Duly noted, it has become abundantly clear that a visual tutorial is needed. I will admit that I was trying to avoid making a full fledged tutorial, but, seeing how the video I posted cleared things up, this is one of those cases where showing how matching works gives information that would be too difficult to convey in writing.
>Tangled mode was actually even harder for me
I personally find it harder as well (depending on how many moves you can do), hence why I made it a malus. The reasoning is that, when matching normally, what usually happens is that you plan a route to tidy up a side of the board, and can usually tackle the other side without having planned ahead, because the area is smaller and lets you ad-lib without getting lost. When your amount of moves is fixed however you really want to try and be efficient not only on this large scale, but also locally, because you're rewarded for fixing any combo that's near your held orb (and sometimes as a result you get "caged in" your own combos, forcing you to undo one of them to get out and wasting time). Plus as you said oftentimes the most efficient move to make is a diagonal one, and they're hard to pull off consistently.
>From my point of view, the (?) stages were counterproductive, because it'd make me go against a more difficult enemy sooner.
Well spotted, the fights at the first few depths are pulled from an easier encounter table, so using an event node at the start has this drawback.
>In terms of visual communication, the fact that only the enemy HP has a bar and the rest is just numbers meant that it'd feel pretty underwhelming whenever I was doing anything other than raw damage, especially because I was mostly focused on actually learning to get matches and not paying too much attention on the stats part.
I'm not quite sure what are you referring to, are you talking about block and evasion coming off as less important than damage?
>does *anyone* do this kind of high-speed match-3 gameplay where you're supposed to rearrange many pieces before they combine?
The only other game I know of is Puzzle and Dragons, which I shamelessly took a page from; everything else seems to follow the traditional candy crush single swap. The fact that this latter style of gameplay dominates the genre is probably yet another reason why a hard to play/not casual match-3 game needs a tutorial.
Finally, thanks for the kind words on the UX, it's reassuring to hear that it doesn't feel as cheap/rushed as its creation was.