author=WheelmanZero
Oh don't worry, I'm not going to mess with the stats that much, I just want bosses to pose more of a threat and have a little more staying power. I'm not touching that one battle with you-know-who though. That guy is as tough as nails, probably one of the hardest bosses in the game.

Chrono Cross was brutally hard for me, since I usually overlevel myself in order to win. In that game, you couldn't really grind up levels, which is what eventually caused me to quit. You win this time, evil talking cat man. On the plus side, the battle system and attack animations were downright cool.

Heh heh, you gotta be patient with that room and use shift to run at the end, or you'll end up french fried, as I'm sure you learned. And to think I believed I was being generous with how long it took for those fire pits to flare up.

Difficulty is indeed a hard thing to gauge, as different players have different skill levels and ways of playing, but I'll tell you right now that you are currently hilariously overleveled. I'm surprised you were able to gather up so many summons before even heading to Lindale. I hate overpowered enemies myself, especially one's that can kill you in a single hit. The healing in Umbral Soul is extremely limited, so I took care not to make any one enemy capable of one-shotting your party unless you're extremely underleveled.

Still, I'm glad you're able to take a breather from bring eaten in one gulp by random treasure chests, and even gladder (that's a word, right?) that you continue to be entertained.

So yeah don't worry, I don't plan on giving this game the Dark Souls treatment, but I do plan on providing players who want a bit more challenge with an opportunity to test their skills.

EDIT: I forgot to mention that I always have a good laugh when you criticize Ranarok and Pandora for their stupidity.

Never played chrono cross so I cannot speak about that one. But after playing chrono trigger a few times, my current tactics of playing that game is reach the mountain where I find the item to cut my MP usage by 75%, put it on chrono, and then grind the monsters there for a hour or two until chrono can cast luminaire... and then I can one shot kill most things for the rest of the game without taking damage because chrono also gets pumped up with speed so he starts every battle first and spams luminaire to one-shot-kill every group of enemies...

I'm not surprised I am overleveled in Umbral Soul, I'm a completionist, I want to be through when I play and I want to find and do everything I can and to explore as much of a game as I can (if I like the game anyway), so it's not so much me wanting to overlevel due to the enemy encounters (with my current levels, they have mostly been a breeze to me, and I do feel I am overleveled), but more due to the fact that I want to solve every single sidequest as it comes along. I feel I will be grinding a lot for the slime-evolution-instructor-battle quest, been working on that one currently (although I don't know how far I would have to over-level that slime to defeat a dragon, even after I got it evolved to it's final form it seems like it will need a dozen more levels to defeat that dragon... may give up on it for now and revisit that quest later). But I want to finish that sidequest now that I can evolve, so it feels like I have to grind my slime to do that, but I cannot level up the slime without leveling up the rest of the party. If anything, I feel this is the issue. Even the experience item gives exp to the whole party rather than one character. So, to level the slime up to level 15 I had to over-level pandora and damien and they are already at level 25. Personally I would prefer to have a more balanced party if possible. Maybe an item which gives experience but only to a single party member rather than all of them? (There's the other items which increases you by a whole level, but I can't buy that one)

I definitely feel like I keep overleveling pandora because I want to level up the other characters or pandora's summons. I also notice that experience in your game is very linear. Fighting the wasp encounters from the initial forest, if you include the massive 350 gold you get for ambrosia, and the character who sells you the 600 exp for every party member items for 500 gold, fighting these encounters ends up giving you... potentially more experience than any other enemies in any other dungen further on, even 25 hours into the game, with the exception of the enemies which drop demonite or whatever it was called (worth 425 gold), maybe that needs to be balanced more? I thought that item was a one-person exp thing, and I still felt fighting the bees was giving as much exp as the encounters 20 hours later into the game, but now that I learned that it's actually a whole party exp thing, It feels like I should go back to grind the bees even more...

If I do a little math here, a group of bees has the potential to drop me 700 gold plus I think 120 exp.
If I do some simple math here, fighting a single group of bees has the potential of granting me 700g/500g(cost of potion)*600ex(from the potion)=840xp + 120(?) of direct exp, that's a potential 960 exp for each of my 4 characters from a single wasp encounter! And, because this is a whole party exp thing it forces me to overlevel pandora as long as I want to solve the sidequests which require my summons to be leveled up (plus I'm curious what their skills will be or what they will evolve into etc. so I'm inclined to level them up, but pandora is forced to also level up.) Defeating the ghosts actually gives you less potential exp, but it's a more consistent exp because the 700 2x ambrosia drop from wasp/bee doesn't happen every time. I think the crystal demon things were something like 600xp + the 425 gold demonite drop (sometimes 2x) but I'm not allowed to revisit that location. What I would really enjoy seeing is some system to use all these drops to craft something rather than just sell them. I already have like 30 ambrosias, 20 demonite and my net worth from just these two items is like 20 000 gold. And I have a bunch of other items too. The gold from the other items feels very low compared to these two items. For example ectoplasm (already have 40 of those...) is only 87 gold despite being a fairly late drop, and the enchanged stone/earth from golems is worth even less.

I'll also grant you that given difficulty in games, I prefer to play them either on easy or normal, I very rarely see games which I would like to play on "hard". In that sense I feel I'm more of a casual player rather than a hardcore one. You could always attempt to have a difficulty setting of some sort, although that may be a lot of work to implement, especially in rpg maker. I browsed and there are a couple of difficulty setting and enemy levels related scripts out there for rpg maker ace, you could always test if one of those doesn't work.

Evil truly is stupid sometimes, and I've enjoyed berating it for it XD, but to be fair the good is often even dumber. I'm curious to find out more backstory on why Ragnarok hates Lumielle so much.