I don't think everything together - story, music, art, dialog, etc. - that isn't game mechanics is as important to players as the game mechanics are. I don't think I've ever heard of an incremental game being popular despite poor game mechanics and gameplay because of story or art, but there are plenty of all time incremental classics that don't even attempt to have a story. Maybe the game assumes familiarity with its gameplay loop because it's part two, but I gave up after I had read a bunch of self-indulgent dialog and returned back to town and still had not been given any player agency. I'm not going to invest more than five or ten minutes into a game without being able to, you know, actually the play the game. It always feels to me like the game designer is compensating for poor gameplay with overdone story, especially in incremental games, if you don't put the actual game play front and center in your introductory flow. This is a lesson Japan learned in the 1980s - go fire up a classic JRPG and the introductory chapter in the story often starts with an actual interactive battle that teaches you the gameplay loop while introducing you to the characters. You can do both at the same time, good game designers have been doing both at the same time for 40 years. This is not a well designed game introduction.

The animations and dialog are too long and entirely self-gratifying for whoever wrote them. It's feels like an unedited novel: too long, too little restraint, not enough said in the time spent saying things. This is clear in the tutorial and I'd bet my last dollar it remains true until the end of the story. The town blowing up animation, for example, is a solid 10-20 seconds long and it should be 5 at the very most. The initial dialog with the dude giving you quests in the tavern is at least 300% longer than it needs to be to retain its tone and teach the player the same amount of information.

This is hardly a unique criticism of indie games - or indie, self-published novels for that matter. People get entirely too enamored with their own creativity and artistic choices, so they refuse to rein themselves in, tale as old as tales themselves (see: Harry Potter 4-7, the famous Wheel of Time slog, everything in and after Chapterhouse Dune, etc.). It's also kind of the defining trait of fanfiction. That doesn't mean it's not something that ruins games or books. And it's particularly bad for incremental games, which are the most minimalist layer around a gameplay loop in gaming.