It is worse than your previous game. It is ridiculously difficult: escaping high stat monsters is too unreliable to be of any use, the monsters have way too high stats compared to the player at start (in the old game the difficulty slowly ramped up and could be controlled by player), the player can run out of stamina in town, the bag of spilling that is your inventory can't be recovered by going back to the coordinates of your collapse (it makes item collecting missions frustrating). Finding new weapons is a problem now as they are random loot with no reliable path that spits them out. Compounding that is you can find crazy weapons at the start, but the main character wants to keep his single digit attack sword rather than a weapon with double digit attack stats.
Right now there is only one viable play style to the game which is to raise your corruption as fast as you can and hope to find a replacement weapon soon. Armor doesn't matter stats wise as the player is always given first strike, so it can be ignored like in your last game.
Solutions: make the bless sword an actually viable weapon. The less corruption you have the better the stats on the sword, you something similar with dynamic stats on a weapon in your previous game (the dildo sword).
Recover your items from a failed excursion, not even the full bag just a portion of the contents.
other thoughts: the map really isn't that useful as it is, perhaps make the whole 9x9 square of the town area viewable in a single map frame. The map disappears when you enter the dungeon proper, so it is only use is while in town. The only downside to this method is if you want to grow (or shrink) the town's size.
With the player rebuilding the town (taking the blacksmith quest as an example of future quest lines to restore the town), maybe borrow some ideas from Dark Cloud games (have people trapped in the dungeon you need to rescue). My understanding for why you created this game is you wanted more PC-NPC interaction, well what better way to get them to interact than interior design! My joke aside, the town area is really big compared to all the locations from the previous game, so I am assuming there will be more places added to this game than were in the last.