First I love the art style and the theme of the game. Magic world but away from established IP and more of what could be explored. My issue is with the quests. It feels like every single quest is start at person 1, they need person 3 who needs a book from person 2 who needs to unlock the book, so they use person 4 then you return to person 1. I'm a fast reader and love the dialogue that exists in the game. But it feels like every quest is a fetch quest with 2 extra dialogue steps in the middle. I like the addition of the mini games and would love if those could be used to solve more problems with less steps. If this isn't an option, or not where you're thinking of taking your games vision I think having some more dialogue choices that aren't tied to the personality meter of the character. Or if they are all tied to them, having them affect the meter less individually. Both of these options would break up the flow of the game and keep players more invested in this story line rather than the game seeming to blend together at some points.
I have also noticed that in normal dialogue characters will use the names that the player has given to both themselves and any other named character, no spoilers. But in "cutscenes" they revert to using "Hero" or the other default names.
A QoL feature I'd love to see for the map minigame is maybe a map grid to kind of see how far each path goes instead of guessing how much distance it has actually covered. Whether a line is 3 or 4 squares long was confusing at times.
Yes, you've noticed this quite accurately. It's a fairly common situation for beginner developers like us. The problem is that the game was initially developed somewhat chaotically, and overall the development has already taken a long time. This led to quests that seem "normal" to you within a single month turning into an endless series of repetitions across the whole game. We didn't know how else to advance the story, and ended up with typical back-and-forth running.
We've already cleaned up the script once and will most likely come back to it again. We'll try to break up the quests throughout the game with mini-games and reduce the running back and forth, but unfortunately, this is a core gameplay loop issue.