Huh. Been hearing about this series for many years and I'm surprised to find that it kind of sucks? It has all the trappings that get me addicted and enjoying it, but this is a game that reaches above the sum of its parts, as nearly all of its parts are bad to terrible. This game is just what if Harvest Moon had very mediocre combat and some even more mediocre dungeons and that's really it. It plays more or less exactly like any other Harvest Moon or Story of Seasons game, except everything is cumbersome.
The good part is, well, that it plays exactly like Harvest of Seasons, so you know what you get. Actually, it's an expanded version where everything is an upgradeable skill and you can do everything Harvest Moon can but you can also tame monsters (and bosses) and use them as farmhands. I love that tossing things around is a skill that can level up, which made it fun to drop off every single piece of lumber I chopped, and that you also level up from bathing and that your overall strength and character ability comes from performing various tasks as all the things you can level, which is pretty much every task in the game, gives you a stat buff. Like the most recent Story of Seasons game I played, this title is also quite good at satisfying upgrades that seem to come just at the right time. On top of that, you get your usual relationships and growing crops, plus some dungeon-delving and combat, which should've made this a game for me. It's a game where you make runs in the hostile overworld and some dungeons in order to obtain resources that you then use to craft tools you use to grow better crops. I love that concept and that's what keeps me enjoying the game even though I think the game itself actually kind of sucks.
However, this is the paragraph that I begin with the word "however", and clarify that I think more or less every single individual aspect of this game kind of sucks. It comes together to form an enjoyable whole, but only if you have patience, and lots of it. The big problem is that this game doesn't actually have mechanics for most things you can do, and instead uses a shoehorned version of the dialogue system in place of a customized menu. This means that you give out orders to your farmhands, shop and craft using a dialogue tree, which is as cumbersome and slow as you can possibly get. On top of that, the developers decided on even more cumbersome things like making it so that every single item you can craft gets its own "dialogue tree" so that you can't just quickly and easily check if that new blueprint you got was a short sword or a long sword. Everything you do in the game, except planting crops and bopping enemies on the head with your weapon, is driven by dialogue menus and this game might have the very worst quality of life I've seen in the modern era because of it.
It really doesn't help that the combat is very stiff and simplistic, with lots of annoying choices like allowing you to get fully stunlocked from full health to death with nothing you could do, and that the game is absolutely dripping with horrific anime-style dialogue. From the very first frame, the game is jam-packed with text boxes and anime-style dialogue where characters say inhumanely haughty things in stilted language and where they take like 15 text boxes to explain a very simple concept that most people could've expressed in three words, not three hundred. Thankfully, you can hold square to skip over the inane dialogue that's telling a very shallow and anime-style story, but the unfortunate part about that is that this game is oldschool in that characters will tell you where to go instead of showing you a map marker and so you have to at least half-listen to this moronic chatter. One thing I can say about the dialogue, though, is that if you like this writing style, you will be in heaven, because this game has tons of dialogue and the characters have hundreds of lines. These NPCs do not just say that it's a nice day for fishing, but they have tons of things to say and the character actually grows and expands their dialogue as you keep playing. Probably the best friendship simulator I've ever seen on an ambition level.
I'm going to keep playing to see if I manage to grab some more trophies and to see how this game opens up in the post-game, since the game does seem very focused on just telling a (rather long) story so that it can open itself up. The game does the fake-out ending thing and has already "ended" once for me, and I hear it's going to "end" two more times and then you seem to gain access to some post-game dungeon and such. I've spent like 20 hours on the game but I still can't grow like a fifth of the seemingly available crops, and there are many weapons left to craft, so the game has only begun and I will stick around to see if maybe it gets much better as you unlock more upgrades. If so, maybe this game gets a more positive review. If not, I will have spent 20+ more hours on a game I to be pretty mediocre right from the beginning.
Update: I kept playing and the game does indeed keep growing and change, and I've been bouncing between hating it and being completely in love. I will say that this game really impressed with its hidden content and very much reminded me of how well Symphony of the Night pulled off the same thing. Once you complete "act 2" of this game, the game pretends like it's over and you can just keep tinkering with your farm but, eventually, town events will start happening that seem to indicate a continuation and that's when you unlock two more dungeons, more crops and more gear, and it feels like the game truly opens up. Once you finish the first dungeon, the second bonus dungeon is less pressing and becomes more something you do later on when you know you've crafted enough upgrades, so the game switches from being a dungeon crawler with a little bit of farming to being a farming game with a little bit of dungeon crawling and it finally feels like I'm free to focus on just growing things and getting married and the feeling is more pleasant than I would've anticipated.
I do love and respect all of the ambition that went into making this game a Harvest Moon++++, with added depth in every aspect of the game, but it's hard to get over the fact that the whole game really is built around a dialogue system and how cumbersome everything is. It's not just the dialogue system, but how the coders couldn't figure out how to do things like tooltip overlay info boxes, and for example how you have to equip and use a looking glass to get info about your crops, when a good game released in 2021 would've popped a tooltip as you walked over the crop you need more info about. I'm going to raise this game's score from 2/5 to 3/5 with the comment that, at times, it's a 1.5/5 when you have to deal with the cumbersome menus while crafting 150 swords, but it can be a 5/5 when you're running around and smacking bosses to get their rare drops, tending to your crops or using the impressive crafting system (I haven't even mentioned how the game has a wonderful secret system where you can use an item while forging a new item in order to give the new item the attributes of both and you can also do similar things of finding hidden attributes and features of various materials and plants too). If only the QoL of this game had been higher, with some more modern code designed by programmers younger than 60, this game would've been one of my favorite of all-time.
The good part is, well, that it plays exactly like Harvest of Seasons, so you know what you get. Actually, it's an expanded version where everything is an upgradeable skill and you can do everything Harvest Moon can but you can also tame monsters (and bosses) and use them as farmhands. I love that tossing things around is a skill that can level up, which made it fun to drop off every single piece of lumber I chopped, and that you also level up from bathing and that your overall strength and character ability comes from performing various tasks as all the things you can level, which is pretty much every task in the game, gives you a stat buff. Like the most recent Story of Seasons game I played, this title is also quite good at satisfying upgrades that seem to come just at the right time. On top of that, you get your usual relationships and growing crops, plus some dungeon-delving and combat, which should've made this a game for me. It's a game where you make runs in the hostile overworld and some dungeons in order to obtain resources that you then use to craft tools you use to grow better crops. I love that concept and that's what keeps me enjoying the game even though I think the game itself actually kind of sucks.
However, this is the paragraph that I begin with the word "however", and clarify that I think more or less every single individual aspect of this game kind of sucks. It comes together to form an enjoyable whole, but only if you have patience, and lots of it. The big problem is that this game doesn't actually have mechanics for most things you can do, and instead uses a shoehorned version of the dialogue system in place of a customized menu. This means that you give out orders to your farmhands, shop and craft using a dialogue tree, which is as cumbersome and slow as you can possibly get. On top of that, the developers decided on even more cumbersome things like making it so that every single item you can craft gets its own "dialogue tree" so that you can't just quickly and easily check if that new blueprint you got was a short sword or a long sword. Everything you do in the game, except planting crops and bopping enemies on the head with your weapon, is driven by dialogue menus and this game might have the very worst quality of life I've seen in the modern era because of it.
It really doesn't help that the combat is very stiff and simplistic, with lots of annoying choices like allowing you to get fully stunlocked from full health to death with nothing you could do, and that the game is absolutely dripping with horrific anime-style dialogue. From the very first frame, the game is jam-packed with text boxes and anime-style dialogue where characters say inhumanely haughty things in stilted language and where they take like 15 text boxes to explain a very simple concept that most people could've expressed in three words, not three hundred. Thankfully, you can hold square to skip over the inane dialogue that's telling a very shallow and anime-style story, but the unfortunate part about that is that this game is oldschool in that characters will tell you where to go instead of showing you a map marker and so you have to at least half-listen to this moronic chatter. One thing I can say about the dialogue, though, is that if you like this writing style, you will be in heaven, because this game has tons of dialogue and the characters have hundreds of lines. These NPCs do not just say that it's a nice day for fishing, but they have tons of things to say and the character actually grows and expands their dialogue as you keep playing. Probably the best friendship simulator I've ever seen on an ambition level.
I'm going to keep playing to see if I manage to grab some more trophies and to see how this game opens up in the post-game, since the game does seem very focused on just telling a (rather long) story so that it can open itself up. The game does the fake-out ending thing and has already "ended" once for me, and I hear it's going to "end" two more times and then you seem to gain access to some post-game dungeon and such. I've spent like 20 hours on the game but I still can't grow like a fifth of the seemingly available crops, and there are many weapons left to craft, so the game has only begun and I will stick around to see if maybe it gets much better as you unlock more upgrades. If so, maybe this game gets a more positive review. If not, I will have spent 20+ more hours on a game I to be pretty mediocre right from the beginning.
Update: I kept playing and the game does indeed keep growing and change, and I've been bouncing between hating it and being completely in love. I will say that this game really impressed with its hidden content and very much reminded me of how well Symphony of the Night pulled off the same thing. Once you complete "act 2" of this game, the game pretends like it's over and you can just keep tinkering with your farm but, eventually, town events will start happening that seem to indicate a continuation and that's when you unlock two more dungeons, more crops and more gear, and it feels like the game truly opens up. Once you finish the first dungeon, the second bonus dungeon is less pressing and becomes more something you do later on when you know you've crafted enough upgrades, so the game switches from being a dungeon crawler with a little bit of farming to being a farming game with a little bit of dungeon crawling and it finally feels like I'm free to focus on just growing things and getting married and the feeling is more pleasant than I would've anticipated.
I do love and respect all of the ambition that went into making this game a Harvest Moon++++, with added depth in every aspect of the game, but it's hard to get over the fact that the whole game really is built around a dialogue system and how cumbersome everything is. It's not just the dialogue system, but how the coders couldn't figure out how to do things like tooltip overlay info boxes, and for example how you have to equip and use a looking glass to get info about your crops, when a good game released in 2021 would've popped a tooltip as you walked over the crop you need more info about. I'm going to raise this game's score from 2/5 to 3/5 with the comment that, at times, it's a 1.5/5 when you have to deal with the cumbersome menus while crafting 150 swords, but it can be a 5/5 when you're running around and smacking bosses to get their rare drops, tending to your crops or using the impressive crafting system (I haven't even mentioned how the game has a wonderful secret system where you can use an item while forging a new item in order to give the new item the attributes of both and you can also do similar things of finding hidden attributes and features of various materials and plants too). If only the QoL of this game had been higher, with some more modern code designed by programmers younger than 60, this game would've been one of my favorite of all-time.