Yeah, the combat is decent, but I didn't feel it was anything revolutionary. Purely in terms of game mechanics, the main area where this game shines in relation jrpgs I played the far is the minimalist amount of level grinding (as an adult with a limited amount of time, I appreciated that).

So yes, for me, the main seller of the game was the story, the differing perspective of the main characters and the choices you get to make at various junctures (the nature of which is determined by the main character you play) which hopefully will have a meaningful impact in part 2.

Here's a question: If I were to, say, take some time (like, say, 30 minutes) to level grind, would it ruin the game's difficulty?

Not really.

1) There are few levels (if I recall, something like 1 to 10, not 1 to 99)

2) If memory serves, each stage, you can gain about 2 levels naturally while progressing through the stage and maybe an extra level if you grind for 30 minutes. Because each level is a big step increment on the level scale, you won't get that "just one more level" compulsion once you got 3 levels in the stage, because the 4th would take too long.

Also, if you grind excessively, you'll spend an inordinate amount of time to reach the level cap earlier in the game, but then won't get XP reward after that (killing the motivation to do it) and will be at the same level by the end than you'd be if you had progressed normally with minimal grinding.

I'd say the game is very story-driven. Rather than grind, you'll want to do quick replays to get the perspective of various characters in order to get a complete picture of the story (I recommend playing Isaac, Camille and maybe Lucienne if you really want to play a third perspective) and also alternate your choices to see the difference in narrative. Interestingly, some characters present you with a choice at key junctures in the game and others will make the choice for you, because of how strongly they feel in favor of a particular choice.

The game was ridiculously easy when I played it. It was literary impossible to die unless you really wanted to. But they patched it recently and now it has a difficulty setting. Just play on the hardest setting then the game won't get too easy.

I was going to suggest trying foobar 2000 which is my audio playback software and it converts to mp3 or ogg etc from FLAC, but I think i probably setup the lame codec with it for mp3 a long time ago and have forgotten that it did take some tweaking, including a little around getting the tagging / file name options just right. So maybe only if you want a project you'd look at that one.