Of the games I've played where you alternate between two game genres, I'd say this is one of the best. A lot of games like that have trouble making both halves fit together smoothly, either favoring one half or the other, or making it feel like two separate games crammed together, but Sakuna manages to avoid that. You want to take care of your rice and that directly makes you stronger when you're out fighting, and you have to go out fighting to get resources and story progress to make it easier to grow your rice. And both halves feel like they've gotten a lot of polish (though the combat isn't quite as deep as the rice growing, though that isn't that much of a slight given how crazy deep the rice growing is).

Moment to moment, when you're growing rice, there's a lot to keep track of and it's all about making small adjustments and remembering and sticking to a long term plan. There's enough details to adjust and details that are mostly out of your control that there's always something to improve. When you're out fighting, the combat feels good, trying to maintain a combo, smash enemies into each other, get out of the way of the big attacks, etc. There's also a bit of exploring the levels looking for rare materials and equipment.

The experience of the game is a back and forth between needing to deal with the urgent needs of your rice, the ticking clock of daylight, and wanting to get further into the levels to progress. The year-long cycle of growing the rice forces you to plan well ahead, and you learn how to best grow it in bits and pieces, which both serves to not overwhelm you and to keep you interested. The story also does a good job keeping you moving forward between years.

Should you buy this game for the aesthetics? The game and characters are cute and enjoyable to hang out with. All of the art is well made, though there's a few hiccups in the animations. Overall I wouldn't say the aesthetics alone are impressive enough to sell the game. They're not hurting it either though.

Should you buy the game for the story? Maybe. It's well enough written and localized, and the setting and characters are interesting. While the major story beats may be a little predictable, that's not such a bad thing. It does a good job of keeping you interested throughout the game's runtime. And there are a few surprises along the way.

Should you buy this for the gameplay? Definitely. This is both one of the best examples of how to mash two genres together as well as one of the deepest farming sims I've played. Unless you just hate beat-em-ups or farming sim games, it's definitely worth playing.

+ Aesthetically incredible; visually and sonically cohesive and beautiful. I used the photo mode in this game, and I stopped to look around pretty regularly
+ I liked the size of the map a lot. If it was any larger I'd have had issues with it.
+ I played this game on Hard difficulty and I frankly think that's what kept me playing. The combat system of this game, when it's challenging to the player, is really engaging, with good variety, rewarding skill, and a pretty nice skill tree/progression system. I did not change the difficulty down even when failing a bunch, I never felt like the game was unfairly hard -- my failures always felt like a me problem and it was a compelling challenge.
+ The push and pull of the resolve system is an interesting positive feedback loop. In order to heal, you need resolve, and in order to get resolve, you need to fight well. Mechanics like standoff mode have the tradeoff of filling a lot of resolve, but alerting a lot of enemies to your location -- whereas assassinations reward you with a little resolve but you remain the Ghost.
+ The parts of the main story concerned with Jin's growth and his personal journey are really excellent and well written, I think the storytelling is paced really well and the way that this storytelling tied into the game progression was a successful attempt at cohesion in my eyes.
+ The side characters are compellingly written and fun to engage with. Lady Adachi's storyline or the relationship between Yuna and Taka are great.
- Boring and repetitive side quest design, lots of copy-pasted encounters that I ended up skipping/avoiding entirely. I did maybe one lighthouse and cleared out two forts outside of quests.
- Unbalanced lack of rewards for completing side content vs main content (it feels like i'd need to do a disproportionate amount of side content to level up compared to main story)
- Unnecessary crafting system that bogs down the progression of the armor and weapons to wandering around the map and collecting items. I don't like crafting systems unless they're a core part of the game (e.g. Minecraft).
- The main story is rather cliched in its storytelling, heavy handed with the foreshadowing, and does a poor job at really making some elements of the core conflict truly feel engaging or real. For example, the relationship between Jin and Lord Shimura feels really poorly established for the stakes that the relationship carries throughout acts 2 and 3 of the story. One or two flashback cutscenes to "prove" their relationship didn't really work for me, unfortunately. Act 3 was certainly the best written of the three acts, but the lead up to it was not good enough for the narrative payoffs that act 3 rewarded the player with.


All in all: I'd definitely say you should check the game out if you want a 3rd person parry-based melee combat game, or if you want to cosplay with samurai aesthetics in a beautifully rendered Tsushima Island. Don't try to expect to get more out of it than just that, though.