This almost interests me. Until I read losing the recovery option, and that was pretty much necessary to be able to move your skills up and stay on the move. Otherwise you sit there for hours ranking your stuff up before moving on. =[
It's not that bad truthfully. The recovery option wasn't taken away from every save point. Save points before a boss will have a recovery option available pretty much all the time (Don't remember a time where a save point didn't have one. If there was, it was maybe in one two spots). That and the recovery option in general was far too abusable. Not much strategy needed when you can just spam all of your strongest attacks, then retreat to the nearest save point to recover.
Zil Ruins and the optional Tower of Temptation still retain all their recovery points so you can spam away there. Probably some other areas too.
Also, enemies give much more xps, gold, and weapon + magic levels compared to before.
As proof, this was where I sat before the final series of fights in the last dungeon:
I didn't spend very much time, if any, doing grinding to get past something. I can only think of a few spots where I did that.
- Disc 2, Castle of Dreams. Wanted to farm up some Red Pills, Yellow Pills, and Blue Pills.
- After Liete joins. In ReDux, she starts at level 5. Yup. However, that just means she gets the potential to become a destructive engine of pain once she's been built up. She'll be about as fast as Feena, but have massively better defenses (Liete's natural magic defenses are the best of the playable characters). She also comes with a item only she can equip that doubles magic xp gained in battle, meaning her magic levels are quite easy to rank up.
- Before the Mullen duel near the end of the game. I had to grind up Justin's weapon levels in order for him to be strong enough not to get steamrolled hardcore and waste a precious Revival Stone.
That's about it.
Also, you're expected to run from most everything at a few points. Valley of the Flying Dragon when it's only Justin & Feena, the first part of the Volcano when you only have those two, and the first part of the Virgin Forest until you acquire Rapp are the major ones.
TL;DR version - Recovery option being nuked from some save points isn't that bad & the difficulty doesn't start going into overdrive until you hit the halfway point of Disc 1 or so (Serpent is probably the first real nasty boss of ReDux). By then, you'll have plenty of options at your disposal for dealing with the stronger enemies.
