You look at My Time at Portia and what you don't see is a dungeon-delving boss battling game. But it handles a light version of that super well. That one dungeon with two bosses was possibly the most fun I've had with the game.
It does slightly annoy me that you actually have to go dungeon-diving for certain things. Probably because the sole music track for combat gets very grating after a while. For much of the game, valves, for instance, come only from the Chemical Dropout boss, and he only drops two. There's other places later on, sure, but for several early quest that you need them for, it's one of the more irritating grinds to go through. It's not even hard, you can easily no-damage the fight once you figure out his attack patterns.
It's also rather interesting how much the Research Center is like the WH40k Adeptus Mechanicus minus human cyber-augmentation. They basically spend all day trying to recover ancient technology from Data Disks(which operate very much like STC fragments), and seem to be utterly incapable of creating anything new for any situation whatsoever - you need some kind of new old-tech to fulfill a request? Hand over some disks and we'll see if there's anything on them that will help.
That said, Petra is bae as hell. They also have a significant respect for machine intelligences.
I'm also finding it pretty funny about how a lot of people are screaming about how they recently nerfed fishing income. I've barely touched fishing at all, and I have no issues with money. If all you're doing is sitting on your ass waiting for a fish to bite, you're missing about 95% of the game's content.
EDIT: Handed the mayor my contribution to the upcoming Day of Bright Sun holiday - basically this game's version of Christmas except it's in Spring. The gift was worth the second-best amount of town-wide friendship gain(+10, best is +15). This caused a
massive cascading explosion of relationship points, since reaching certain milestones of relationship points will give you bonus points with people related to that person, thus making friends with people can help you make friends with the friends of your friends. So much so, the game scrolled through it too fast for me to see, probably the entire town and then some.
The best part was the mayor's opinion on the gift: "A lot of people will be wanting this. Let's see who the lucky one is."
I gave him a triple-barreled shotgun that shoots poison darts. One that is banned by the church.
Firing it for the first time loses -20 relation points from the pastor, Lee, and -10 from Nora, his assistant.