Puzzle Quest: Immortal Edition

I'm a huge fan of the series so this purchase was necessary. Yes, graphically it is an improvement over the original and the animations are snappier than the original. I didn't come across any graphical glitches or any corrupt saves. But DON'T MAKE THE SAME MISTAKE I DID! I know I am slow at playing games but I am almost 90 hours into this thing and still haven't finished the game and I only have myself to blame. I have a life-long fear when playing any RPG's or games with RPG elements, that I haven't selected the right build or I'm not strong enough and I'm find myself in a position where I can't go back and beat more enemies. Yes, I know it's silly but any time I came across an enemy in this game, I would fight that enemy no matter how easy it was because I thought: "Hey, free money and XP!" But it wasn't free. It cost my time and in the long term: my sanity. During these easy fights, the money and XP was paltry and in the end, was not worth the rub. I did end up with a lot of gold because I always siege the cities which, even though they were marked as, "Walkover" as the difficulty, they were the most consistently difficult fights. I have lost 10 matches in my time playing, of which 6 were sieges - nothing "Walkover" about them. Even after befriending the dwarf that helps with sieges. I spent a lot of gold on upgrading my characters skills. So while I am level 52, the rank of each mastery is higher than it would be. I should have rushed through it more and avoided any fight that I could because my character is not learning any new spells through upgrading levels. He can now only learn new moves through research from any of the enemies I have captured which is fine, but found the ones marked VERY HARD were too hard and time consuming. That being said, the captures themselves were very satisfying and a highlight of the game. I was only ever able to unlock one or two very hard moves via research after spending a lot of time and in the end, I only managed to unlock the ones I did from sheer perserverence - not because of skill. It now makes the game very samey because there's no new moves unless I want to invest MORE time in moves I'm not even convinced makes any difference and the only thing I now have to see out is the story which is only OK. I've already spent way too much time trying to learn moves I was never going to use just in the off chance they either might come in handy and I find a synergy that I didn't have before OR found myself in a situation where these moves are effective against a particular enemy. But that approach seems to be too nuanced because a lot of those moves were just not strong enough to be useful no matter what they're paired with so it was time wasted. The game loses its lustre after awhile because wins now feel like I had either grinded enough to be far more powerful than the enemy I was facing or if I was roughly the same level, the random drops went my way and not because I was any better at playing the game. Conversely, I also felt that I lost matches because RNG felt it was time I was taken down a peg or two. Which is how I've felt about the game for the last (at least) 10 hours. There was one fight in particularly where I was facing a minotaur which kept making crazy chain reactions no one could possibly have guessed including one where he made 6 matches in a row. No, I wasn't dazed or held in a web. It was either a "lucky match," a match 4 or "another turn" - exclusive move to the minotaur. The part where skill was involved was when I would worm out of moves that the game forced my hand to make a match that would have given the enemy a match of 3 skulls. But the enemy would make a match which sent a chain reaction I couldn't possibly have predicted where skulls fell from outside the screen into place to benefit the enemy. I found a synergy that works for my character where I can wipe a lot of life from the enemy quickly if the mana matches go my way and any time I lost, it wasn't because I was any worse at playing. I understand my strategy is to minimize the amount of risk and avoid the matching of skulls that will destroy me. Or stop their mana-generating abilties or enhance mine. But even though I had the deck stacked in my favour, gems would fall from outside the top of the screen that benefitted the enemy over me. And sometimes they would get "lucky match" after "lucky match" that felt far more frequent than what the stats were saying. There were even matches I felt I had made too many mistakes and I definitely should have lost and still won those. There were matches I should have won but still lost. In the end, I have lost interest. I might come back and force myself to finish it but I'm pretty burnt out on this game right now and really need a breather. I'm not going to give this a thumbs down because I'm fairly convinced this was all my own fault? But they very much refined the pacing in the sequel to the point where I never really found myself wanting to waste time beating every enemy and researching every move. I even finished Puzzle Quest 2 twice with two different characters and Puzzle Quest Galactrix after the endless crashes Galactrix was notorious for having on PC.