Glad to hear that it was an issue with the strategy of the fight rather than necessarily the difficulty of the games. The intention with the stats is that you're suppose to work it out either through trial and error or from hints in the events. The problem is that there simply wasn't enough time to properly fill out the events. Also the fight scenes were suppose to have more minigames in them, one for each attack type and variations for things like the dodge game based on the enemy. We also would have probably made the fights somewhat shorter by playing further with the balance, but again time was not on our side for that.
Some of the tutorial stuff for the combat also ended up never getting in the game due to time constraints. For example, originally I intended to make it so that hovering over the buttons in the menu told you what they did and gave the instructions for the minigame instead of the combat blurbs.
The reward at the end being worth the effort you put into getting there was honestly never something I actually considered. When making the game, me and Jass wanted to make something interesting and original that we also learned something from at the same time. Personally I dislike games that don't offer a real chance of failure, so I wanted to make sure that you could lose the fight if you did bad enough or didn't consider strategy at all. Even with the current setup, I never actually lost without doing so intentionally but was afraid to push things even harder without getting some playtesting. So my main goal was to provide a challenge, I wasn't really trying to make something that was guarding some amazing reward that you'd get for all your hard work.
I'm not sure if we'll take the game further or not right now. It all depends on what happens over the next month or two. In the mean time, I'm getting back into my regular projects and Jass has something he'll be focusing on himself. For now, the game is exactly what it was always intended to be, since it was made in just two weeks for a game jam.