The character that typified one aspect of my disappointment was Atul. He was one of the first 4 spirits I found and one of the last 5 to leave because a specific resource you need is tied to finding Stanley via fishing. He was on the ship so long and I could not progress any part of his story until I was able to get that resource that I gave up on him. I had not fished for several hours because I had caught or found so many I just didn't need to anymore, which needlessly held up Atul's progress for hours. In the end he "disappears" and you never get to take him to the Everdoor. If there is an in-game explanation for this it's lost on me because all of the above pushed away engagement with him that might have otherwise elucidated what happened. I instead had to read a wiki to find out, and even then I still don't know whether I missed something or if I just needed to harass him to talk to me to get the explanation.
During that time I learned that not feeding the spirits didn't impact the game in a meaningful way at all, just building their house/interior and fulfilling their quests so I stopped cooking. Mood only affects some small bonuses, which only sometimes materialize into resources, often ones I had more than enough of. This usually required talking to the spirit to even get the resource from a mood bonus, which would sometimes be prompted by a short blurb to call attention, other times not. You only need to feed the sheep so they don't screw-up your progress by eating cotton or linen you have growing.
But damn will Atul lose his shit when you enter a lightning storm, while also bringing the boat to a complete stop even if you don't need to do the event. The game goes hard to force your attention to those resource gathering events. Only option to avoid this is to chart a route around by setting a destination, waiting until your just outside the area that will trigger the event, then setting another. This is especially a problem in the early game where the boat is slow and you have very few bus stops to expedite movement. Bus Stops are also something that you wouldn't really want to engage with early on because that's when you really need to do most of the crafting.
Then there are the bugs, that put an extra hour to my playtime. The most egregious were the spirit quest progress ones. Giovanni and Elena were the two characters that this happened for, and Elena was by far the worst (she was also the second to last spirit I took to the Everdoor). For both of them there were instances where they had the exclamation for quest progress, I'd talk with them, their quest would progress via the notification in the upper right and in the quest menu. Then they would proceed to not go to the boat when I arrived at the Everdoor location. Quitting, going to a different area on the map, actually getting on the small boat to go to and then leave a location, nothing fixed it without doing one of those three things numerous times. I must have had a profoundly broken time with the game because I've not seen anyone else relay the same experience.
Stella can also get stuck under that small boat if you jump into the water next to it and the ice-like momentum of being in water slides her underneath it. Gotta quit and reload to fix that. In a number of cases, unless Stella is a certain height above a platform she can land on, she'll instead just fall through it. The first jump onto a roof during the tutorial was my first frustrating intro to the poor platforming in the game.
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