Sweet Lily Dreams looks cute and interesting, I'd definitely love to play it for the story, puzzles, exploration and graphics, but I'm put off by the 40+ hours length combined with all the reviews I've read pointing out how challenging and also frustrating the combat can be, how huge the areas are and how much grinding is required. Those are my main gripes with JRPGs, it's a shame that for me they ruin the attraction of all the supposedly great and original things in the game. :(

Like Doug Walter of IGM wrote in his review, a bit polemically:
"To illustrate a point, I’d like to mention Kurt Vonnegut’s first rule of fiction writing: “Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.” If game writers and designers had taken this to heart in the 1980′s, the entire console role-playing game genre just might not exist today. This sub-genre is swollen with mechanics that provide a manageable context and proportionally little gratification beneath a massive layer of challenge that manifests largely as delay." :P

Any suggestions for original RPG Maker games that don't take that much time to play through, feature some interesting combat in smaller doses and are very low on grinding and repetition?