I enjoyed most of the hours I put into this game; once I hit 32 hours, the game was losing it's charm. It became tedious and the end play was bare.

Let's start with positives first. I adore the art style of the game: bright colors, animal designs for the spirits, and interesting locations to explore. The music was uplifting and I found myself humming to the song when I wasn't playing the game. Exploring new islands via boat was awesome; you can get off the boat and run around. That was my favorite part of the game: exploring. Helping the first handful of spirits was a rollercoaster of emotions. Through their quests and short conversations you start to learn more about them as individuals. When you have to say goodbye, it hurts.

Unfortunately after maybe the fifth spirit, the rest felt bare boned. It made me care less and less the further I went into the main character's story. The final two spirits (which are optional) did NOT feel worth the challenges. It was very disappointing to play while I felt punished by the game. The last spirit was extremely rude, self centered, and if you fail one of their challenges they became verbally abusive. It made me feel AWFUL. I have no idea why they added this character? The game calls itself cozy...it's not cozy to be told I was terrible. The end of your story went where I feared...and I was disappointed by that.

Don't mistake this game as story heavy. It can be an emotional toll but it doesn't give you a full story. It's a management game. You may be puzzled on a few points. If you want the full story and explanation of the characters...you have to buy their art book for ten bucks. The player should be able to understand the story well enough in the game that you shouldn't have to buy something else to understand what you just played.

I loved it, with a few problems.

First off, the story and characters are all well written and heartfelt, to the point I was sure id be sobbing throughout. But I didn't really, some things prevented it from hitting me the right way.

I think anytime story shit is happening is wonderful, and the core of the gameplay is one of my preferred resource MGMT/farming games. It has a good deal of engaging platforming, fun activities to break up gameplay, decent progression hooks and upgrades, perfect art and animation, music, visual style. But the pacing, if played the wrong way, sucked a lot from my enjoyment.

I do blame myself partially, as I naturally kind of hit areas and completed stuff in a way that caused shortages later in the game, but this unfortunately soured it a bit. Long stints of no new narrative interest and seemingly more or less maxing out my resources to collect, and I realized this too late that I should be doing more farming when the request comes in vs. a continuing factory assembly line of materials and refinement and so on. I get that it's supposed to be meditative but not having all spirits, but it feels like the pacing gap between all the moving pieces felt pretty unfortunate. and some more obscure information gets scattered by not doing every activity all the time, even if there's no reason for you to do so, such as one of the most important spirits obtained via fishing, when nothing indicates this is necessary, but is linked to an essential item for other progress. I also felt that when stacked together, the stories felt kind of mechanical and packed less punch for some of it, especially when it requires a lot of irritating travel, when you could have done it more efficiently if you had x just a little before, and then if you get it unoptimally, it isn't really worth getting it in the first place. Hard stuff to balance, I'm sure, esp with the way the story develops, but it did make me kinda sad about this. The core stories and gameplay again are so good, and it's worth playing, but not without some rough edges.

I