After having some time to stew on it, I'll mention I don't like the way enemy spawning and hidden items are done.
Being able to interact with every little doodad in a dungeon to get mostly the same filler text but SOMETIMES items is actually hell on my RPG instincts. It makes me feel compelled to way my time bumping every barrel, every table, every pile of rocks, everything. This is the sort of thing that, after I've beaten a game, I realize never mattered and I know where the only good things are so subsequent playthroughs are easy
But this doesn't have the makings of "multiple playthroughs" game.
Please make some kind of visual hint about which doodads have loot. It doesn't have to be as obvious as the alchemical goop thing. Just something so I can learn what will have loot and what won't.
I'm PSYCHOTIC, I need HELP.
A subtle glow on lootables, or something that you can realize "Okay, there's never something in rocks that are the same color as the surroundings, but these rocks are pearly white in this grey hall, so there must be loot." Things that are noticably not like other doodads in the environment are a good place to stuff bonus loot. But I can say for sure, this game has too many lootable doodads that are no different from pointless ones.
I'm mixed on enemy encounters. I think being able to clear out enemies in a place and not have them respawn when you change rooms is nice. I'm just worried the game would punish me for not killing them all. I need a friendly warning that there's no need to kill everything... Which, I'm sure there is no need to kill everything. It's just a waste of time.
Oh and another thing I forgot to mention.
Before entering the freeroam portion in the city, there's the guild member who wants help with wolves. In the wolf forest, there's a place full of undead that some boy is running from. There's nothing to do there right now, right? Because in gameplay, there's nothing. There's no quest, there's a few enemies, no loot, that's all. There's an oddly labeled tomb, but you can't go inside, you can't interact with the gate. The Orelian Family Crypt or something. Can't enter it.
If there's a quest or anything of value in that place, then that's a bug. Talking to the boy back in the village outside the city won't do anything, he just talks about being scared and mentioned wondering about his mother or something.
And let me think if there's anything else... Oh yeah, the art is 3D so it's generally bad, but the male characters are exceptionally awful. In particular that comes to mind is that one guy in the Elinore NTR stuff. Which is bad NTR, since you have 0 romantic chemistry with Elinore. Before you start bonding with a character, NTR is pretty empty and meaningless. Once things get further along in development, you should gate the NTR behind more dating stuff. And try to generally make it feel like the main character feels something for the girls during regular events. If the player's character doesn't care about the girl, it's not NTR by any definition when the girl goes to a swinger party in an under cover investigation with her colleague (Lucielle NTR chain). That's just... unrelated characters having their own hentai antics.
It'll be a long way off, I'm sure, but I think a great tactic to make the player feel more connected to a wide cast of potential love interests is to give them all unique quests that shake up normal play. You can only field a party of 4, so make th eplayer use different characters by making specific groupings or limiting them for a quest. Play as just Haru and Reina in a little quest where she doesn't want the other girls to know, but she wants, for example, her lucky dagger that the guards took from her when she was caught one time as a child. So you investigate a bit together to figure out if they even have it, you sneak inside to get it, you have a few fights balanced around only Haru and Reina being in the party, and she gets her lucky dagger, which is a good secondary weapon that has some special effect on it. The only companion quest I've seen is the maid one, but I assume from "companion quest" being its own category, you do plan on things like this.
It'll make NTR good if you bond with the character beforehand.
