Ok, this is an early version of the game, and it might be much better if the massive amount of grind and other issues are fixed. I may re-review a later version which may make the rating better, but we'll see.
The basic idea of the story seems good, but after about an hour of game play I didn't find anything after the prologue, so who knows what later updates will have. Though since I decided to test the actual game balance without cheating, it might just require more grind than I'm willing to put in.
So, the shitty game design choices.
It's a standard rpgmaker game right now. There's no real strategy elements other than the "invasions" which are basically just some enemy mobs spawn in the town, kill them.
Almost every enemy in the starting zones have a poison attack, poison doing massive damage compared to the enemy attacks and persisting onto the field like pokemon games still doing shit tons of damage. The only good part is that the poison does end after a while on the field.
You have no way to heal outside of potions, and no way to get more without grinding the potion shop if you follow the game's advice of going to the forest and mine. There is a potion seller at the tower in the SE of the map. Resting in your bed doesn't heal you, unlike basically every other JRPG game.
There doesn't seem to be any skills gained through level up, or they just require massive grind to get them. I have gotten no skills by level 8-10, don't remember the level I actually ended on.
You require massive amounts of resources (wood, stone, and iron) to build things in your town, and can only hold 99 of an item. So you have to grind a shit ton to build one thing, and can only hold enough resources to build on thing at a time. You get 5 resources a day, if go to the mine (give on entry) and the woods, picked up manually. They don't build up, so if you skip a day you get nothing. There's no way to improve the resource rate I found so far, ie hiring more workers, better tools, killing monsters interfering in their work. Enemy fights drop 1-2 resources each, usually 1 of 2 different resources, but its specific resources from specific enemies and iron is only dropped by rats and (IIRC) slimes.
By the time I ground up the resources to build the potion shop I had the gold to buy plenty of potions and an equipment to prevent poison, which did fix a lot of the combat annoyance.
You may see a gold colored mob on the map, which is an elite enemy mob. The elite wasp dropped a good weapon for me, which really helped with the grinding.
I found no adult content, but only built the potion shop and blacksmith so it might be gated behind something else.
You can get stuck in an infinite loop fighting rats, which is good when you can one shot them and use it to grind the massive amount of iron to build things. Running from a fight may soft lock the game, preventing it from reacting to any inputs. There are some of the usual map issues of things you can walk on that you shouldn't be able to, but nothing really game breaking I saw.
You're also stuck walking only on the roads on the world map, despite most of it being an open field. Not a huge issue, just an annoying decision.
You can also get multiple of items that it seems you shouldn't. The elite enemies I mentioned each dropped a picture, which I got duplicates of when fighting the elite mob again. There's also 1 key I got in the tower, which opened one of the 3 locked doors I found.
Lastly the economy of the town (based on the descriptions of what you can build) is just weird. So buildings will basically all consume resources, which will require at least some grinding to keep the town afloat. To start with it makes a bit of sense that if you're not selling the food the farm makes it'll cost money to run it, but you can't sell food from what I saw (honestly forgot to check if I could sell anything at the potion shop or blacksmith). Outside of them being rpg shops there;s no benefit or penalty to the blacksmith or potion shop. Houses cost food and give nothing, food is kind of fair enough, it was food produced in the town that they'd buy from the town but they don't seem to pay for the food they eat or pay taxes. Similarly the bar and inn both require gold per day to run, so they're seemingly not actually making money or just not paying taxes again. It just seems weird since most town builder games would have you try to balance the food production with consumption in the town, getting taxes to improve the town further, exc.
