ourtinymoments | Delighted squeaks can be heard from the direction of a virtual farm (Reply)

So, Harvestella! I'm someone who's wanted to get into farming sims but always bounced off them after a couple hours because ou of a sense of "why am I even doing this?", even in Rune Factory and other games that have a battle component. As it turns out, all I needed was a heavy story focus and some tweaks. The system where you're expected to get closer to npcs by talking to them daily and shoving left-over items at them as gifts, is nowhere to be seen here and good riddance; it's my least favourite part of these games. (Like, I get that it was useful especially in older games with fewer features overall that had to give you something to do with your day once the fields were tended to, but the more Stuff there is to do, the more making the daily rounds just feels like a chore to me.) But let's launch into this bullet point style, shall we?

The start is very slow, which I didn't mind, but you're hardly able to do anything other than watch cutscenes and read tutorials for the first hour. In the prologue, the game kicks you back to your farm at six pm and back to you house at eight, but that restriction goes away quickly

It opens up quite a bit in the first couple chapters, and then it really opens up, giving you even more thinks to work towards: sidequests whose story I find genuinely charming, "social links" with important npcs that give you more of their story, faerie tasks to check off for extra rewards both long- and short term, and all that on top of the farming, fishing, fighting and exploring you were already able to do before. And through all that, the main story keeps going.

That story is delightful nonsense, by the way. So many proper nouns it doesn't bother to explain (at first)! A time traveller! Machine(?) people! A self-important unicorn! A deadly season between seasons! A strange girl who only you can see who brings more mysteries with her! A bunch of townspeople who're really just trying to live their lives and come up with new dishes for the local restaurant! There's something about the plot (and this whole game in some ways) that reminds me of psx/early ps2 era games, and whether that's a feature or a bug depends on you, but I'm loving it.

There is, as far as I can tell, no actual time limit, so even though there's a lot to do, I never feel rushed. (I say this as someone who really doesn't care for time limits and often feels overwhelmed when there's a clock ticking in the corner of the screen but here, it doesn't have that effect on me. (btw, if you've played the switch demo: the devs listened to complaints that time passed too quickly on the worldmap and that fishing took too long, and both of these things have been adjusted.)

I find the game utterly beautiful. Really shows that a solid art direction is so much more important than photorealistic graphics. The autumn trees of the first dungeon-type area alone make me sigh happily when they start glowing in the evening darkness. <3 And while I wouldn't have expected anything less from Go Shiina, his soundtrack is also a thing of beauty. (Like this song, for example.)

But while we're on visuals, I have to say I'm not super happy with the text readability. While the subtitle size is okay (no option to change it though), the white, borderless text can be hard to read on brighter backgrounds. It's a pain.

The battle system also seems to be hit or miss with people. I've seen complaints that there is no dodge or roll, which is mostly false, but you have to unlock a quickstep at the start of your dash from the jobskill menu first. It is more shallow than a dedicated action rpg, and some damage seems unavoidable. You're definitely going to have to rely on buffs and heals from the meals you can cook with all that produce you're harvesting! (Feature or bug? I don't mind and like that it makes the farming aspect feel important, but I could see this being frustrating for people who want to take down a high-level enemy in the first few hours with just their dodging reflexes.)

Cutscenes are unskippable, as I discovered when I replayed the first twenty minutes or so in German for the next bullet point. There is also no option to have all text in one "text box" appear at once.

Here's something that seriously impressed me: So you might have heard that the game lets you choose your gender from a set of three (the third one being non-binary), and that's already really cool. As far as character creation goes, you can mix and match the following any way you want: pronouns (he/she/they), one of two body types (each of which has four skin colour options that are sadly limited to three very pale ones and one that's a bit darker), hair colour, eye colour, and one of two voices (one from a male and one from a female actor). Now, I was curious what the German translation would do with the non-binary option (which it calls "divers") because we don't have they/them to fall back on, and I was happy to see that instead of just doing some "generic masculine form" nonsense, it flat-out uses neopronouns. (Xier/xiem, to be precise.) It's just really nice to see that from a major publisher like square enix, especially with the advertisement the feature got.

a collection of other things I enjoy in this game:

fishing (a simple one button affair, but so relaxing, thanks to the music and the camera angles showing off the beautiful landscapes).

the cosiness of the experience as a whole, even when the story gets Serious.

the different jobs; I've only unlocked a few so far, but mages are neat. ^.^ And a lot of them seem to get additional skill trees as you get closer to various characters. (speaking of getting closer to characters, some of them are apparently romanceable in the postgame, and are not restricted by your choice of gender/body type/etc.)

You can get a mount for the world map, and pet it. It's so fluffy!

Because so many quests reward you with seeds, and so many treasure chests give you some as well, these rewards actually feel very satisfying. Farm farm farm~

Being able to walk around with your watering ~~can~~ stick makes watering crops fun instead of a chore. Grow, little plants, grow!

"Such abhorrently arrogant creatures. You would do well to learn from me, a prime example of unparalleled humility!" No, seriously, this unicorn is amazing.

tl;dr: I'm having a blast. Harvestella is not without its flaws, but conveniently, most of them either don't bother me or a features-not-bugs to me.