So, now almost 5 hours into Get in the car, Loser!, in the middle of Stage 2, and, sorry, but eh, this is just mostly doubling down on what’s bad about grind in RPGs.
(Yes, once you get Level V items, there’s a wider palette of actions they might provide - things like DoT, AoE and so on; and there’s also this rock-paper-scissors elemental system… but since the elements actually heal enemies of the same element as them (and having elemental attack up makes you weak to whatever it is weak to), it seems like it’s never worth taking them (since you get no info about what enemies you’ll face in a particular battle before it happens). )
Despite all that, the game still doesn’t really feel hard - I don’t feel like I need to go to Easy or Story mode because I’m dying a lot (in fact, I’m using the optional extra-hard-fights-for-special-bonus-items mode about 50% of the time)… but the fights just aren’t interesting enough to be pushing through a billion of them interrupting my dialogue tree and the progression to the next boss. (Especially since I’ve now heard the same piece of music about 2 billion times, and it’s now actively souring the music itself.)
I noticed an interview with Christine Love where she was asked essentially “do you think there’s value in a VN mode where there’s no combat?”, and she immediately dissents, arguing that the combat is necessary to set the stakes and develop the actual story. But in doing so, she never addresses the “sliding scale” version of the same question - is the amount of combat right for the story?
GitC,L’s exponential-experience item levelling system (you need to sacrifice other items to upgrade an item from level N to level N+ - which then unlocks buying level (N+1) items, which you level to level (N+1)+ and so on… but the number of items needed to upgrade from one level to level+ increases with each level - level 1 to level 1+ needs 4? items, and when you’re at level 4 I think it’s already 16? per upgrade) inherently requires a lot of grind - you need money [or special bonus difficulty items] to get more items to sacrifice them to upgrade your items to unlock higher level items so you can face the higher level challenges without being underlevelled - but, as previously mentioned, the combat isn’t interesting enough for it to stand up to the sheer amount of grind you need to support this. (To be clear: I don’t hate it, and I might have even liked it if I didn’t have to do so much of it repeatedly…). IMO, it would have been better just to scrap the exponential levelling system (probably in favour of, say, requiring you to sacrifice only items of the same level together, with low level items being worthless) and dial down the combats respectively.
It feels to me that this is just falling into the classic RPG problem for me, the boring, and somewhat question-begging argument of “we’re an RPG, so we should have a leveling system because RPGs have them; and that means we need an experience system - and the only way we can possibly conceive of protagonists getting experience is by fighting, so we need to just give the protagonists a lot of fights because they’re going to need experience to get higher levels… so we’ll just have to have them be interrupted constantly by random mooks as they try to actually go about the plot” … without ever considering if “having lots of fights” is a reasonable design goal. (And how many fights is okay.)
I remain of the opinion that almost all RPGs with random encounters would be considerably improved by either entirely removing them, or at least reducing their incidence by a factor of 2 or more. (And if that needs them to introspect their experience system, and the need for levels and other unquestioned assumptions, all the better).
I’m doing this update now, btw, because I’m really not sure if I can be bothered wading through another half-billion combats which are only sort of engaging to get to the next boss. (Because, to be fair, the first boss battle actually has an interesting mechanic, so maybe the next one will too…)
Edit to note that apparently I’m not alone in this - all of the genuine negative reviews*, and quite a lot of the positive reviews, comment on just how much combat there is, and how wearing it can become. (Especially using a keyboard.) The positive reviews are often positive despite the combat, in fact.
*there’s some non-genuine trolling reviews of course
Second edit to note that I found some tweets from Christine Love about her design process for GitC,L (derived from wanting it to evoke Final Fantasy XIII apparently) - see here: https://twitter.com/christinelove/status/1404619155790249985 . I think it says something about my difference of opinion with Love here that I see absolutely nothing in the Active Time Battle design document that required it to be strictly realtime [sure, it wants there to be consequences on timing - but that doesn’t have to mean that time always flows, just that you need a more granular action management system than just alternating turn by turn, round by round]. Still, I understand more where she’s coming from, even if it’s just persuaded me that I would probably hate all Final Fantasy games. 
