I made it to Chapter XV, Part 8/10 and the enemies are level 47/48 and I’m around the same level. I’m using the Shaman. Their battle rating is ~1700 whereas mine is 1270. However, the enemies are undead-type so they’re weak to green magic, which balances things out somewhat. However, at this point the Skeleton you fight first in this specific battle can, at this point, two-shot my armor, or even one-shot my armor with a critical hit. I only managed to get past it twice.
And then the next enemy is a Doomknight.
Doomknights take half damage if their armor is more than 100.
They also have more than double my Power (~880 against my ~370). If the skelly doesn’t kill me, the Doomknight will as you functionally cannot kill a Doomknight in one hit, even with your ult and four spells ready. No casual player will ever be able to make it to the ending of the story with the way enemies have been scaled.
This is why they teach you in Game Design 101 that injecting a shitload of steroids into the enemies doesn’t count as balancing, because there will come a point late-game where the player simply cannot progress without serious grinding for either levels, crafting components for armor(they also teach you not to make rare resources impossible to obtain without buying them or grinding an absurd amount) or gold to buy every non-gem Daily Deal that exists.
At no point in the endgame should the player be forced to grind more than they ever have to even make it to the final dungeon, let alone be able to beat the boss in it. The only series that gets away with this is Disgaea, but in that series the grind is half the point of the game. You could argue my PQ1 “naked run” had this happen late, but the game was simply not designed to be played without everything that could make you comprable in power to endgame forces, so the gold grind was necessary to get stat points via the Temple. Even then, I was still allowed to have that caveat because otherwise the challenge couldn’t be done.
A self-imposed challenge where you play the game in a way that the designers didn’t originally intend and so you have to find your own way to dig yourself out of the hole with the same shovel you used to dig said hole is one thing. A developer-created intended experience where you will literally never make progress out of the hole they dug for you unless you dig even deeper in the hopes of buried treasure that will maybe, someday, help you get out of the hole they dug, while your shovel got replaced by a plastic one that little kids on the beach use to make crude sandcastles, and having the buried treasure turn out to be plastic worthless play money that doesn’t help you in any situation at this point(read: common drops from anything above an iron chest) and also at any point high tide might come in and drown you…is quite another!