After playing this game for awhile in normal difficulty, here is my conclusion:
The Shimmering Horizon and Cursed Blacksmith is a turn based SRPG, that has souls like, rogue like and massive RNG elements that can be concluded with one word: Unfair.
-Despite being an RPGM based game, the atmosphere is really good, from stage 3 and later, you’ll really feel it, the war, the blood, the despair… Combine it with the memories that you collected, it makes the world feels deep and immersive.
-Despite this game is running in 16:9, it runs surprising well.
-This game is EXTREMELY HARD, the more later game you goes, the higher that enemies’ stat scales, to the point that your character strength is simply cannot keep up. (note: stage 4 and later. Also they always start with level one, so if they defeated something, not only they will get almost full heal, and stat increase) It’s not impossible, but you’ll have to go back to previous stages’ fixed map frequently to farm weapon materials in order to beat the current ones, it’s extremely time consuming.
-While being an SRPG, the Strategy part is really weak, it uses the a very common SRPG plugin that makes enemies act once every time you acts. You rarely has allies, and even if you do, you can’t control them.
-Souls like and rogue like doesn’t match together very well, if you die, you lost almost all items and some souls, and even if you come back alive, you’ll be reset to whatever level that you’ve upgraded via the cover girl, which makes the next point.
-Nothing is permanent, weapons, equipment, and even skills, they won’t last forever. Of course, these alone are ok, especially with proper balancing, quite a few games does this right… but this game isn’t one of them, which brings the next point.
-Everything is against you, even RNG. How should I describe this, just like the word that I said at the beginning, it’s unfair.
First, the if the multiple enemies spotted you at the same time, even if they are in different party, they will attack you first, even if you are miles away.
Second, remember RNG? Most of the time, they are usually working against you, and the negative effect are way stronger than the positive ones; for example you touch a trap, one of the best positive trap is to kill every enemies in an area, usually around a size of a room, but one of the worse negative trap will remove all walls in the map and make every single enemy to spot and attack you. That’s basically the death sentence in later stages, hopefully you got the bell on you to retreat.
-The enemies doesn’t play the same rule as you, the easy example is you vs enemies using items, while you throwing items like regular projectile, a straight line. The enemies can throw items anywhere in an huge area, even through the wall.
…
I don’t mind hard game, but I think this stacks up way too much, especially with this amount of punishment and the amount of time that you need to get things right, while these punishment can be occur while you are not making mistake, a single trap called “death” or even somehow you next floor is the map with no wall… It’s so difficult to the point I feel like this is unfun in its “intended” difficulty.
Hence, if you are interested in playing this game, I would highly recommend you to throw away your gamer pride. Go select the “assisted” difficulty and spam that sword to beat the game. Until the dev make an massive overhaul that makes game much easier and less RNG, I wouldn’t recommend to touch the other difficulty.

That’s it, thanks for reading.