It makes sense that the player has to conquer the areas to progress, i assume the player will have some stat checks eventually, and simply saying "go back and grind" isn't cool either, so the time you spend unlocking areas gives you enough progress to pass stat checks, that's cool, however, this time spent in combat is too long and unnecessary, the main aspect of the game is doing quests, interacting with npcs and exploring the world, but when you need 10+ minutes just to progress between interest points the mood gets killed pretty fast.
The time i spent on maps was consistently 2.5 minutes, i did all the quests in the early areas and leveled up accordingly with the games tips, it wasn't a challenge to kill mobs, all of them died within 1 or 3 hits, and still i had to spend a lot of time just waiting, not even being able to alt tab to do another activity while doing it, i'm sorry to say that but this system feels really bad.