Tried it out from the big bundle. Overall quite interesting though flawed, glad to see you've been developing a follow up.
Some relatively small tweaks could greatly improve it.
Played as knight, and generally focused on melee.
I’d split the phases of the game Into early-game, mid-game, and late-game
Early-game: when you don’t have any stats maxed
Mid-game: when you have one stat maxed
Late-game: when you have more than one stat maxed
The early-game was a bit frustrating, but I also only went to the store page and read the "How to Play" around the beginning of the mid-game, so it’s probably because I didn’t know what a lot of things did. I didn’t know that P was potions, and assumed that the “defensive stance” mark was the one potion I had. The game became much more fun to play once I realized I had more than one potion stock.
Mid-game starts getting grindy and tedious somewhere between 2-3 stats maxed.
This is when one wants to be able to speed up transitions and text appearing. But this is also the point where I found the game most interesting, where I had enough valid choices in combat to make interesting decisions. Perhaps have the initials levels come faster at first to make reaching this point faster, to reduce players quitting before it gets good.
-I had a misconception that the more consecutive “Explore” actions one did, the harder battles would get, with higher EXP rewards. It appears that it is actually a random encounter table based on level/stats.
Late-game one's stats are high enough that you can settle into an optimal rut and it is kinda boring as a result. It becomes a cycle to farm EXP because all other resources are plentiful. Events become pointless because you always have full money for potions and heals and the scroll isn't useful if the stat is maxed.
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Events have an issue with text being cut off at the top, which interferes with legibility as much as the font. In general, you should break a word to the next line if it can’t fit, as it is hard to read words which have only one or two letter broken to the next line. Seems you already know this though.
Scroll event is mostly frustrating after the beginning because it it doesn’t check if you have a maxed stat before awarding — leads to many times where you get an uncursed scroll, but it is useless anyway because it increased a stat that was already full, mostly intelligence. Ironically the first time it increased a stat other than intelligence, it was strength, which I had already maxed. I got to a point where I skipped all scroll events because they were useless to me.
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Below the stats, there is a bar labelled +, which was a mystery for awhile, and is not clearly explained in your How to Play. It represents how many stat points one has, but when you have stat points, the red arrows appear, and there is no reason not to use them as soon as you have one, so I don’t understand why there is a need for a bar to track them. It is unclear and unuseful because in almost all use cases, this is 0 or 1 - where 0 isn’t useful info, and 1 is also indicated by the red arrows and thus is redundant. It would be much more useful if this was a bar that showed EXP and how close you are to leveling up again. This would factor into choices about whether to go to town and recoup or explore again in hopes of leveling up.
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I never went to town to restore mana, because it passively refills, and by the point I had spells that used it, my physical attacks were way stronger and effective. The only spell I found useful was Heal, when I wanted to save potions during battles with weak enemies. But only using heal, mana recharged before I needed it again.
In general I didn’t find battle actions other than physical attack to be optimal. I really wanted defend to be useful, but it is only useful when you are a bit outclassed, and with only two rounds of buff, and it not working every time, it was really 50/50 whether it’s be more effective than just attacking.
By the time I built up enough Dexterity for Escape to be useable, I was so strong that it was a waste of EXP to use it. The fact that using it again doesn’t roll for another chance to escape seems a wasted opportunity, especially since it is possible to encounter an enemy that you cannot defeat.
I think this could be improved if some enemies were more susceptible to magic damage, or even impervious to physical damage like the WIsp, or the Ghost. This would validate using Magic attacks, and also for characters that don’t yet have magic, validate using Escape.
I appreciate that the stronger attacks and magic are more likely to miss, but it is random enough to eschew tactics regarding it. It would be nice if it had a system similar to Chrono Cross, where the more small hits you land, the more likely a big hit will also land, up to a point.
Sometimes the transition animation would just stay up after the transition period, obscuring the text. This only happened to me after I got to mid-game but I don’t know if that’s a coincidence or not. As a result, I already had memorized the possible text and button positions and was able to muddle through. I noticed this mostly on explore events, but I think it may have happened going to town also.
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I almost made it to the ending, with Dexterity nearly maxed, and Luck halfway, everything else maxed. But I had my friend take the controller while I took notes for this feedback, and they died to an Ogre. I’m not willing to go through the grind again, so gonna miss out on the ending.
Thus, I also recommend a save system be implemented, even if it’s only one save slot. It’s simpler than implementing some kind of meta game where the early game gets faster level ups based on how many times you’ve died or gotten further in the game…