is there a guide?
yep, so for the original version, the beginning of the game kinda sucks and i'm sorry about that. it was based on the grinding type games that were popular when this began back in 2017. If you look in the game file, there's a .txt file called walkthrough.txt that will tell you the order of things to pick for the first few chapters. That repetition slows down considerably in chapter 4 and then goes away completely after that.
If you ever play the revamp, the repetition sequences from the beginning are completely removed and the entire story is more linear.