There it is, folks! My final playthrough of the game for Version 1.0!
I'm sure it still isn't perfect, but it is in a state that I would consider worthy of the 1.0 name.
I tried to rush through this one and unfortunately had to cheat a little bit for the final battle due to a bunch of other stuff happening IRL. Otherwise, I would have done some grinding to get through it.
It seems like Normal difficulty does require a little bit of grinding and not just for levels, but for money to buy better gear.
However, I do think this problem is mitigated heavily if you take your time and do the side quests. As you can see, I didn't even do 1/3 of all the side quests. There are plenty of dungeons not tied to side quests as well. Those give you a lot of chests and have a lot of enemies to fight, so that helps prevent grinding.
I definitely found my last playthrough, where I tried to play it like I normally would, much easier in terms of encounter difficulty because of how much I played the game.
So it would seem that rushing through the game is going to be pretty hard unless you're playing on Easy difficulty, which I'm pretty okay with.
I still had a lot of fun and had a lot of things happen that I didn't expect! I hope you're all looking forward to next week when the game releases! If anything else is caught in between now and then it will be updated, but this is the true and official first version of the full game.