Arright, I've played this again after leaving it to percolate for what, a year now? So it's time for some real criticism. Some of this may sound harsh, but that's because at this juncture I'm sure you can take it and I'd be surprised if you haven't heard it before at various points.
First of all, even with the 50% boost to XP stat gains in this game are glacial and only get worse as things go along, as your stats (and therefore ways of gaining XP) do not rise in the same way costs do. Every single thing in the game is therefore far more of a slog than it has to be. There's so many things to talk about that I almost feel like I'm back at work going through these but I'll just go through them as they come to me
When you acquire a skill you should automatically get the first level in the specializations (Or at the very least have some things you can do with it without them)To be honest, the mining and farming skills should be something that you also get early on with the cooking skills or just come by default. Getting these should be story based, not just "give me a small fortune early game and a hundred xp". You should be able to get them from the goblins via quests, like for instance clearing the rats getting you mining if you get 25 of them or the smithing skill being a reward for getting lots of ore and so on. You already do this with the Athletics 101 one but tie it behind either random drops from
Base VP/WP should be doubled or at the very least be raised to 150. Ideally, you should also be able to actually be able to level the MC UP too. This is in practically every RPG for the very good reason that it makes for additional incremental progression and would alleviate a lot of the problems with the game progression. I know you can level up in skills to get stat gains but christ almighty these are marginal gains with excessive costs, though at least they don't rise.
I know you're going for the Harvest Moon vibe but jesus christ, there the loop is short and simple whereas here you have way, way more complexity and getting constantly hobbled by these fairly hard limitations is not good design.
Combat is hideously unbalanced, especially as it's optional to have the bunny. Enemies in general deal way, way more damage to you than you do to them, their drops are weak and so are their XP gains. The XP gains deserve special mention because by far the best and easiest way to get them is to just beat the dummies or farm rats, because more difficult enemies do not give you more rewards! Why should I risk a self destruct from a Chaos Turkey for a measely 9 battle XP when I get seven from a rat I kill instantly? (aside from the fact their feathers sell for 1 silver, which is in it's own way another unbalanced element)
Enemies like the slimes chain stunning you AND charming you is absurd. Multiple enemies when you are always alone are always a problem. The bomb is a crutch that can work and if you want the game to be so that you have to use one way to do it, that's fine. But why does a bomb do damage but fire magic doesn't?
Cooking recipes should actually be relevant to what you have. I have an inventory full of eggs, mushrooms and all manner of meats. My options, for some baffling reason, are to make bread, pasta or lotus chips. Making a mushroom soup, omelet or boiled potatoes should be a start. The baked potatoes are a good example of another bloat, where methods to gain things are slim and need repeated steps and then have excessive costs, same as every other crafting skills. You LITERALLY have wild oranges and then have LEMONADE as a recipe. This is excessively bizarre game design.
Literally everything in the game wastes time by requiring excessive amounts of grinding and materials. I don't know if this is some kind of attempt at verisimilitude by literally requiring you to have realistic amounts of things and time to master them but it's extremely tedious. We're not quite at Disgaea levels of grinding but we're definitely in bad JRPG or German sim level of bad grinding, especially when random chance is so prevalent and everything needs So Much Shit.
Requiring 300 XP for the first level of forging requires massive amounts of resources and is, again, absolutely absurd. The same with cooking and probably the others when I get to them, because all the XP gains are incredibly low. I have to have 450 potatoes and a 150 pieces of salt to get just the first level of cooking! I need 600 pieces of iron ore to make 300 nails to get the first level! This is is incredible lack of respect for the players time and anyone who doesn't use a cheat engine to get this up is addicted to wasting time.
As far as I can tell these numbers have literally not changed since these elements were added and while they were OK when you first did them they should absolutely have been rebalanced by now to actually be reasonable. Surely your vision of the game isn't that a player should spend hours grinding minigames in your game about monster girls??
Even if you want to keep these absurd things, you should at least have it so that crafting creates multiples of things used to make other things; making one nail out of an entire ingot is just immersion breaking in a different way and, again, bad design. Huge costs abound, with very small gains. Literally every single crafting menu I looked at had these absurd costs! Almost every single thing has these stupid costs: you don't need varnish to make a bridge, you need wood and nails because these are things an early game player can be expected to have.
If you play the game with numerous elixers and cheat out the wazoo by giving yourself way more experience, the game rapidly improves. Combat becomes more tolerable (though it's strange to only have defeat scenes) and resource gathering is slightly less tedious.
Lastly some minor points:
"Approach Special" and "Approach Normal" should honestly not even be options. Just add a flirt option to the special goblins or a talk option if they have unique talks.
You don't grow potatoes from seeds, you grow them from other potatoes because their genetics are irritating. Oh and in one part of the Autumn Woods with the copper node, they can spawn a pepper you can't harvest because you can't harvest on top of it but it's 4x4 so you can never face it.
I don't doubt these aren't things you've already heard before or thought of yourself; the Tengu for instance has fairly reasonable demands and has multiple options to get her things, so I assume you've already moved for some of this. And obviously this is a dialogue, because while I'm somewhat confrontational in tone, QA is like that. If I didn't care, I wouldn't even post, I'd just never play the game, but I want it to be better, because there's a lot of good in there that just needs adjusting.