I played a bit more with the walkthrough and i don't think this deserves the abundance hate it got.
Certainly it would be really confusing without the walkthrough but isn't that why they left one in the game folder?
Even with many valid criticisms in the review section i just don't see how it deserves 1 star as the game even has full voice acting for h-scenes and they did quite a good job too, i don't see many rpgm games or even renpy games with voice acting around. Just that and the easy on the eyes artstyle + a diversity of girls was already 2 stars from me.
You shouldn't have to consult a walkthrough to work out what arbitrary task the game requires for you to progress. I play games like this sitting back away from my keyboard with a controller, so I'm not too keen on having to get out of my comfort zone to go over and tab out to read a document. There's a
massive event log right in the game, with descriptions for the events that are rarely ever helpful. Why not explain these steps, or keep track of the progression of the quest, or give hints on what to do next through it? The game does a terrible job at directing the player. God help you if you ever mash through an important dialogue box a bit too quick or forget what it said, because that information might just be gone.
There's plenty of groan-inducing design decisions like this in the game. For example, committing the sin of placing hidden items everywhere in the game, with no indication of anything being there. So that you have no choice but to interact with every tile if you don't want to miss something, because who knows if it might be something important. (Did you know that there's a weapon in the jail in Northland? Same room as the treasure chest, randomly laying in a corner.) Put a glint there, or something. Your RPG Maker world is not so interesting that I want to be spending hours scanning every stock asset for items.
I will agree that 1 star is a bit harsh though, as it's certainly not the worst RPG Maker game I've ever played. The voice work is alright, I like the style of the artwork, the writing is decent enough, there was clearly some care put into it as even random NPCs are given some more-interesting-than-usual dialogue. I want to say that the freedom on what order you want to do things in is nice, except... It still wants you to do things in a certain arbitrary order, and you'll randomly get stuck on a quest without knowing
why, whether or not it's possible to progress or if you need to do something else first, or if you just missed a bit of information somewhere. So, I think an overall low rating is still pretty fair simply based on how much of a directionless mess the gameplay is, combined with its other tedious mechanics.