Harvestella

released on Nov 04, 2022

Introducing a brand-new fantasy x life simulation RPG from Square Enix! Through the changing seasons, explore an imaginative world, tend your crops, make new friends, face enemies in dynamic combat, and unravel the mystery of the season of death, Quietus.


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Fair warning, this is not a cozy farming game. It is in fact a fully-fledged, party-based JRPG with a (big) farming part. The farming part is well realized and fun and there is a lot to do in it alone. But to progress you need to play the story as well, which takes a lot of time doing main-, party-member and side-quests that all come with extensive, non-voiced dialogue. So if you are just in the mood to do some farming and ignore the “social” and dungeon crawling parts, this is not a game for you. In Harvestella you will always go back and forth between farming, dungeon crawling and story bits.

That said, all the parts of this game are well made and work together hand-in-hand. For example, everything you need for healing life and stamina is made by crafting which is done with components you grow on your farm. There are obstacles in dungeons like broken bridges that need to be repaired with components created during the farming parts. Farming is your usual affair of breaking down rocks, collecting wood in the wild and planting and watering all kinds of seeds during the four seasons. Some stuff can be automated later in the game. Earned items can be sold for money, used in crafting or invested into farm and weapon upgrades.

Combat is pretty simple and reminded me of MMORPG combat where you mostly dodge area of effect attacks shown with red circles and lines while spamming standard and special attacks that are on a cooldown. There are twelve different character classes that all come with their own special abilities. Three can be equipped at once and freely changed during combat. You only control the main character Ein who can be female or male, while party members engage on their own.

The story itself is surprisingly deep - if you are into convoluted anime-stories - but the presentation itself is probably the biggest downside of the game. While the graphics and artstyle are pretty, it shows that this was made on a tight budget. There is tons of non-voiced dialogue transcribed in mildly animated ingame-cutscenes. The character animations repeat over and over, there are maybe a dozen of different animations for character interaction. The same goes for the music. While the music itself has some great tracks, they loop way too often over the play-time of 60-100 hours - depending on how much stuff you want to do in this game. It doesn’t help that some of the dialogue, especially the minor side-quests, is overly long. It really hampers the pacing of the game. I’d say, if you really focus on doing all the side-quests, Harvestella is ⅓ farming, ⅓ dungeon crawling and ⅓ dialogue/cutscenes.

The game runs great on the Steam Deck, but it doesn’t show video cutscenes which happen mostly at the beginning of a new chapter. There are only a few of them, but it’s still a big oversight and can hamper the enjoyment of playing this on Deck. I also had one part very late in the game where I just got a black screen after a cutscene and I had to play that part on my PC instead.

I can't believe how hard this story went. It was a very surprising game for me personally. I enjoyed the farm loop. I think the combat is nothing amazing, but as you unlock more classes, it gets better. I was really just enamored with the world, story, and characters. Music went hard as hell too. It's a hidden gem.

I gave it my 5 hours. Both from a JRPG and farming standpoint, this game failed to grab me. I wanted to like it, I heard a lot of great things, but the pacing is incredibly slow. I can forgive poor pacing if other aspects of the game can capture my interest, but sadly nothing does.

The combat is passable at best. It simply feels like a button masher, as avoiding enemy damage seems like a task. You don’t get a good sense as to where the hit boxes are or where you need to be to avoid damage.

The characters intrigued me slightly, but after 5 hours I would expect to have have built some kind of connection with them.

Anyways, if I was starved for games, I would give it a couple of more hours, but with a growing backlog of amazing games, I need to move on.

Its okay. there isn't anything technically offensive about it but there's also nothing that wows me away and makes me wanna spend another 20 hours on it. Could potentially set up a good sequel though.

This game is really fun, it's worth it.

Played time: 65hrs

Un juego precioso en todos los sentidos, con una trama muy interesante y unos mensajes muy bonitos sobre la humanidad, el planeta y la esperanza. Tiene sus carencias jugables, pero me ha resultado muy divertido y lleno de contenido.