Valthirian Arc: Hero School Story 2

I was addicted to the original Valthirian Arc as a kid back when it was a Flash browser game. The combat was simple and repetitive - you just ran around the screen clicking on enemies - but it was really fun to develop your students, promote them to advanced classes, then get points when they graduate based on how powerful they are. For Valthirian Arc 2 they decided to go with a turn-based JRPG-style combat system, which is risky because of how grindy this kind of game is by nature. Turn-based combat can be slow and clunky, so it has to be [i]really[/i] strategic and interesting to stay fun for a long time. Unfortunately Valthirian Arc 2's combat is neither strategic nor interesting so I was struggling to continue playing past my 5th quest to kill slimes. One strange design decision is that every time you take a turn, any of your 3 students may take that turn. So you naturally end up spamming the strongest move on your strongest student over and over and ignore the others. The simplicity of the game is worstened by how forgiving it is. It might be relatively easy to kill slimes but if your quest wants you to defeat 10 of them your health and ability points might start running low. However... there are rest spots all over the map that will fully heal you and set your ability points to max, with no limit to how often you can use it, so situations where you might have to start thinking just don't happen. There are also minigames that pop up every so often like fishing, and if you beat the NPCs you can get a strong reward. However if you lose you can just keep retrying it until you win, so even when you do win it doesn't feel much like an achievement. The devs clearly did a decent job on the visuals - the character portraits are pretty and the 3D models are okay (but not my preference - low budget graphics might as well stick to 2D). However your academy looking kinda cute just highlights how little customisation is available to you. The academy is split up into fixed squares so all you really get to do is pick which of those squares your next building goes in. So the academy-building part of the game is mobile level. Lastly, the game generally just feels kinda clunky. I noticed a few sentences with weird-sounding grammar. Some hitbox for a few buttons were kinda off. Certain tasks like setting your student's schedules takes way more clicks than needed and several menus lack key information to make decisions meaning you have to scroll back and forth between screens.