That's amazing that you can beat this in under 40 hours, although you have platted all the other games. I'm at 45hours and I'm not even halfway through my first playthrough. I suspect I'm going to royally screw something up some how and end up needing like 5 playthroughs or something.
I have no idea what I'm doing in this game. Meeting the quarterly assignments has been pretty easy because you can just make or buy a bunch of crappy items, but everything else seems really hard. I'm struggling to juggle everything else because of the time management (being able to upgrade my characters, make money, find decent ingredients, craft decent items, and complete jobs for other people).
I just got to the Ster Highlands during assignment 7, I'm dead broke, have crap armor, crap weapons other than Rorona, and I'm getting my ass kicked. I've only used Cory and Iksy the whole time so I'm probably screwing myself in regards to reaching max friendship with everyone else. I'm sure I'm missing events by being out of town trying to explore and gather ingredients. I've read the previous trophy guide and krystal's walkthrough and I still can't master the time management. I suspect this will end up taking me well over 100 hours.