I'm not sold on the narrative choice to make the protagonist's past life uninteresting. Between that and the abruptness of being pulled away it feels kind of rushed versus the rest of the intro.
I wish the "enter name" boxes would have more obvious prompts than just the input cursor, and not allow the player to accidentally skip them. I don't know if the engine supports checking for an empty text string before progressing to the next event, or perhaps just a confirmation prompt of the entered name would work. I decided to roll with the main character being a nameless entity from another realm or something, but if I feel like most players would just restart the game at that point (hence, it's an unnecessary point of friction).
First battle, I got down to 1 HP after selecting an Air Knight, a Fire Rogue, and the Water Mage. I was decently sure my party comp should have been favorable against the enemy group, but the intro text only provides a very vague idea as to what beats what, rather than specifics. So maybe my comp was bad - or maybe it was good, and my RNG was unfavorable - I honestly have no clue. And that's a pretty big problem. The first fight was, other than making some profoundly uninformed decisions, completely non-interactive. I felt like I should have lost but barely pulled out a victory due to a lucky roll about 14 skirmishes in. But more importantly I felt like the victory, as well as the defeat which probably should have taken place instead, were entirely un-earned.
Despite the lack of mechanical satisfaction, there was some tension and excitement and the battle music did its job. I'm just already pretty skeptical of the core mechanics, or at least how the player is onboarded to them.
I'm digging the exploration system so far.
I tried reading the Basics and Tactics pages for info I missed, and honestly it's overwhelming. I feel like there's got to be a better way of guiding the player through this information.
Second random encounter, I completely murdered them. But my elemental bonus was a net negative per the info at the top of the combat screen! Hypothesis: the game system favors offense (larger dice over larger HP pools), making Knights bad. I will test this further as I go.
The self-deprecating nature of the companion(s) is kind of grating but I wonder if it's meant to be, as a way of highlighting the political / societal issues in play. I can see there's been a lot of effort that's gone into world building, although having that come in via a slow trickle of incidental dialog is interesting in contrast to just kind of being dumped into combat.
Battle 3, seemed very easy once again despite having a negative elemental modifier. I'm back to thinking it's more RNG than anything, with the Morale skill being basically essential to player survivability. That creates another issue, since there's no reason (yet) NOT to spam Morale every turn it's available. Battle 4 was the same findings.
I had a massive element and faction bonus going into the boss battle, and used Morale every turn. Seemed like the boss would spam its special at every opportunity as well, dealing 1/2 of the incoming damage back to my party. Which was nearly the only threat it posed, but that threat alone was enough to get me down to 1 HP at the end of the battle.
Got to the first major story milestone and am calling it good here.
Conclusion
The art is fantastic and the animations add a lot to a format I am usually skeptical towards (visual novels). Dialog is generally solid, and while there's more world building than storytelling so far, it's competently done, and I am admittedly quite early in so I assume it will get more engaging once we meet this important NPC they keep talking about. I am genuinely interested to see how the plot begins to unfold. The Renpy GUI is fine enough, but it sometimes feels janky where menus are concerned. Small voice over snippets don't do much for me, but the rest of the sound design is very solid.
Sadly, I don't see this maintaining my interest mechanically. It's just too random and at the same time too repetitive to hold up any longer than the five or six battles it took me to escape the newbie area. I feel like combat needs a complete re-work, but if that's infeasible at this stage I could see a larger early game skill variety (and in general, more actual gameplay E.G. interactivity) going a long ways as well.
I hope these notes are useful and wish you continued success on your project. My tastes aside, it's very well done!