I played a few SoS games and have enjoyed them. I never played a HM game in the post Natsume/Marvelous split era so I don't really have much expectations going in.

The graphics are great for a farm sim game and the environments are visually appealing. It's a very colorful game. The designs for animals and crops are great. The NPC designs are okay in comparison. Not bad, but not amazing either.

The music is pretty solid. Fits with the farming tone well even if they are mostly unremarkable outside of the game. Some standout tracks are the contests, the main theme and the special autumn town theme.

I don't expect much story from a farm sim game and WoA is pretty basic as expected. Although, I did enjoy the adventure/save the world type of story it was going for. It definitely did motivate me to progress the story.

The characters are a mixed bag for me. I did liked the romantic interests, the sprites and the Harvest Goddess. Everybody else feels too generic that it gets difficult remembering who is who. Their generic copy/paste designs didn't help either.

WoA's world is massive and a big highlight of the game. There's a lot of exploration and with good variety in design and landscapes. Some areas have interesting verticality that makes it less straightforward to navigate.

Content-wise, there's a ton of things to do. Every NPC gives out sidequests (which are sometimes recycled after a while). There's a vast amount of crops to grow and I really enjoyed the mutation crop aspects.

The amount of animals to tame and bring home is staggering even if their use is pretty limited outside of the mounts.

The festivals are enjoyable and the contents are interesting to participate. It is kind of annoying how festivals and contents are locked out until you complete certain parts of the story and sidequests first. This means that you can be late to experience them if you unlock them too late and have to wait for the following year.

My biggest issue with the game is the community aspect. The idea of multiple towns are interesting (and that each town are actually interesting to see and visit), it does inhibit a strong community presence. You're constantly traveling through different towns so you don't really spend all that much time in a single one. Every day in the town is pretty much identical from the next. This relates to the NPCs as well, but their schedule does have much variance. It's wake up everyday and stand around in a shop or outside until it's night. It does feel like a hollow experience in this aspect.

The romance aspect is decent, but not all that special. I say this as someone who didn't think many of SoS' romance aspect were particularly special either.

Overall, the game was a blast to play. I platinumed it in 140 years and really enjoyed the strong aspects of the game. Fresh off of SoS AWL which felt really lacking in content, WoA is the opposite with a lot of things to do.

Ever since Natsume has put out their first original Harvest Moon, unrelated to the Bokujo Monogatari series, I pretty much swore them off. But I'm going to be perfectly honest: I am a farming sim enjoyer, and despite more games coming out for the genre, the actual quality of these games has been kind of horrendous. I personally have found that Story of Season's game quality has been steadily declining since they've started working on games for the Switch. While I appreciate the contributions it's made to the genre, especially in regards to gay marriage, I don't like Stardew Valley's core gameplay mechanics. All the other farming games coming out recently seem to have missed the point of a farming game: a rewarding gameplay loop, likeable characters, and, do forgive me if this seems controversial, but farming. The one farming game that I have been enjoying is still in early access, so to say I've been craving a new farming sim game that actually scratches the itch I've been having is an understatement.

So, I swallowed my pride and gave this a try.

As you can probably tell by my rating, my itch remains unscratched.

To start with, if you play it for the computer, there is no keyboard or mouse support. Well, mostly. You use the controller for most of the gameplay, but you have to use your keyboard to enter names. As an example, when first creating your character, you have to press "confirm" on the name field, go to your keyboard to type in the name, and then you have to go back to your controller, go down, and press confirm. Does this sound wonky? Perhaps a bit awkward? It is! And you'll have to do this every time you adopt an animal, too!

Next, let's go over the character creation. You pick your gender appearance, your skin tone, your hair color, your eye color, your birthday, and your name. You might notice, right around this point, that there is no option to pick your hairstyle or eye shape, when this has been a thing for most other popular farming games for A While. That isn't my only gripe with the system, to be clear. The darker skin tones are just ashy as hell, and the hairstyle and eyes just look... bland.

Let's get into the actual game itself.

It's a bold move to make movement cost stamina. I have never seen a game do that before, and I'm always open to new innovations in the farming sim genre. This design choice does NOT pay off. Early game, there is a quest that you have to complete to continue the story: go into the mines, get some silver, give it to Doc Jr. Fine, in theory. In practice? Jesus fucking Christ. To get to the silver, you need to be at a certain level in the mines, which is fine until you remember movement costs stamina. And breaking rocks costs stamina. And digging costs stamina. You finally get down there, and spot some silver, and you finally smash it with your pickaxe, but...

Oops! Your inventory is full! Did I mention the inventory system is abysmal? Your bag is split up into three main sections. You have food, you have non-edible stuff like fences and flowers, and you have materials, which are completely seperate from the non-edible stuff. You have ten slots in each part, which can be upgraded if you collect enough power wisps, which are like, little hidden golden guys. Also, you can only upgrade one section at a time to have an additional three slots. These slots fill up FAST. I have never had problems with early-game inventory management in any other farming game, and this isn't hyperbole.

Also, what is up with the movement and aiming system in this game? It's genuinely so wonky. In order to go down a level in the mines, you have to position your body just so, and then you'll still end up hitting the dirt next to the ladder instead. This is also true for the actual farming aspects of the game.

Unlike in previous farming sims, you don't have to equip your tools to use them. The game does that automatically. Great, in theory. In practice, with the piss-poor aiming system, it just leads to the player expending stamina on things they didn't need to do, when stamina management is already such a pain.

With stamina management, let's talk about the map: It's way too big with the stamina management system, and too awkward to navigate. You can't jump, and even a slight slope will prevent you from progressing onwards. It's bad.

With farming, you get seeds by either buying them, or finding harvest wisps who will give you some seeds. You will have to talk to the wisps to get most the seeds you need for requests. Do you need to complete an early-game quest where you need ten of three different types of flower? You can't buy the seeds, but you can spend real-world hours trying to collect enough seeds from the wisps to grow them! I wish I were exaggerating, one of the flowers you need can only be received by a very specific wisp in the overworld early-game, and I've only managed to get about six of them so far, even using the overworld map to mark the location. Seasonal crops don't seem to be a thing, meaning you can grow any crop at any time, which is cool I guess, but also kind of boring. Anyways, the farming sucks.

The animal rearing is just nothing special. You build up friendship really quickly, which is weird, but there doesn't seem much financial incentive to. Your eggs don't sell for much more once you build up friendship with your chicken, but I didn't get super far, so who knows,

I don't have much to say about the characters. There isn't much to say. They have no substance, they just stand around and say the same line while you try to rack up friendship points. They're bland. Some of the designs are cute, I guess, but that's about all I can say on them.

Finally, the graphics. God, the graphics. They're better than the previous Harvest Moon game, but the bar is stuck in permafrost with how low it is. They're just not good. I went into this knowing it wasn't going to be good, but I feel personally offended by the items floating into character's hands.

With all of that out of the way, let's talk about the good. There's... not a whole lot to talk about. I liked the concept of being able to move around your farm on a large map. I liked being able to reuse your animal waste as fertilizer. I liked having a kitchen super early. That's all I have to say for the good parts.

To make a long story short: I feel content with my decision to never play another Natsume game, because this one was a flaming pile of animal waste. It had a few good concepts, but executed them terribly. I might pick this up again when I'm drunk and think it might be fun, then remember why I decided not to keep playing it.