Hi and thanks for playing. I'm glad to hear that you found the world intriguing and that I was able to make a genre that you don't normally like appealing.
It's good to hear that you were able to backpedal and get the August Attire even after skipping it. The "hey you missed an important item" is pretty blunt I feel, but I was worried that some players might just ignore that message, find the game too hard and quit.
I think it's been a fairly universal opinion that [on Intended Experience difficulty] Sarcoph August is a bit too challenging, and that Orobas, Oracle Of Obscurity is too easy. Especially considering that most players will fight Sarcoph first. I've already made Orobas more challenging, and I hope to tweak Sarcoph later today.
I feel that in terms of getting the most out of development time, the sort of boss-rush format is a very practical choice for me. It takes me a long time to design and implement bosses, so it's good that I can usually squeeze a good 10-30 minutes of gameplay out of players for most of them. Normal enemies would still take while to develop, but probably wouldn't provide as much dev-to-gameplay time value. The other issue is that I think that hiding behind terrain and kiting would be very powerful when fighting enemies on the overworld, so I would almost be required to make areas have an arena-like design in order to make enemies work well, I feel.
That isn't to say that I'll never explore the idea of having lower-tier challenges. Maybe something interesting would be to have some weaker enemies that you fight on their own, only to have them appear later as minions during a boss fight. We'll see!
Thanks for your feedback!