Out of the water and the imprecision of progress bars

I finished Neptune's dungeon.  With the underwater conveyor belts and the inability to cast spells, how can we cap the area off?  How about Neptune healing herself for outrageous amounts of HP?  Ugh, ugh, ugh.

I know I should mess around in the area a bit more to use the demon circles for some gear, but I dislike the area so much that I don't want to be there.

Anyway, making it back led to the "just beat a demon wackiness" that I've come to expect.  The catgirl maid is finally not afraid of the character, so that's good news.  Why?  Even though I don't care for her, I've been picking up these mushrooms, so I'm able to offload them on to her and get a bunch of MP recovery items.

Then we had a tea party!

I have a bad feeling about this...

I knew it!

I chose Fran, the manager, because she's the least objectionable out of the above group.

I now supposedly had no clear way to progress in the game.  However, that mimic chest I beat required 5 keys, and I had 5 Demon Keys.  It didn't require the mad deductive reasoning skills of Sherlock Holmes to figure it out.

That wouldn't be like Second Impact, would it?

The weapon store owner (the blue-haired guy in the above image) knows a lot more about the castle and its history than you'd expect.  I'm thinking that he's going to be related to the lost king and is trying to reclaim his birthright.

Using the ring from the mimic chest, I was able to enter the castle, where it appears that I'll have another several demons to fight.  I also got to go into a boss fight to make it to the castle.

I'm still enjoying the game, but one thing I do not like is the imprecise bars that are used to measure experience points.  If I had numbers, I'd have a much better idea of how long I needed to go before leveling up.  As it is, I have to guess, and since the bar remains the same length no matter what level your characters are, it sometimes requires a lot more fights to level than you'd think.

As a mechanical point of progression, I have equipment that restores HP on all of my characters.  That increases the time I can spend in dungeons.