After thoroughly enjoying the first 6-8 hours of the game, it eventually became monotonous and the story was not good enough to keep me going.
When the game first teaches you the blacksmithing mechanics, I was sure I'd be bored extremely quickly but instead I found myself very engaged, enjoying the simple but fun blacksmithing process and wanting to fulfill all the townspeople's menial requests simply because I wanted to make more stuff. This was the case for the first 2 towns. At this point, making items was a 4-step process: Mine, Smelt, Shape, Assemble. Fine, no worries.

Then the third town comes and it introduces a new material (Damascus) that must be made from the other two previously available materials (iron and steel). This made every request a 6-step process (mine, smelt, shape, assemble, smelt that, shape those, assemble) that was not enjoyable and also not easy to accomplish.

Then the next town came and there was another new material (glass) you needed to make out of other materials, another 6-step process.

Then the 4th town came and you needed to enchant glass items which is a 7-step process, minimum, with Damascus required sometimes also, bumping up those steps in many cases.

At this point it was taking so long to just fulfill one request that it was no longer enjoyable. I hate to see how many steps would have been required for the requests in the 5th area.