As much as the art looks like it would be something totally up my alley, hooo boy does the rest of the game need some serious work. Pacing and direction is nonexistent. Just going to run through an honest blow by blow of my though process while playing:
Took me a minute to figure out where the adventure guild was, having it combined with the priest in the back room kind of gave me the impression it was some kind of religious building for some reason. Once you join the guild, the receptionist suddenly gets kidnapped by...something? Somehow? And she's now in a cave, behind someone who apparently I'm assuming works for the town you're in so like... why didn't he stop whatever it was? How did whatever took her get past you... though the ONLY door to the guild... with no one seeing it? Ok well I have a direction to go in soo.....and he won't let me through because it's too dangerous to go alone. Great. Ok well I guess I need a party then.
Oh, the priest needs water from the waterfall, cool, can do! Get water, bring it back, get monastery key. Find out one of the nuns is holed up in there with a ghost, ok. So far makes sense. After a very long and tedious fight with said ghost, I rescue her, aaaand now I need to fix my house. Ok cool, well there's what looks to be a shop with a hammer on it that might... oh... the door event doesn't work... ok maybe one of the other... oh.... half the door events don't work... ok, early stages, I get it, some of my early projects pulled the same thing (though personally I at least have the door event lead to a simple room with nothing interactable, basically a placeholder map I copy and paste or one of the MV preset maps. Gives the game a more polished appearance even in the early stages). Ok well there's this area off to the left with monsters, lets try fighting one. Ok, lvl 3 goblins. I'm lvl 1 how bad can thi.... and I died... alright lets load up the autosave from killing the ghost and... it... autosaved after I died...before transitioning to the game over... I'm stuck in a death loop... well fuck ok guess I gotta start over.
[10 minutes of boring ghost battling later]
Alrighty, lets grind for some levels and poke around in the menus a bit. Oh I can pick a sub class? Sweet lets do healer since these fights are long, grindy, and devolve into just attack, attack, attack, heal, attack... Alright, killed a crow. I gotta go to the inn and recover. Ok back to it, killed a mushroom dude, think I can handle one or two more encounters. Great, alright it's grindy as fuck but I'm making progress. I'm clearing out the map and... wait.... did that just respawn? It hasn't even been a full two minutes yet and with this tight grid.... ok lets grind some... great lvl 2... that took WAY longer than it should have but I got it. Now to head back out there and LEVEL 4 CROWS? God damn it these fuckers scale with my level don't they. Alright, fine, lets just deal with the boss, get this over with. Level 2 mantis, ok, I got lucky. As long as I keep up with my healing I'll... that was 80 damage in one attack... ok note to self play super safe. Ok, grinding it down, it's got maybe one hit left and I.... it just.... it just healed to full.... and now it's doing multi attacks... Yep, fuck it, as good as the screenshots look it's not worth this absolute grind fest of boring combat. [closes game].
So with that out of the way it's time to get to the more technical feedback and issues I'm seeing.
First is the polish and proper signposting telling the player where to go. There are parts where the game does this well, for example with the monastery. The priest wants water before giving you the key. Then you find out about the ghost, then you get your first party member (sort of... it's after where the signposting falls apart and leaves the player wondering how to fix their house because no such mechanic or indication of where to even go are introduced prior, and all the places that LOOK like they make sense to check lead literally nowhere). Sure the ghost kind of comes out of nowhere, and adding to the priest quest that he needs the water to make holy water to deal with the ghost or something might add a bit more context and urgency. Hell you can even make it a usable item that adds holy element to your weapon giving you a damage boost to the ghost. Would tie everything together.
As for the receptionist part, there definitely need to be more context to it. The way it stands now it honestly doesn't even make sense from a lore standpoint and a logic standpoint. As mentioned above she gets taken by something, but despite it HAVING to pass several people and the guard by the cave, you see none of it. Also why does whatever it is want her specifically? Is there a reason? Does it have to be her? There's plenty of easier targets just wandering around town. Also Why doesn't the guard to the cave stop it? It looks like he's completely chill like it's just a normal day. There's two ways I can see to help fix this. One is to have a separate NPC be the one taken and have it happen prior to the start of the game, or just after the adventurer's guild as your talking to the receptionist there's a commotion outside. When you leave, you see some townsfolk gathered by the cave and they tell you what happened, and maybe have the guard in the down graphic blocking the entrance to show whatever it was just plowed right through him. The other option if you're deadset on it being the receptionist is have the conversation with her trigger a switch. The next time you sleep at the inn or at home, have it check if that switch is on. If it is, play that cutscene drifting over towards the cave with her screaming, have maybe a monster character in front of the guard, a slash SE and animation play on the guard sprite before using set movement route to change his sprite to the downed sprite, then erase the monster sprite paying the escape SE to imply it ran off into the cave with the receptionist. Now you have your hook, and the guard telling you it's too dangerous to go alone makes more sense since it kicked his ass, and as of now he can probably kick yours even in the shape he's in.
This signposting issue is also present in the mechanics. It took me 30 minutes to realize the game even had a class system, let alone being able to change classes. The JP and CP appear to do nothing at this point, which is a bit of a problem since I assume the balance of the game is built around leveling and building your job levels since enemies scale with your character level.
And now for the elephant in the room, the combat and the difficulty. Personally I've never been a huge fan of dynamic enemy scaling as a solution since it's very difficult to find that sweet spot where the combat mechanics are complex enough to give the player the tools needed to overcome the encounters but not so complex that they can't accidentally screw themselves by building a character in such a way that they hit an unwinnable situation. And since as far as I'm aware JP and CP do nothing, the only other way of surpassing the enemies in terms of power is gear, which is a static bonus, meaning if players either are unlucky with mob spawns and/or grind too much, the enemies will outscale the weapon and armor bonuses and leave the player completely screwed without an actual scaling power progression system in place (unless I just couldn't figure out how to actually use JP/CP).
The main issue is there's a difference between legitimate difficulty and a boring grindy mess where enemies and respawn rates are set up to make progress near impossible. I shouldn't be running back to the inn every two combats to heal. In reading through the thread and some of the replies, yes, some RPGs are tough as nails hard, but the only ones that I can think of that required that much grinding of going back after a single fight with the first enemies in the game was the original Dragon Quest, and that wasn't a GOOD thing. Having high difficulty is fine, but that difficulty has to come at a proper pace and be designed around the tools the player has to deal with the challenges set before them. The early game should be easing the player into the games core mechanics, laying out how to set up your character's classes, the purpose of the different stats/points/etc you gain through combat, and an introductory dungeon or series of small quests to apply what they've learned (the monastery fight actually makes for a great tutorial encounter though I'd drop it's HP a little bit and maybe drop how much MP it drains so it doesn't completely hose spellcaster classes, but does make them have to cast spells more proactively).
When it comes to making difficult RPGs, the worst way to do it is just crank up all the numbers and make it a slog to get through by just pressing attack over and over until you can afford what you need, especially in the early game, just to get started. The games I've seen that handle challenging RPG combat well have set things up a lot more intentionally, making combat more of a puzzle to be solved rather than just making the fights barely winnable even at the earliest stages of the game.
I'm going to use Tower of Trample and Shrift as examples as they're kind of two sides of the same coin from a design standpoint. I'll start with ToT first since it's a bit of an outlier from an RPG standpoint. Tower revolves around you climbing... well... a tower. Each floor has a single encounter you must overcome to clear it and move on to the next. Being a femdom game, it makes sense that the first one WILL kick your ass right out the gate, hell it'll be a few rematches before you'll even stand a chance, but losing isn't a game over, and this is entirely intentional as it's teaching the player the fundamental gameplay loop of persist end endure until you figure out how to win. Improvise, adapt, overcome. You still get some resources, even from a loss, and more importantly, you gain knowledge. Each encounter has an intricate pattern, the first one uses certain skills on certain turns, and has a tell for when it is going to do a feint attack and counter your attacks on her. The second one provides a tell by the color of the gem on her shoulder pad as to what attack she will do. The third one you can actually mess with by interacting with her cooking pot outside of combat to weaken her by poisoning her food prior to the fight. The fourth has dialogue throughout the fight and has tells sprinkled in based on what she says and some subtle details in her sprite changing. Each combat is a puzzle to be solved. Screw around too much and you may eventually lead yourself to a game over, but the difficulty isn't coming from just 'big numbers and a cheap full heal out of nowhere' but from the fact the bosses are a puzzle to be solved.
Now on to Shrift. Shrift has both boss encounters as well as random encounters. The random encounters are a bit less puzzly (but they do have their moments, such as exploiting elemental weaknesses to draw out certain attack patterns or using defensive skills to avoid grabs or reduce damage). Combat generally relies heavily on proper preparation and forethought, or fucking up and then re-strategizing in the save room on how to reconfigure your skills, magic, and gear. It's not perfect, mind you, some fights are still absolute bullshit (fuck you Harpy Queen, fuck you), but 99% of them make perfect sense once you figure out the rhythm of the fight and how to approach it. A great example of this is the living doll boss (her name escapes me at the moment). She has the ability to stop time or something like that? It's been freaking ages, anyway the point is she has a tell before using her strongest attacks. You have to use a certain skill to reduce the damage prior, while also watching for tells for her grab, as well as managing your health with all of her normal attacks. You can beat her with just about any setup so preparation isn't as big a key with her iirc, compared to something like Siren who you want both an electric attack to get her into her aggressive state so she uses more physical attacks rather than charms as well as a wind move to remove the unique status effect her sticky body gives you. The point is the game gives you a variety of tools and you need to figure out how to properly utilize them to solve the 'puzzle' of the encounters. Some skills are damn near necessary for some fights, others are more about just getting the rhythm down. When you have less tools early in the game, combat is simpler and less challenging to compensate for those lack of tools and a more limited strategy.
I know it's a bit of a novel, but I think it might provide a good bit of insight. From what I've seen of it the art looks promising (except maybe the main character face sprite... that needs some work) and from what I've played so far the gameplay just really acts as more of a deterrent than anything to where I feel like a lot of people aren't even going to want to push past the downright oppressive mechanics of the early game to even see any of it. Unless the game is meant to meme on 'hard RPGs', the early game needs to ease the player in and at least be clearable without hours of grinding or legit just cheat engine. I work pretty much exclusively in RPG Maker MV for my side projects so this is coming from someone also pretty familiar with the engine as well. There's a foundation worth building on buried under there somewhere, just might have to rework quite a few things to really get the game in a state that makes people actually want to play it rather than slog through it for the hope that the H-content is worth what they're being put through to get to it.
Slight edit here, noticing a lot of your comments about some of the design choices you're referring to 'most people requested' or 'most people preferred' [insert aspect X/Y/Z here]. Just wondering how broad your test audience is and if they're giving specific feedback to the actual current build or if it's more interest polls/surveys outside of the context of the current build.
