I've been playing this game for a few hours and it seems far more unbalanced that 10,000,000 in many ways. The most glaring issue seems to be that 95% of monsters have powerful physical resistance making sword upgrade completely pointless, and making the runs much more frustrating as your board fills with useless sword icons. a lot of the other upgrades also seem utterly pointless. Most of the monster recruits give pointless buffs that are barely even noticeable and just seem tacked on.

It definitely seems like Staff > Sword in most cases but due to the nature of the game you have to spread the upgrades anyway. The game is incredibly addictive so the fact that it feels nigh impossible/rng based sometimes is interesting; e.g. It might take me 30 minutes to beat a quest but I never get tired of trying. Of course lately I've just gone as fast as possible not paying any attention whatsoever to the top part of the screen and that seems to work really well.