I was waiting for the translations to catch up/be completed for the most recent version but it seems they may not be being worked on anymore. 1.6 is like 6 months old now. Sounds like 1.52 has a lot of bugs too, guess I'll just try 1.0.
This game would have been so cool if it was balanced better and the monster choices were more fleshed out and unique. On hard difficulty anyways, the main strategy is just to choose an HP tank monster, and spam defense up, poison, and healing items because all the enemies do too much damage (and stunlock you nonstop) otherwise. None of the monsters but the basic goblin can even heal themselves with their own skills, so chugging potions is needed. The game was certainly not balanced or tested for hard mode because very few strategies remain viable.
I agree that you shouldn't play this game on hard mode, not because of the difficulty, but because it completely shuts down the little bit of variety the game has strategy wise. I restarted from normal mode because I felt it was too easy (And I grinded and became far too strong in the overworld before I realized I had to start the main quest from the board), but I kind of regret it now. The game was still easy, it was just a lot more boring with the poison + healing spam.
Keeping all items in a new playthrough kind of sucks too. Feels so cheaty I don't know if I want to play it. I just started the newgame+/2nd part, and feel like it should have just been the original game at this point. Actually having some goals like unlocking new weapons and armor and having a party instantly makes it more interesting compared to the halfbaked monster/karma shit. I want to dump all my items and money and play part 2 as a fresh new game. If I can't do that, I'm not even going to bother with it.
Man I'd love to see somebody really put a shit ton of care and detail into a game like this. The premise is perfect, it just needs a shit ton of work to flesh everything out more. Overall kind of disappointing. Not enough to make me stop playing the first playthrough, but this could have easily been so much better. I think they really should have kept part 1 and 2 as separate games too. Half-assing both versions because they wanted to cram the evil and good route into the same game really hurts things here. Both sides need more love, this could have been a really cool series. The monsters all really need more skills for starters, and you shouldn't carry over shit into part 2, it makes things way too easy. Imagine how much better it would have been if they spent all the game dev time just on the evil route first and saved the good route for a sequel.