Hi! My apologies in advance for the novel to follow. I wanted to provide as much detail as possible regarding my experience in the hopes of providing actionable feedback. I'm hoping it comes across as such, rather than an attempt to roast the game.
I'd like to see the intro display something other than a black screen with the dialog boxes. Seems like a lost opportunity.
Is there any way to convey the characters' classes/roles other than that kind of chunky tutorial text? Something that also demonstrates their personalities might be better. (EDIT: I don't have any sense of what makes these characters tick, even as far as the maze section)
"This should be easy". Enemy proceeds to deal 2/3 of Eliza's HP in damage in one turn. If the third attack had gone her direction I would have lost a character instantly, which seems weird for an opening battle. I didn't use Taunt because the characters said it would be easy, and the hint text said that skill was for harder battles, so it kind of felt like a gotcha to be honest. Maybe you have something in place to where Eliza can't die in the fight and it's just cinematic, but it doesn't establish a great feel right off the bat.
The tutorial text assumes keyboard rather than controller. Would be an easy fix to just mention which buttons are mapped on your average X Box or generic gamepad. Though, I think it would be better still to use a key rebind plugin and direct the player there to configure their own control scheme.
The second wave of guards doesn't have that crazy triple attack skill, or maybe it was just bad RNG on the intro battle. I'd still suggest making the intro fight not have a chance to kill Eliza out of nowhere, if it doesn't already.
I don't like stuff with such a low % chance of working, but it's OK-ish for damage skills which just happen to have secondary effects. Cure, on the other hand, should never have a % chance to work. That feels extremely bad, and I would never waste 10 MP and potentially a turn on that. (EDIT: I never really found a need to remove States, which isn't a sign that they are well designed)
NOTE: can you put in the skill descriptions which ones are instant-cast? It feels like Heal and Taunt don't take an action, but I have no way to confirm that's actually how it works other than observation.
Curiosity: why does magic do fixed damage, but physical scales with ATK? Fire and Light are already super weak versus literally anything Ryoma can do, since he now has THREE skills which deal multiple hits, each of which deals in excess of 100 damage. BTW, he learned Dual Attack at level 4, but he already had the skill at level 1. Was he not supposed to have this starting off?
These battles pose literally no threat now since I level up every time and the DEF scaling seems to make enemy attacks do negligible damage.
Got Fire 2 already. The % chance is high enough to maybe proc sometimes, great. Its damage is already lower than Ryoma's Dual Attack, though, and I just learned it. Plus Fire1 is completely useless, since I don't have to worry about MP conservation given how this leveling system works. Incidentally, I don't level up every encounter now (which is good), but there isn't a sense of danger or attrition to any of the battles. I also get one or more potions from every fight.
Enemy detection is kind of wonky. Sometimes they make an alert emote but don't approach or speed up.
I found a Buckler, cool. Wait why does it REDUCE my Guard Effect from 100% to 5%?! I think it was supposed to increase it to 105%, perhaps? Well, Imma equip it anyways because the DEF bonus warrants it.
Please consider using a plugin that makes it so moving events stop moving when an event / dialog box is playing. I just got stopped by a random "I think this is where the secret passage is" text box, which felt weird because he just said he didn't know where the passage was 30 seconds ago, then 3 guards mobbed me. Very tedious, because at this point enemies are just bags of hit points and treasure.
The Eliza solo fight was the closest thing to a strategic battle I've had this far. Felt pretty good to exploit the slime's weakness right away, but the rest of the battle was sketchy because it felt like if both soldiers used their OP skills on the same turn I would just be dead. So, used Sweep to stun one guy, used Heal every turn to top off, and used Dual Attack to chop down the enemies. At this point it dawned on me that TP recovers so quickly from damage taken that I have practically unlimited. I'd strongly suggest reducing the TP gain rate.
Ran into the secret passage (the black screen eventing once again felt lazy tbh) and then wandered around the maze for a bit looking for levers. Nothing new or exciting at this point, and unfortunately I am not invested at all in the story because it's so generic and there are no character moments. Actually, at this point it's barely a story, it's a series of plot events. And the gameplay is not compelling either.
I don't want to harp on the mapping too much because it looks like a previous reviewer covered that, but I will concur that it needs a lot of work. Not just mapping however; the level design itself is subpar. I think you could do more interesting things with having to be stealthy and not just farm all the battles in these huge rooms, though that would require fixing whatever mechanism is driving the enemy alerts.
I know this is a big update to an existing game and it seems like a lot of effort has been spent in establishing scope and setting up later characters and story arcs, but with an introduction this clunky I feel like a lot of players will tap out before you get there. My advice would be to refocus that effort into quality rather than scale. If the game was polished I could somewhat forgive a lot of the less-than-original mechanics and tropes and the vanilla gameplay, but the combination of poor balancing, obvious database mistakes, and generally questionable systems design make it very tough to trudge through.
I hope this info is useful and that you find success in continuing to improve your project.