes. Them even having skills was honestly a last minute decision, which is why the variety and quality of skills they have at their disposal is so lacking. Originally I planned on keeping their skills as they are for the sequel, but maybe I should increase the amount of skills available to them now that I've read what you wrote.