Lionheart (JRPG/VN) 90% off, getting delisted after February 11

and 4 of them are negative.

Let's look at the highlights of those reviews:
1: "Unfortunately , I do not like excessive reading."
2: "super snail slow " "The 1st 5-10 minutes of "gameplay" is just visual novel reading!?! "
3: "this is about as generic a VN/RPG as you can get."
4: "Typical Japanese feel. Nothing special. The game speed is insanely slow. And there are no way to speed it up. So don't play it if you are not a patient person. If the devs adds a "Speed up animations" button somewhere in the options."

So two are from users upset that it's a visual novel, one is vague on meaningful critcisms [but does go into good general details], and there's one that's actually a legitimate negative review but is based in subjective points such as being impatient and not liking "Japanese feel".

Outside of the legitimate complaint over a lack of animation speed control, it's hard to really tell from the current negative reviews if the game is in any way bad. So from there, we need to look at the positive reviews:

1: "Lionheart is a monument to grind. It loves nothing more. If there’s a goal to obtain, an obstacle to overcome or a secret to find, the answer is--universally--that you need to grind some more. Nothing gets done without grind. " "Lionheart is unapologetically superficial. Though it adorns itself in JRPG trappings, it also unashamedly borrows from visual novels. So, all that grind isn’t tapered with exploration like you’d normally expect." "But you only visit these places in the shallowest of senses; there’s a static hand-drawn background and a progress bar. " " There’s a story behind it all [that is] openly trope-reliant"

:blink: :looks up: Okay, it's always weird when the positive reviews make for better negative reviews than the negative reviews. It seems to support the general vibe of the negative reviews, though, so let's see if the other positive reviews further support that perspective:

2: "Of course, with the comedy being far more prevalent, players will probably find themselves chuckling most of the time at the endearing and sometimes frivolous humor." "One of the things that I like about the battle system is that it is reminiscent to the “Mana/Atelier” franchise that allows you to swap frontline and backline party members," "My only complaint about Lionheart’s battle system is that there is no way to speed up battles. "the production values for Lionheart looks great" "From the spread of characters to easy-going storytelling, I would be simply remissed to understate how much amusement I was able to get out of it"
3: ..no, okay, the rest of the positive reviews are worthless blurbs, so we'll stop here.

Okay, so, to summarize:
The game appears to be grindy and generic in general design and overall narrative, and lacks proper quality-of-life elements to speed up either battles or dialogue. It's also very distinctly a typical visual novel/RPG hybrid, so RPG-oriented fans who don't favor visual novels are recommended to avoid it. Finally, due to how superficially you switch between regions, different areas of the game tend to not feel very distinct.
However, the game is apparently [according to, y'know, the one legitimate positive review] charming in its dialogues, aesthetics, and atmosphere, and doesn't suffer from weakness in characterization or core gameplay mechanics.

It's clearly a game for a specific niche, but there's nothing to indicate that the negative reviews are inherently meaningful to those players for whom the niche is appropriate. While it's hard to argue with "many people will [not] care about this one", there's definitely enough of a decent game there [from the perspective of current reviews] to make this thread worthwhile.

P.S. This seems to be a good, proper review for the game.

Ack, sorry! I'll try to clarify and hopefully keep from scaring anyone else!

Actually, due to the way Japanese visual novels are licensed, they seem to only rarely come back once they get pulled.
Being a developer with only Lionheart, its sequel, and one other game under its label, there's also not much strength for the developer to push its games in the future, especially seeing how low interest was in their first translated release. There's even less liklihood that Fruitbat will republish them. There's the possibility that they're moving to self-publishing before translating over their other games but, again, that possibility is unlikely given reception, and there's the fact that it's quite unlikely to get a better discount in the future.

In short, you could be correct that it'll match in the future, but seeing as there's a high probability of it being removed permanently and an extremely low probability if it surpassing the current discount [especially since Steam caps at 90%, so there'd have to be a change in the base retail price] there just doesn't seem to be any reason for anyone interested in the game to skip over it.

But it's not a Visual Novel.

Thanks for the update; had just thought to bump this myself!