What does the leveling system afford us?
- Difficulty modulation; we can stay level 1 and unarmed and naked and kill all the bosses nohit 1hp at a time, or we can grind indefinitely if we run into a brick wall and one-shot every boss
- Character customization; if we level up different stats we'll have different characters
- A sense of progression; you are stronger at the end of the game than the beginning
What don't I like about the leveling system?
- Changes feel extremely incremental. Like if my defense stats go from 84 to 85, that doesn't feel like a Big Deal. Very rarely does a levelup feel "fun."
- Open world means you sometimes find an area you're over/underleveled for; I haven't played enough of the game for this to be a problem yet but everyone agrees that this happens because of course it does, and they just throw up their hands and say that's an attribute of open-world games with levelup systems.
- The game doesn't tell you what level you're supposed to be. If you keep dying to a boss, should you go grind? You can kill the stuff around the boss so you're probably intended to be able to kill the boss. If you overlevel for the boss you're probably going to overlevel for the stuff around the boss. "If the boss is too hard go grind" doesn't address this.
- Also grinding sucks. Like that's cliche but it bears repeating.
The solution imo is to make elements ridiculously important, Pokemon-style. Maybe your starting weapon is an ice spear, but the nearest boss is an ice guy. So you look around a little bit and find a fire hammer. Once you learn how to use the hammer, you've gone from doing 50% damage to 200% damage to the boss.
You gradually get "stronger" not because you can bonk bigger numbers out of the enemy, but because you gain the ability to answer every situation. But if you want to, you can kill the enemy 1HP at a time with the worst possible weapon.
Also this is an opportunity to flavor the elements. Maybe fire is the "anger" element so it has lots of big-damage weapons and armor that gives you strength boosts for taking damage. Maybe wind is about moving fast so you've got lots of daggers and spears but not so many broadswords or axes.
That's the version of ER I wanna play. You're always at level 1 but your character gets more versatile over the course of the game.