you are rather free and not chained to specific way to do it. but this also led to some problems. like i am stuck on a boss and cannot go back to city to shop for items so basically my save is stuck there forever, i could go keep fighting the boss until my character leveled up (yea you could still level up and fail repeat) enough to beat the boss without restocking anything, but i think it will take too much of my time, might as well retry from one of my earlier saves. so yea be sure to have extra saves