Fields of Mistria

It's Stardew on crack. Magic abilities, weapons and armor. More exploration and depth. Addicting progression and cool perks. And most importantly, the coziest of the cozy.

So... I absolutely love this game! This is exactly the sort of farm sim I've been looking for, and I can't recommend it enough to fans of the genre, particularly classic Harvest Moon. At first I felt the game was a little too straightforward: NPCs enjoyed almost every item I gave them, crops grew very quickly and required little pre-planning, shops and houses were accessible at all times of day, and resources were very abundant and easily gathered, and the map shows the location of every NPC at any given time. But when I gave the game more time I realized that this works well to easing the player in--the game world opens up more the longer you play and there's a surprising amount of depth to it. The atmosphere is welcoming and friendly, and I find the main story and town progression to be extremely good motivators to progress. The writing is very charming and entertaining, and has an incredible attention to detail that I haven't seen in the genre before--there's almost no need to consult a wiki of preferred gifts or schedules, because most characters will tell you the information organically and the map will show you where everyone is, allowing for more varied schedules. I've played through my first year of the game, and only just have started to see dialogue repeated--there is SO much unique and situational dialogue, and it really helps to bring the characters and the town to life! I have come to really enjoy all of the characters, and am excited to see how all the heart quests for the eligible characters will play out. There is a great deal of robustness to the game mechanics, but they aren't needlessly complex or hard to engage with. As a diehard farm sim fan who has played and loved a lot of Harvest Moon, several of the Rune Factory games, Stardew Valley, and a good handful of other early access projects, I can confidently say that Fields of Mistria executes the farming mechanics I like while staying away from the ones that muddy things up. As much as I love Stardew Valley, I felt that it was a little lacking in the animal department since it had no animal festival... And I'm delighted that Mistria has one! It may not sound like much, but I've always felt that the yearly festival is an important way to reward good husbandry and make the animals feel more interesting and lively. There's also a lot of animals--large and small--to raise, and I appreciate the wealth of choices! The ability to breed animals for new and interesting colors is also fresh to me, and I've been really enjoying how much it adds to the gameplay. However, growing crops is relatively straightforward in this game at present. If you prefer the depth of Harvest Moon A New Beginning and its system for crop husbandry, Harvest Moon Tree of Tranquility and the array of unique crops available, or if you prefer the variety of the grange display in Stardew Valley, you might be disappointed. Animal raising has always been one of my favorite elements in the genre though, so I'm hardly complaining! I also vastly prefer the mining in this game to Stardew Valley. Mistria's mines are much more my speed--somewhat similar to Rune Factory 1 and 2, but with enough variety to keep venturing into them for resources engaging. I appreciate how the enemies require a little more strategy to deal with, but combat is still simple enough to keep exploration smooth. However if you prefer the randomly generated floors, simpler combat, and tighter progression of Stardew Valley, you may not enjoy the mining here as much as I did. Even in early access I'm amazed at the level of polish and detail, and I can hardly wait to see how Mistria will continue to improve. I've had only a few issues with the game crashing, and that's more than I can say for a lot of other early access projects I've played--plus, it's clear to me that the devs are taking feedback and putting it to good use. This has already become one of my favorite farm sims of all time!! If you enjoyed Stardew Valley but craved something closer to Harvest Moon or Rune Factory, I think this'll be the game you've been waiting for too!

wow. i had been looking at this game for months now after fully immersing myself into gaming, and i have obviously tried plenty of farming sims which always left me feeling like i was clocking into a job after leaving my real life job lol. i often looked at this game and honestly believed “oh great it’s just stardew valley with a re-skin to make it look more cute” OH BOY WAS I WRONG. what attracted me the most to farming sims was definitely the townie feeling of being around the same people all the time and building relationships. i dare say this game met my expectations and beyond for this. dialog feels so fresh and it adapts to time passing which makes the game feel like your neighbors are ACTUALLY involved in what you’re doing unlike them being around and just living so that you can talk to them once and continue on. farming not being REQUIRED but encouraged was the biggest selling point for me. YOU CAN BE ANYTHING. you can literally be a rancher, fisherman, miner, chef, carpenter, etc. i HATED farming in other sims because i am very relationship oriented in this type of games, and it often being pretty much a big necessity for a good chunk of the first year in other games can get boring for me. this game gave me the exact opposite feeling. the mechanics and animations are beautiful. character customization is so sweet and i am hoping they add more as time goes on and id be lying if i were to say after 17 hours i am unsatisfied with the cosmetics in any way. i am just greedy. the fact that you can have different outfits on the go is INSANE. I change my outfit anytime i go mining, when it rains, to go chop wood, to go meet characters at the inn for a night at the bar. i even sometimes have a PJ outfit to GO TO BED. fantastic addition and so RP friendly. my only complaint and i hope the devs see this: ADD SITTING ANIMATIONS PLEASE PLEASE PLEASEEEEE LET ME SIT PLEASEEEEE I WANT TO SIT SO BAD GOTY

I played a lot of Mistria, maxed most things out, and took some time afterwards to really cement my thoughts. I feel like in the end, I can't say I enjoyed myself more than I was frustrated by odd or short-sighted decisions, and can't recommend it. There's a lot it does right, but I think putting sunglasses on a cow is probably the biggest highlight. Despite not being pixel perfect, it does much better job of pixel alignment than some of its contemporaries, especially Mina the Hollower. It tries to invoke a very SNES sort of visual atmosphere and it sticks to it pretty well for the most part. For the negatives, I think one of the biggest double-edged sword the game has is the Early Access. As other reviews mention there are a lot of crashes, and I'm sure they'll get ironed out, but the frequency of the crashes is odd when this has been in an abnormally long Early Access period of two years. Early Access is a risky trade-off where you get free QA testing from paying customers in exchange for lower goodwill from those players for a few months or a year. One of the other main benefits of Early Access is you can get the sense of what works and what doesn't from the community and change them even if they're core gameplay aspects. After so much time, most players consider this game's core loop set in stone and there'd most likely be backlash if they were redone or corrected. If the bugs aren't fixable and the main gameplay issues can't be refined, it's clear the Early Access wasn't worth it. Some of these issues (both subjective and objective) include: - Animal raising is not profitable, is tedious, and not even necessary since you can largely just buy all the items. - Days are far too short, and the map is far too big, which allows you to do only one thing in a day. There's an option to make them slightly longer, but it recommends you don't, and it still feels too short. - The game is full of the bad kind of RNG and double RNG. It's almost entirely non-deterministic and there's tons of situations where you have a 1 in 5 chance to have a 1 in 40 chance to get something you need, and if you don't get it you need to wait 3-7 days to try again. This means either you're encouraged to work out strats for grinding for days on end (of real time), or ignore these quests and parts of the story entirely. - In contrast to other games in the space, there's a ton more things to level up, but most aren't related or mesh in any way without meaningful rewards, so you're not encouraged to explore them and end up with some stat at level 60 while another is at level 4. The other thing is that leveling them up usually only has a single minor reward and no other use. Ex: Maxing out blacksmithing lets you get armor that is worse than what the game automatically provides you. - The characters are inconsistently designed and all have a similar personality. Some look like they're an 80's anime inspired design and others are closer to Dream Daddy inspired. - The character events don't really reveal much about them or provide anything to make you more invested, and everyone's a little too flirty without any provocation. Along with most of the characters drawn in a thirsty design, it makes me feel like I'm maybe not horny enough to enjoy this game the way it's meant to be played? - Everyone is already happy and no one has any real problems except that there was an earthquake (though all the buildings look fine), but no one is really bothered by it. There's no real motivation for you to get to know or involve yourself with the town, because everyone's already fine without you. At one point you have to literally [i]convince[/i] some of the characters to let you pay to upgrade their shop. - You have to max out friendship with two specific characters to progress the game. I personally thought they were both pretty boring characters so when I found this out I had only one heart with each. There's no restriction to how many gifts you can give in a week, which means each one makes less of a difference, so you have to obsessively give them loved gifts every day for 3+ months just to continue. - The music sounds like it was composed by multiple composers where one was largely using the Earthbound sound set, and the other using a Sega Genesis sound set and (while this is a personal preference) they tend to clash a lot. There are a few tracks that stand out really well (like the Spring Festival, though it reminds me more of a shopping mall), but many just straight up don't fit the theme. The songs for Fall is a good example of this, where one sounds like a western highway and another a carnival. Other songs sound like they belong in a racing game like Out Run. - There's really no late game things to do, and majority of rewards in the game are clothes and things, which I guess didn't interest me, because once I got an outfit I liked, I was pretty set. But that's just me. There are other positives and other negatives, but these were the ones that stood out to me. While this game isn't for me and I can't recommend it, there's a lot to learn from these missteps and I'd be interested to see what they cook up with their next game, because I imagine if they had some more time in the oven before going Early Access this would have been a real winner.

I was having a good time and really enjoyed the game initially until I got to the later part of the game. Overall its a good game, I really had fun playing it last few months. [hr][/hr] [b]First of all the positive comments:[/b] - overall gameplay is fine, its simple yet interesting enough. - a lot of QoL feature that really makes sense. - character designs are fantastic, they look awesome. Although I sure hope all of them goes beyond just looking fantastic. [hr][/hr] [b]Now the negative:[/b] - The RPG side, a lot of skill perks are unbalanced. Either it doesn't provide enough to make the gameplay anything different (for example most buff on armor), not worth it (likeable food buff is useless when there's a lovable food buff with the same drop rate, unlocking both makes the drop rate of useful buff lower even), or simply useless (revival food unlocked last, where you would also have all highest armor level and makes it useless). [hr][/hr] [b]Characters[/b] - I love that all the characters are very lively, they have so many unique dialogues that almost never repeat. However, they are too friendly. All of them are friendly. By saying this I don't mean that I want disrespectful town folks, I just want to see some variation. Lots of them feels like the same person with different occupation. Realistically people will be kind of awkward and not really know what to talk about until you befriend them and reach higher hearts. I know Mistria is a very welcoming and friendly town, but characters like this will truly make the world feel alive. - [b]Most character story are quite flat, they are just doing something with you. You are not really learning more about the character personality.[/b] Maybe that's enough for a 1/2 heart story, but the same format until 8 heart? And suddenly you are confessing to each other?? [hr][/hr] [b]Friendship and Dating mechanism (early access)[/b] - I don't see anyone talking about this, but this is the one thing I hated the most about the game: Since becoming best friend = automatically loses every other thing, its forcing you to choose to date multiple people to enjoy more content from the game. It should be the player that initiate relationship, not in an inevitable cutscene, not brushing it off with "dating multiple people is fine I don't judge". It makes the game breaks out of my control. I don't want to do that. I wish I know this sooner so I don't gift everyone everything every time. - I don't judge dating multiple character at the same time, its the way I found out that it's forced to my throat and I have no other choice. Combining it with the fact that some character story is so flat, I don't feel like I'm closed enough to the character to confess with them. Yet I had to because if I choose to be best friend I'll miss out and never have the chance to change it back within one save file (without mod) - Either have a separate best friend storyline or add the ability to make them your partner again, or else it feels like there is no real gameplay for choosing other option. It's easy! Just make an item player can purchase so you can ask them to be your partner again! Now you are just missing out the option to make them your partner for free. - Dates having no dialogue and only able to obtain photocard one time is pretty dissapointing. You already prepared so many dialogues for all other things, how is making dialogue for dating any different? It's like one of the most unique and important feature you provide, yet it's so lacking. [hr][/hr] [b]Main quest progression[/b] - I see a lot of people voices out their frustration already but I will say it again. Locking quest progression behind two marriage candidate storyline is super weird? Combining with the point I mentioned above about friendship and dating mechanism, it feels very forced and out of players control. [hr][/hr] Overall, as a farming sim, its alright. As a dating sim, it is very lacking in storyline and character personalities.

The art is beautiful with a Harvest Moon type vibe with gameplay with a similar feel to newer titles like Stardew. Not to mention the characters are so unique and charming. I want to marry just about everyone in this game (definitely going to be doing multiple runs through) I can't wait for the full release of the game, also really hoping there will be a coop mode I'd love to play this with friends!

I love this game! It's similar to Stardew Valley but with a wonderfully unique fantasy storyline, I prefer the controls over SV as well, much smoother and less cumbersome. There is already an insane amount of content, whether you're following the story arc, delving into the mines, filling up the museum, upgrading your various skills, taking care of tons of cute animals, or making friends with the very likeable variety of characters, it's so hard to put this game down! I can't wait for the full release of this game I'm so unbelievably excited! I recommend this to everyone who will listen. Thankyou for this great game! ♡⸜(˶˃ ᵕ ˂˶)⸝♡ ദ്ദി◝ ⩊ ◜.ᐟ

This game has great potential to be the next big cozy game. The only thing that annoys me is the size of the bag/inventory feels too small but still, looking forward for the v1.0 ! (And thank you for [strike] Not Gale [/strike] Hayden 😁😁)

please make a Portuguese (BR) traduccion, the community is worth the trouble

I wasn't sure that this game was going to be for me. I do love a great farming game though so I decided to give it a shot while it was on sale. OH MY GODDESS I am so glad I gave it a chance! between the classic RPG vibes, the creative freedom with decorating your farm, the wardrobe system(who knew it could be this fun and easy?), The adorable old school anime portraits, animal breeding for colors and so many more features, this game quickly became my new obsession! If I had just one complaint it would be for the romance writing in particular, none of the big romantic scenes I experienced felt a bit romantic, however I do know that marriage is only coming in the full release this august, so hopefully that will improve with the update!