Just beat it. What a great game this is. The music is just amazing.

Noweth I willen keepeth on playen.

Fucking hell this is an experience. Just finished the last chapter 4 at 70 hours in. Primrose's story is fantastic from start to finish. Loved the others too. Still got heaps of side quests and the final boss to go. I love this game, best thing on the Switch as of this moment.

Stories, I'd rank them: Primrose > Alfyn > H'aanit > Cyrus > Tressa > Olberic > Therion > Ophelia (Though there wasn't a bad one among them. Ophelia was merely good, opposed to Prim being excellent)

I was at about level 29 with my main character at the point you describe. Did you equip Cyrus' passive that lowers encounters and do you fight every fight? I'm now almost done with all Chapter 2s and there hasn't been a point where I needed to grind XP yet.

Yeah, Primrose's just starts off so dark. Her Dad dies, then she endures years of physical and sexual abuse just to find her father's killer. 

Then her best friend gets murdered. 

I'm looking forward to doing Chapter 2 of her quest, to see where it goes. It's just so dark for a JRPG on a Nintendo system. 

I still only have 4 party members in total after about 9-10 hours played, the lead is around level 20 and the other 3 one, or at most two, levels below that. I'm having no issues and very minimal grinding and I haven't done more then a few side quests either. I sometimes use the "run" function in the wilderness and roads to get more encounters if it's an area with enemies that net me a hefty amount of XP but don't take that long to take down. I think that focusing on leveling a few characters at first and then power-leveling others as they tag along is the easier route.

I started with the hunter, then got the thief, healer and mage, and I'm using them right now. I only have one special skill left to unlock on all four and getting close to unlocking it. Leveling is actually unusually quick for a JRPG, which is a breath of fresh air, you can still die if you miss your timing on breaking bosses and let them unleash AOE attacks. Use the thief to steal higher tier items during fights, it's easily worth using boost to succeed, his damage is usually not all that anyway (with the exception of enemies who are weak to his sword attacks). I've hardly ever bought any healing items, but make sure you have wake up herbs and cure for blindness etc, it can be a real pain if the main hitter gets blinded or falls asleep (attacks don't wake you up either).

One last tip; use boost on your class skills, such as Therion's armor break ability or the hunters snare, it can dramatically increase the duration of status effects from the default 2 turns. Handy in longer fights!

How do you guys use the "Nut" items? They give permanent stat boosts to one character but since I can't make up my mind about who I should spend it on I'm stockpiling them (I used to do that in Chrono Trigger too). I thought of giving it to my main character (Ophelia) since she's always in my party but then again she's also already guaranteed to be the strongest character I have so it might be overkill.

You just need to cycle your party members. Swap out members to keep them evenly leveled. If you are going to "grind" all you need to do is this. After you run through a Chapter. Go to the tavern, swap in your other party members, and run back through the dungeon again. That will keep your party's levels balanced. I recommend going to all the initial job shrines ASAP as well. This will allow you truly take advantage of the enemies weakness. Giving everyone a sub job will allow you to have more weapon types per character. Between that an additional skills and spells, you can keep enemies broken and reduce the length of your battles.

If you can't decide just use them on your main party leader as they're the anchor for the whole party throughout the game.

Ne else fight Gustav for a gosh dang hour? Wasn't hard, just tedious :( also I'd much rather play each story one by one but I'd have to grind soo much. I seem to fall in and out of love with thia game each play session. It's no final fantasy, but it's still good.