I decided to mess around with the game in spite of the various issues with the incomplete gallery. I'm currently playing untranslated, because I don't really care for MTL and just grab screenshots when I need info on stuff like rings or whatever. Also, for the record, I'm playing on normal... but, unless bosses and stuff gain additional moves or something on higher difficulty, I don't think that makes any difference in terms of mechanics.
All things considered, there's definitely something weird going on here. You gain karma from helping people, supposedly, but you also supposedly gain karma from telling that one dude where the bunny girl is, which definitely can't be a good thing. What's karma even supposed to be in this context? You need 100 of it to reach the Prayer Maiden... but is that a good thing or a bad thing? Considering the Prayer Maiden defeat scene... it seems like a good thing, especially since the boss in question didn't even try to talk with Aradia, and it was implied that it's turning people into monster-girls, basically.
It's really, really weird...
On the more technical side of things...
Do we have a list of which mobs drop upgrade materials? I'm pretty sure I've seen the 1st tier materials drop from some monsters... but I haven't really kept track in terms of who drops what and where. I'm curious, because with what you naturally find, I believe you can only upgrade 2 weapons to Tier 3, and that's if you upgrade them on different branches. It would be neat if more weapons could be upgraded than that.
Not that there's that many weapons that are genuinely useful. High attack-speed seems to be king in a lot of cases and dodging is just way safer and easier than parrying. I suspect that the heavier weapons were meant to allow for parry and retaliate strategies where you block the enemy with a perfect parry, and then counter with a heavy blow. Rinse and repeat... but I have a REALLY hard time seeing that work against the succubus for example. Unless parrying one of her tail swipes stuns her or something...
Spells also seem kind of bad. All the INT heavy weapons are meh at best, for one thing. For the other, the whole "convert HP into MP" thing doesn't really work without a method of recovering HP that doesn't rely on landing one specific spell on target and being in range of the explosion. Or some other method of recovering MP in battle. I can get why any proper method of HP restoration would potentially be problematic in this sort of game. As it is, the only spell I found genuine useful rather than just 'neat to use here and there' was the Light Wall spell against the succubus' missile massacre moments. (Seriously, what was with that Touhou knock-off crap?!)
The succubus also felt like the only genuinely difficult boss so far... Guess I'll see if I still think that when I hit the final boss.