XYOTAKA'S PROFILE

Hey, I'm really enjoying your game. I've played about 40 hours and it has some of the most interesting characters I've seen in a long time.

Also, any tips for the...

Ok, it seems like more enemies later on actually take damage from physical attacks. And I found a place where you can buy powerful permanent stat boosting items.

But I also found a game-breaking bug. I was exploring around on the monster hunt sidequest instead of advancing the story and ended up in the Ulaid forest. At the end before what seemed like a boss room there was a message saying something like "this will end volume 1." I tried to leave, but couldn't enter the valley again and am stuck.
Unfortunately I saved my game >_<

I have only played an hour or so (just made it to Ogham village).

I want to like this game, and it looks like a lot of love went into making it, but I just can't get past the terrible battles.
What sort of logic want into making the main character primarily a physical attacker/tank, then making at least half of the enemies completely immune to physical attacks? Then making enemy attacks do so much damage against you...
Maybe I am just overlooking some major gameplay element.

Anyway, I would suggest doing the following:
- Add elemental attacks for the main character with damage based on your Attack stat (Fire Slash, etc?)
- Either make magic/techs cost less or make Guarding recover much more MP
- Add more skill slots so you are able to keep a set of elemental attacks as well as a healing move or something
- Make enemy attacks do slightly less damage (one-shot kills in the first dungeon is too much) or give the player characters more HP/defense.

Sorry for all the complaints. I do think this will be a really fun game, once some balance issues are worked out.

Edit:
I posted the last part after a ragequit from being wiped out by the Entite things in the forest several times in a row.
I grinded skills and levels a bit and it got a lot more manageable.
Also the story really seems to start picking up after the cave events. Looking forward to playing the rest now!

Also, supposing you sold the bomb fragment you get in the intro battle, is there a way to get another so you can complete the alchemist sidequest?

Nevermind, found it.

I'm in Chapter 3 and enjoying myself so far.
Sure, the story and characters are nothing groundbreaking, but it feels like the old-school kind of RPG I have been missing, with enough twists and innovations to the formula to keep it interesting.
At first the combat was very frustrating since one lucky hit from a normal enemy could wipe out one of my characters and force me to either go back to a town or use one of the expensive revival items, but after a little grinding and AP allocation it became quite manageable. I like how bosses aren't immune to bad statuses like in most RPGs, and even managed to keep two bosses stunlocked for the entire fight thanks to my Agility/Accuracy-spec Rogue with a Confusion dagger.

That being said, I noticed a few things:
- Characters talk about Ark having mind control powers, but he doesn't start with any Confusion or Charm techs and hasn't seemed to do anything related to mind control yet.
- The Double Strike tech says it attacks an enemy twice, but it only does one slightly more powerful than normal attack. However, in the flashback area (in Chapter 2?) it works like it should.
- Not a bug, but Merces sure has a bad case of obsessive/compulsive villain monologueing. I wonder what his thoughts were, "I just met these random guys, time to tell them all about my evil plan!"?
- Traziun is also my favorite character from The Way.

Anyway, time to get back to playing!