Barely into the story but, so far, I like the balance of narrative and event occurrence. I'm looking forward to playing this.
However, the UI needs serious work. Confirmation dialogs look like menus and are hard to read. There are no tool tips for the different buttons. Button click zones move and disappear. None of the scrollable lists scroll using the mouse wheel. There are no scrollbars with a draggable thumb. The dialogs only advance with a left mouse click or the spacebar; the most common and comfortable way to advance long narration dialogs is using your thumb on the return key of the 10 key pad on the right side of the keyboard. The spacebar is too loud and clumsy for long narrations. There is no way to eliminate the most annoying of game dialog functions; auto-typing the text instead of displaying it all at once forcing you to click twice to get through each dialog. - Oh, and you can not save at the most natural place you would want to save: the Hideka town destination menu.
The worst part is; the sound/audio/music management system is a complete disaster. The only sound volume control I can find is the music volume on the menu, which is an invisible slider that moves so fast it is impossible to set it to the value you want. Any value above 0 is already almost full volume. It only seems to control the music and not all the other sound effects and voices that are permanently at full blaring volume. The music volume keeps getting randomly reset back to 100% as you go through menus and dialogs. Worst of all, the game always starts with full volume and only (but hardly ever) remembers what volume you set after loading a save. I am not a fan of waking up the entire house because this game randomly blares out full volume sound effects, voices, or music. Sound management is a well established game function and absolutely necessary to game play. You at least need values for: a master volume, background music, sound effects, and voices; and these set values should be in full effect when the game is started and not wait until a save is loaded.
Please keep in mind, my review of what little I've played of this game so far is positive and I'm looking forward to what lies ahead. I point out the above items because they are seriously destroying the playability of this game and it's a shame because, so far, it seems interesting.