Updated Review:
Finally was able to finish the game, completed all post-game content, beat the Task Master. Several thoughts:
-I will lighten up just a little on the bugs, because even though they were numerous and twice caused inability to progress, the dev has been fairly responsive in fixing them. Kudos on that, although I'd have preferred they not exist to begin with.
-Combat by late game became uninteresting, the playing field was way too cluttered with the daughter's side, the enemy side, and effect pillars. Everything basically devolved into tank and spank with AoEs to clear enemies. Effect pillars could have been interesting, but eventually became miserable with no way to maneuver around status fields or prevent them from spawning on you. I eventually just opted to tank the statuses and otherwise ignore them.
A way to instantly skip past combats that would be considered trivial would have helped by the end, although perhaps that's just disguising the fact that combat became tedious by endgame.
-I absolutely loathe the vitality system. The %-based costs mean that there's absolutely no sense of progression in the daughter being able to do more things as she progresses. In other raising sims like Princess Maker and Ciel Fledge, the daughter's ability to do more in a time period opens up more flexibility in her schedule. There is a sense of snowballing progression which is satisfying, that is absent here.
Vitality in the field is absolutely wretched and I'm not shelling out to Lyla to buy her potions when the maps are so winding and vast and there are stamina drain tiles every couple of steps (plus there's no minimap, so larger maps are just going to have you wander around a lot). The ideal solution is to clear everything, then go back and tank all the vitality poison and statuses collecting the treasures, then clear it all off with therapy afterwards.
-There is no way to change the standing portraits earned by character titles: the last one earned is the one always displayed. A way to switch them would be nice.
-The budget system. I like the idea of encouraging players to use items rather than hoard them. The flip side of this is big ticket purchases like great guardians' shrines feel greatly devalued because the point when you can actually get your hands on one, it's unlikely that you'll actually need it, and it can't be stored when it's actually useful.
It feels like there's a glut of too many life items that do similar things. In the first few years, this is fine, but as more items are added there's a bunch of redundancies in life items.
Being randomly punished for buying things for your daughter feels absolutely awful. If she dislikes the item, that's my fault, but I'm to take a mood and/or condition hit because the dice said so?
As prices scale, as with vitality, there's no sense of progression in being required to buy the daughter more expensive things in order to maintain the greater heights I'm supposed to be pushing her to.
-Final point, storyline. Overall, not bad, but not good either. Quite predictable, eg: no big surprises as to who the Harbinger was. In that sense, it's okay, about what one might expect from a title. Bland porridge; it fills the belly and does what it needs to, but mostly forgettable.
Liked: not so much the daughter replies based on her state (which should be expected of this genre), but the exact personality trait that caused this being highlighted.
Did not like: constant fourth wall breaking, overreliance on pop culture references to make jokes.
My biggest disappointment from the narrative, mentioned in my earlier review, is the railroading. Overall, the game doesn't feel like a raising sim; it feels like a VN with raising sim elements like Long Live The Queen, only with fewer decision points. The sensation of being railroaded is perpetually there, with the inability to end week without participating in that week's storyline.
The expectation coming from other titles in this genre is that there's a wide variety of differing storylines that I can participate in at will. Even the main story is perfectly skippable in Princess Maker 5; you can just make your daughter a quiet homebody. You expect tons of possibilities for endings from everything from Queen of the Five Realms to crime boss to just being a humble farmer.
There is absolutely no sense of that in this game, everything's set for the daughter. She's going to be a guild member, go on these adventures that are preplanned for her, and you're going to enjoy this on-rails storyline. Is she going to fight in the tournaments? Of course she is, because you must. I as the player don't get to make the decisions about my daughter, which defeats the expectations set by the genre. Both the daughter as a character and the player are purely reactive; there's no sense of going out to find things for oneself, to explore, to set one's own goals and be able to back off and come back later when one's stronger.
It's not necessarily a bad thing in and of itself, but coming with the expectations set by the genre that one is trying to attach to, the lack of player agency in the daughter's choices and fate is stark. It's not a raising sim, it's a visual novel. If it sold itself as a visual novel, I wouldn't have problems, but attaching a title to the genre means expectations come with it.
Neither is there any payoff for making it to the end. No ending cutscene(s), no CG of your daughter's fate, just several lines of dialogue thanking you for playing the game. Sure, this isn't Gainax here, but even an indie product like Lullaby Days can put effort into ~70 different endings, or Ciel Fledge, which had like 13 endings. One ending to the game, and it's unsatisfying enough to provoke me into writing this review.
-Conclusion:
Despite credit being where it's due, my earlier review of not recommended stands. As the player, I don't get to make meaningful narrative decisions about the daughter, which defeats one of the big selling points of raising sims: to raise the daughter and see how her future turns out. Instead, I'm saddled with the tedium, with no emotional payoff either in the satisfaction of seeing her get stronger, since everything scales, or having a satisfying conclusion as to her fate.
I can't have her just be a regular person.
I can't have her take over Winston's farm and live a simple life.
I can't turn her into a councilwoman and rub shoulders with Anne-Marie every day.
I can't have her marry Dimitri and build Joe's family business together.
I can't have her join the bandits and become a menace.
I can't have her become the head of the church after Julius steps down.
I can't have her embrace the corruption and become a queen of destruction.
I can't have her agree that Victor is doing the right thing for Parcel and become a crime boss.
These are the kinds of things I expected from this game when I bought it, because it calls itself a daughter-raising sim, and was thoroughly disappointed by.
