Fine then, let me try arguing this on more common terms, and actually go into just plain judging the game as a whole, then...
This game advertises itself on being a game that is fun for being tile-based, turn-based, and strategically difficult.
That means that the game has to involve complex decisions, because games that are turn-based cannot be based upon player finesse or skill for its challenge, and the point of the game is to be hard.
A game that is real-time can be challenging while being very simple because it's all about your capacity to handle what is thrown at you in real-time.
Touhou can be hard while involving nothing but dodging bullets because they focus on freak-tons of bullets.
A game that's turn-based and tile-based, meanwhile, is a game that has to be more like Chess or Sid Meyer's Civilization, and involve a lot of different choices that are not simply, easily measured to be engaging.
If a turn-based game is too simple, you wind up with Tic-Tac-Toe, a game that is so simple that even if you don't sit there and analyze it too thoroughly, you wind up finding out that all the games you play wind up coming out the same.
The thing about Eschalon is that basically everything important in the game comes down to a few simple math problems that are easy to solve, even if you're not particularly trying to solve them. Almost all the real challenge in the game comes from killing monsters trying to kill you, and you kill all those monsters the same way - putting all your points into the same few skills that are the obvious choices for getting better at killing monsters.
On a very basic level, one of the crippling problems in this game is that all the enemies are, fundamentally, the same monster over and over again. Like with how many other RPGs just "palette swap" the same monster, and make a slime into a red slime that just has more hit points, in Eschalon nearly all the monsters act like the same monster.
Fanged Salamanders/Catacomb Rats have few HP, and attack by just moving towards the player, then punching at them until either they or the player dies. Thugs have somewhat more HP, and attack by just moving towards the player, then punching at them until either they or the player dies. Tauraxes have more HP, and attack by just moving towards the player, then punching at them until either they die or the player dies.
Every single encounter is basically just trying to get one lone monster's attention from range, and killing them before they can actually get to melee range and punch me. Every single fight is the exact same thing, no matter what the actual monster is supposed to look like, just a straight, one-dimensional line of how many tiles it takes them to get to punch range, followed by punching time.
When I say these things, people come out and say that if I'm tired of every fight being the same, that I should do something different.
But here's the thing - sure, I could try juggling with one hand while clicking a monster to death, or I could play Bohemian Rhapsody up loud and play air guitar and have a blast while occasionally clicking at an enemy, and have fun doing things differently, but then, if all the work of entertaining myself while playing this game is on me,
why am I playing this game? I might as well be, as someone so helpfully suggested earlier in the thread, just playing Skyrim instead, because that game actually manages to deliver entertainment values.
The problem is that every encounter in this game starts to quickly feel the same.
That isn't
always the case, there are some bright spots - I rather liked the point where I was in whistling cave, and found an object stuck in the rocks that caused a bunch of bats to surround me. Being surrounded was new. For a quick moment, I felt I was experiencing something different.
This just doesn't happen nearly enough to stay entertaining.
Even in a game as basic as Dragon Quest, you can find enemies that are truly different from one another in some manner other than just having a different graphic.
When I play Elona, I am rushed, yes, by melee monsters, but also monsters like mine dogs that drop land mines while running away from my player. I fight liches that cast spells at me, then teleport if I get nearby. I fight sound dogs that breathe sound cones that inflict confusion. I fight mass monsters that split upon taking damage, and require I use spells that create walls to box them in so that they can't keep dividing because of a lack of room.
Monsters of other games have elemental affinities, status ailments that they either inflict or are vulnerable to, they have waves of little monsters, or single giant monsters, they spice things up with variety.
These things keep the game interesting because I'm not constantly faced with the same thing over and over.
Eschalon has, at best, just a few rare monsters with bows to present any variety at all, and those are nullified completely with a single spell.
In this game, all characters are the same character, because the game's mechanics enforce the same min/maxed "classes" of characters, and the game's enemies are all just the same monster with more hit points and slightly better numbers, while, in the core ways that monsters should be judged - how they force players to react - they are nearly all identical.
When I play a game like Dragon's Dogma, you know how
their wolves act? They don't just come stringing out at you one at a time. They first howl for reinforcements, which brings all the wolves in range together, and they'll retreat until they can attack en masse. When they're ready to attack, one wolf will seemingly charge you, then stop while out of range, and dance away from you if you get close. That one's a distraction - there are more wolves circling around behind you, and they'll dash in from the flanks while you focus in on the first wolf, and pin and grapple you if you aren't watching. They like to drag one party member (usually ranged combatants like rangers or mages) off, and then let the other wolves rip them apart while the other wolves are still just distracting your party members.
The whole point is, they're not just stupidly charging you, they're actually using group tactics, and it makes the encounter as a whole much more engaging and fun to play.
If the red wolves in this game actually used a capacity to run in order to surround your character and then close in on them, the game would be far different and more entertaining a game than one where wolves just require grabbing a single wolf's attention, pulling them away from the others, and then firebolting them to death just like every other monster in the whole game.
So when I say that I can just make one character, focus on doing one thing, and do that one thing over and over and over again, it's not me trying to say you're stupid for doing anything else, I'm saying the game is not giving me any
reason to do anything else, and that's a flaw
in the game, not in other people who tried to do anything else.
This game is, fundamentally, a solved game.
It's Tic-Tac-Toe.
Too simple and boring to be fun.
I've found a single tactic the game can't defeat, and there's no reason to play any other way because the game doesn't have enough breadth in it to make me want to.
And the fact that enemies are so one-dimensional is just
one of the problems that causes this - the skill system is basically geared to that same enforced min-maxing problem, which means that characters are general clone-stamps of one another, the fact that this game uses a system where every character moves at the same speed is another, the lack of any real capacity to role-play, the discouragement this game gives to exploration, so that going over the whole map is more chore than fun (in spite of this being what the developer of the game wanted to be the most fun part of the game...) there are a slew of problems, but every time I try to talk about what the game's mechanics are like, it keeps being twisted into somehow a discussion about who is playing the game, rather than how the game is made.