6 hours in and I feel like this is the game I was looking for. Was playing some of the "free" fantasy simulation shop/city building games for a while now to pass the time. I wanted a little more dungeon crawler and less feeling like I was playing a game that felt like a second job. There's a good balance between the different elements in the game and it feels like the progression is well earned if you put in the time. The shop aspect of this is interesting, although I'd love it if the helper you get in the game did more than add flavor to the story and conversations. It would be nice if you could actually build/design the store as you play and have her be an automated NPC salesperson. That said, I would definitely recommend this game if you're looking for something more involved than those free, but pay to play games.

Daily routine: eat some food for huge exp boost, heal in a church, fight five fights on arena to get some resources from enemies from past dungeons (available later in a story), check guild for new quests, heal in a church, explore one dungeon (collect resources from mining nodes, kill enemies for resources/quests), craft some items in your workshop, put some items on sale and open the shop. Repeat every day.

Characters are manually generated, can use two classes (second one unlocks at level 10), first class defines equipment they can use and how they look, second class adds extra skills, stats and passives. Each class has 2 passives that are gained as soon as you choose the class as main or sub, one passive can be trained. Each skill has 1-5 levels and requires only cash to train. You can initially equip only 2 passive skills, more slots are available when you level up. Characters can be further customized by equipment and each equipment piece (weapon, shield, hat, armor, boots, accessory) can be modified with up to two orbs that give different bonuses (extra stats, HP/MP regen, discounts in skill cost, extra damage). They can also freely change their faith which also gives 2-3 passive bonuses/penalties.

Quests are simple - go to N level of the dungeon, kill N enemies of certain type, collect N certain resources, craft N certain items.

Each item has certain progress bar that fills when using it or crafting it. When bar fills items gains stat increase (price or character stats if it is an equipment piece) and may unlock a skill usable by any character and/or another recipe.

Overall it's just a simplified Atelier type game without any secrets, serious story or complicated crafting systems. Still the game is quite enjoyable.

fun game but after 2 and a half hours i enountered a gamebreaking bug , where i try to kill a black wolf miniboss, and the conversation after the fight freezes . even if you skip it, you're basically frozen in place, and cant cancel or move anything.
therefore i cant continue playing and cant progress.
will change my recommendation if they communicate and fix the game.

edit: workaround was shown to me, setting windows 10 language to english (united states) as prefered and display language. fixed the issue. still waiting for a patch though. but now i can play again so recommend.

A fun Game to begin with, reminds me of the Atelier Games, but with a much simpler crafting System.

But, after some Time you encounter a Bug thats gonna softlock your Game.. It seems that mostly Ppl with a Nvidia Card got this problem.
Gonna change my Review if they fix this Bug.

Fun for the first few hours before the repetition starts getting to you. Its really just an android phone game port, so no mouse support and keyboard only game. Unfortunately the classes in the game are pretty bare too so that was a big bummer for me. If you really want to give it a try its probably better to try the android version since its only $8 there.

This game has stripped out everything that would make for an enjoyable experience and has replaced it with grind. Mindnuming repetitve grind.

The combat is so bare bones that even basic functionality like looking at enemies stats and weaknesses has to be unlocked later through grind. At first I was like "Why is there an automate combat option? I want to play the game!" Then that turned into "Why do I have to still click automate each fight? That is too much work."

The 2nd Dungeon unlocks after 3 hours so befor that you can only repeat "suburbs" over and over. Btw just because its called suburbs doesn't mean it will look like one. It's just empty green grass meadow. Then you go into the 2nd dungeon and guess what: also a green grass meadow.

This is not like Recettear where you actually get to manage your store. It's just a pop up at the end that tells you how much you sold which seems to be mostly random. There is a demand arrow but people buy your stuff anyway even with low demand.

And story: Every vendore is introduced but then afterward nothing happens and you just grind. The quest you do for the guild are forgettable fetch quest for people you never meet.

This feels like the skelleton of a game where more complex mechanics and interactions could be build around. A shame they didn't.

Is this game a masterpiece? Probably not, but it is an interesting mix of JRPG and shop simulation with a little flavor of visual novel. Nothing is too complicated. You play Volker, a young blacksmith who wants to become the best blacksmith in town. Inside the town, various shops offer their services. You can talk with everyone, buy or sell stuff (materials, runes, books, items) in the shop, heal your group or change your god in the infirmary, eat in the tavern (I love Carmela, the owner, although her prices for food are outrageous), train your characters and receive orders for items to produce in the guild, fight (already discovered) monsters in the arena, and finally craft items to sell in your workshop. Crafting plays an important part in the game, there are soon a lot of things you can produce, and they get better as you get more experienced making them. Adding runes to your items makes them even better.

When you need materials to craft and run out of gold, you have to enter a dungeon. You move your party of five (you can change your 4 companions in town) through the dungeons in real-time, although the dungeon levels are rather empty. There are treasure chests and piles of materials to collect with your pickaxe like in a survival game, and there are monsters roaming around that attack you on sight. Unfortunately, you cannot see which monsters or how many are in a group until a fight begins. During a fight, your party is placed on a 3x3 grid, and your foes are placed on a 3x3 grid. Every character can attack an enemy or just defend, use one of his skills or items, or try to run away. If this is too difficult for you (or the foes are just too weak to care), you can allow the computer to control your characters. It is even possible to select a strategy for every auto-controlled character (focus on attack, healing or buffs/debuffs). When you win a fight, your characters gain experience and "trophies" (loot). Although there is a story to follow, fighting and collecting materials gets a bit repetitive after some time. 10 save slots are available, and you can save inside dungeons. Gamepad support works fine, ultrawidescreen not.

Conclusion:
Not overly complex JRPG with relaxed turn-based battles. Use the loot from the dungeons to craft items in your workshop.

This is the 22nd review of the Steam Redlight series, a series where I purposely seek out negatively or controversially rated games on Steam to see if they're as bad as the Internet says they are. It's accompanied by a video review that can be found here.

In summary, I can recommend Blacksmith of the Sand Kingdom, the core gameplay loop is satisfying and since the game is backed with so many Quality of Life (QoL) enhancements, it draws a good amount of the pressure off of what would-have-been a grindy loop. I’m also drawn into the class-system that this game features, and the developers have made what I think is substantial effort to support experimentation by allowing you to consistently change (main/sub) classes, stat-granting mechanics, and equipment enhancements without locking you into all of the previous decisions you made earlier in the game.
In Blacksmith of the Sand Kingdom, you play as Volker (or whatever you decide to name him) as he takes over his late-father’s smithery. Since Volker has the desire to be an adventurer as well, he figures he should kill two birds with one stone by adventuring to get materials that he can bring back to his workshop. At the shop, he’s aided by a childhood friend and a family-fairy that provide him support and knowledge - the same kind of help you will see from the various townsfolk around the city of Muspelheim.

In this game you’ll find that it’s an RPG that strikes a good balance between shop-management and dungeon crawling with turn-based positional combat. When you get started, you have the chance to choose one of the five base classes (Fighter, Mage, Thief, Priest, and Archer) as well as a Faith that provides status effects and bonuses. Shortly thereafter you’ll create four faceless and silent party members since the game requires you to have five members in your party to be allowed an adventurer’s permit. As you go through the game, you’ll unlock additional faith bonuses and party formations, all that help you further a strategy or scenario for whatever you’re working through.

The game is built into what I’d summarize into three phases. The first phase is the township phase; it’s here you go around the town buying materials or knowledge, healing you and your team, picking up quests that further the story or training your skills with Gold payments, eating food for team-wide experience, and eventually battling through an arena to earn specific crafting materials. This phase is mostly errand-running, but serves as an important supporting piece into the other two.

The second phase would be the dungeon crawling. Here, you go through a map that’s made up of fields looking for resource nodes, mobs, or treasure chests. Resource nodes can be mined once per day and offer earthly resources for crafting. Mobs are just monsters that can be defeated for quests or their material droppings and respawn shortly after they’re defeated or escaped from. Lastly, there’s treasure chests which contain an item of some value, and these do not respawn at all.

The last phase would be the crafting phase. Here you’d take the fruits of your labor and create or upgrade equipment or commodities to be used by your party, turned in for quests, or sold to the city. You set what items are out on display, price them in accordance to market value (or not), and then open up shop. The reason I call this the last phase is because doing this ends your day and moves you to the next after the daily sales are done.

That’s about all the basics we need to cover, so let’s move onto what I liked about this game.
The thing that I enjoyed the most was the core gameplay loop. To summarize it, you do things in town, get things from dungeons, then create things in your workshop. Following this gameplay loop efficiently keeps your party strong and pars the course to becoming a successful blacksmith. Levelling growth or skill research is immediately felt in combat and with your furthering of smithery you can see your recipe list expand to bigger and more quality items. The core gameplay loop is supported by some Quality of Life enhancements that help keep this machine running smoothly.

The developer has put what I’d consider a healthy amount of convenience in the game -- for example, the ability to auto-battle and set a team-AI behavior in addition to speeding up combat makes quick work of trash mobs since your time is better spent elsewhere in the game. In addition, there’s the quest markers that would appear over what would otherwise be an anonymous monster, the quantity count in your crafting list so you know exactly how many items you need to make at your shop to complete a quest, and the convenience of showing if you have the items in your inventory to complete a quest upon accepting it. There’s many more in the game, but I found myself thanking the developer for these often as it really softened the tediousness of the grind.

Another thing that I enjoyed is the class-mixing dynamics. When you (or your party mates) hit level 10, you can choose a subclass. Your stats are mostly determined by your primary class, but the subclass grants you additional stats and access to that skill spread, allowing you to carve out a niche for your party mates with active and passive skills, both in-combat and out. If you’re worried about choosing the wrong class, well that leads onto the last point.

The game mechanics support experimentation by allowing you to freely change classes, faiths, and formations in reasonable intervals. You can change classes anytime you can reach the Adventurer’s Guild in town, and there’s no cost associated aside from having to buy new skills. There’s also equipment enhancements called runes that you can invest into low-level weapons -- if you have a strong enhancement, traditionally you wouldn’t want to waste it on a weak equipment piece. However, in this game you can transfer the whole of those enhancements to your next weapon of choice.

Those are some of my favorite parts of the game, but let’s talk about the lesser of the enjoyables.
One of the smaller nuances is the keyboard and/or controller layout. I played with a keyboard primarily since I found my PS4 controller bindings to be really weird-feeling to execute. The keyboard was the lesser of the two evils but there’s quite a few uncanny keys I have to hit to perform UI functions and that took a lot of getting used to since there’s no in-game key rebinding.

The only other thing I can be critical of is that the story leaves a lot to be desired. You’re given a couple of lines of world-lore in the beginning, a little bit of family history, some slight history on the Pantheon of Faiths, and that’s mostly it. For your occasional NPC interactions, there’s so few that have any substantial content that it’s hard to consider you learning much about the world around you. Even after over six hours of gameplay, I don’t see anything heroic or interesting about Volker’s quest -- he just seems like a regular dude who just happened to inherit this smithery.

All-in-all, these problems hardly leave a scratch against the game, so I still feel pretty good about playing it and look forward to putting some more time into it.
That’s about all the character count I have time for - while this game seems costly, I think I’m getting my money’s worth out of it. If you like shop-keeping mixed in with some dungeon crawling, I’m hard-pressed to be able to recommend anything else.

If you’re into curator groups, we have one of those. Did you like this written review? Watch the video review which does have some different coverage not talked about here: https://youtu.be/i2wXc0WFDLk

INTRO

Like another review said, I feel like this is pretty close to "the game I was looking for." It's a light JRPG with fun party-building mechanics such as sub-classes and party formations, that is streamlined to the extent that it plays like an auto-battler game at times, with the occasional encounter needing more fine-tuned control. There are some mega-simplified Atelier/Recettear-esque systems as well. The game does get a bit repetitive/dull as it goes on, but the progression is satisfying, and I've had more than enough fun to justify the $10 sale price, though I'm not sure if I could recommend it at full price.

PROS

The most impressive part of this game to me is how well thought out the systems/menus and UI/UX stuff are, making it very easy to "optimize your workflow", so to speak:

- You can easily toggle turbo and auto-battle on and off (and toggle specific skills on and off for auto-battle) to breeze through the tedious encounters.
- Nice and clear dungeon minimaps.
- Items in your inventory are clearly marked with who they're equipped on, which is especially useful for the materia-esque gear upgrading systems.
- Items you need to craft for requests are clearly marked on the crafting list.
- You can view the crafting list not just by final product, but by base ingredients (as in what they build into), making it easy to bang out some crafts with surplus ingredients.
- The game manual actually does a good job of conveying the overall flow of the game as well.

These kinds of features, combined with the general streamlined nature of the game, makes it pretty painless to get into a rhythm and just kinda zone out while playing, in a good way.

Also, the music and art style are nice (both the sprite work and the character art by Makimura Shunsuke), and the characters are likable enough. Hearing the same 5 seconds of the battle music every few seconds as you rush through dungeons does get repetitive real quick, though...

CONS

My primary complaints right now are as follows:

- The class/sub-class system is a peculiar example of extremely annoying UI/UX in this game. There have been multiple times where I wanted to see if it would be better to run Main Class A/Sub-Class B or Main Class B/Sub-Class A, stats-wise, and as far as I can tell, there is no easy way to check that, because the game does not let you swap your main class and sub-class. You have to swap to two completely different classes, then swap back to the combo you wanted to test. And the worst part is that doing so will un-equip any incompatible gear you had on, even though you only swapped to completely different classes because you had to. It may not sound like much, but it's a real pain in the ass when you're trying to compare and contrast a bunch of different class combos.
- The game is not very clear on which class passives can be used even if the class is not equipped as a main or sub class. You can use any passive skill from any class that you have ever equipped before, which means you can use all of them, BUT you must have put in at least 1 level into the skill if it started at level 0 to see it on the list if you are not currently using that class. Also, the passive skills do not tell you which class they came from, so it can be frustrating trying to figure out which class to swap your party to to learn an elemental resistance passive, for example.
- Similarly, Faith bonuses could be better explained, some of them are kind of vague and it's difficult to tell what exactly they do.
- It feels kind of weird that the Tavern becomes completely useless once you hit the level cap. I think it would make more sense if eating meals there gave some other temporary buff, so it would make sense to eat there beyond just getting efficient EXP.
- Some weird small bugs, such as the music cutting out when you alt-tab until the song/screen changes, triggers on the controller not being detected unless you re-connect the controller, etc.

OTHER THOUGHTS

I would like to see a system for saving party templates, including Faith, Classes, Equipment, Passive Skills, Formations, etc. It would make it a lot more convenient to swap between loadouts intended for progression/combat vs those for gathering/farming of low level areas.
- What meager story there is is extremely forgettable.

Cute game, if a bit lacking. Reminds me a lot of mid 00s indie/doujin rpgs, where it's rough around the edges but it knows what it wants to be. That kind of flavor appeals to me personally, so I don't regret my purchase (though it was also on sale which certainly helped), but I imagine that for a lot of people there are plenty of other games that they'd rather play before this. There are some pretty severe bugs and similar issues (nothing that outright prevents you from finishing the game, but it's annoying and will definitely turn off plenty of people) that are discussed at length in the community hub for this which makes it very hard to expect a random person to buy this game and not end up regretting it. Maybe it's better on other systems, idk? If it didn't have those problems I probably would've thumbs-uped this but as it is, I would recommend this to myself knowing my own tastes but not to a total stranger, if that makes any sense.