As someone who has never played the series but is interested, how does the crafting and time progression system work? As a bit of a completion the time moving forward per quest? thing has me a bit put off.
Finding decent info about this game outside of a walkthrough has been hard.
I was in the same situation, but there is nothing that really conveys how this game plays. Your main actions (battling, gathering resources, traveling, etc), all take up time, but this is something that you commit to, so it doesn't take place in real-time. In that regard, the time management is like Persona, it moves forward when you decide on your action. This all varies though, so for example, alchemy will always take a minimum of a day, but certain materials will either take longer to produce (or even shorter), but you're always putting forward a certain commitment. There are things that can take around a quarter of your overall day, but keep in mind that the day is already "spent", so you want to make use of it and produce the maximum amount of items possible, which in this case would be 4.
The way time passes is always relative to your actions, so the alchemy example doesn't apply out in the field, where you have a bar of 10 units (denoting an entire day). To give a rough guide:
Gathering (4 units)
Fighting (1.5 units)
Fleeing (1 units)
Once you leave the area, a day will have always passed. So again, you really want to maximize your potential, and use as much of those units before you leave, without carrying over into another day (which happens automatically, whenever you deplete an entire bar). So if I was to gather materials twice, I'd still have a small portion of my day left, at least enough to enter into a battle.
Explaining it like this makes it sound completely obtuse, and in some respects, it is. Fortunately, the game is generous for the first month, where you can pretty much idle and see how these systems work in context. My fear was simply burning through huge chunks of time without really knowing how everything works. My suggestion would be to make a save as soon as you are able to navigate the world map, and pretty much just experiment. I only started playing yesterday, and I picked it up pretty quickly.
There are some main narrative-beats, though from what I've played (almost through the first year), you are given a faraway goal and pretty much left to your own devices. I've occasionally referred to a guide, so not to run up against barriers unexpectedly.
Hopefully, this is at least a little enlightening!
