I found out how easy it was to get newer weapons after having upgraded the originals and decided to start over to just get the second tier weapons instead and now I can't complete the quest to let me leave town. Running at the crystal and mashing the button does nothing.

did you take the quest again ?
I could only get mats from it after taking the blacksmith quest

I tried taking the quest again multiple times, I ended up uninstalling the game then reinstalling and starting over again to get past it.