Finally started playing this after seeing it in people's sigs forever, I like the art and the writing is 70% to my taste (it's good and I really like some of the speech patterns of the first enemy, just occasionally too BDSM-dungeony for my taste).
I am a bit confused about the gameplay though. The first two losses are obviously scripted, but from there there seem to be a few ways to progress. Grinding XP from the mobs is insanely slow because the only enemy you can beat is a solo skeleton, even after gaining multiple levels (NB I bought potions with starting money, which perhaps has gimped my earlygame). Grinding money from them is even slower because you have to savescum to beat the solo dusk champion, the only beatable encounter that drops a craftable item with a non-zero sell price (the dust is still unusable in world 1). Conversing/submitting puts you into some sort of locked in bad-end route.
This leaves only the option of fighting Katrina and repeatedly losing to be given 2 foreign shards per loss, but I don't really understand this from an in-game logic perspective, since I'd expect losing your third shard would put you into the bad-end route. Instead it seems to reward you even further by giving you a stat buff and resetting your shards? I'm assuming this is intentional but I'm pretty confused and can't quite tell if I'd be progressing some kind of hidden loss meter each time, and I really am "meant" to spend 5 hours scouring the dungeons to find and mug skeletons who were stupid enough to wander around alone. At least in dark souls the new londo ruins and the graveyard both made it pretty clear you were doing things out of order even if you wanted to do them first
Edit: Ok, some flavour text implied I'm burning my fellow champions' soul shards in order to keep going, but I don't recall any previous reference to this, maybe I skimread too hard?