HARVESTELLA

Harvestella is a game you have to accept for what it is. As a farming game, action game, and RPG individually, it would feel kind of subpar; the farming is fairly shallow, special "festivals" and other such events do not occur, and seasons take a long time to rotate, meaning that variety does not come often. Compared to other action games, Harvestella's controls are a bit weirdly loose, combat techniques are limited, and basic enemy attacks cannot be avoided, meaning you will always be taking damage during fights. As an RPG, character building is perfunctory and lacks much in the way of meaningful choices. For all of those reasons (plus its obviously-budget presentation paired with $60 base pricetag), I don't really blame anyone for not being able to accept Harvestella on its own terms. But if you can accept the game on its own terms, what you'll find is a good, if very non-standard, action RPG with a surprisingly enjoyable narrative. Characters all have strong voices, the music is well-produced and easy to listen to for long periods of time, and the dungeon design evolves over the course of the game and has more sauce to it than plenty of other RPGs I've played. The farming being a bit shallow is ultimately fine - it's meant to feed into adventuring. The fact that you simply pay HP as part of the tax of engaging in combat is also vital - because it serves to make farming a core part of the loop. It's okay that combat feels a bit weird and loose and lacks a real dodge button, because Harvestella's combat is positional, not reflex-oriented. The day system consistently encourages small bits of decision making as you progress through dungeons, as you'll wonder how far you can get before you run out of time and need to head home, and having to tackle dungeons over several days makes each one feel like a lengthy trek. It's weird, it's kinda low rent, and it doesn't do any one thing outstandingly well - but all together, I think it's pretty neat.

I want another one, gimmie gimmie Square enix

The story line of this game is absolutely beautiful, and its overall very enjoyable. I'm now just going through and getting the rest of the achievements, I finished the story line at about 65 hours (i'm also a slow game player lol). Anyway, I really love this game and will probably always cherish it as its also my first "big" game that i've 100% besides Stardew Valley! Much love to the devs and this game <3

You cannot manually save at the start of the game. Good news, the game tells you that it auto saves when you go to sleep... just a pity that that is straight up a lie, it does not. It saves when you wake up again. Fun fact, the early game constantly has events and stuff happen after you go to sleep but before you wake up. I am not sure who thought not letting you save from the start while not giving you a proper auto save was a good idea or how it got singed off on but there is literally no excuse for it.

おもしろいけれど牧場物としては完全に失策というかコンセプトとしてはなにがしたい作品だな。 RPGの部分はまぁ、それなりよく出来ている。 世界観は面白い、物語は悪くない、キャラデザインは独特で魅力的、クエストは普通に興味を持たせる、曲はいい、全マップは個性的で好き。 文句はすくないで良質そのもの、正直RPGを楽しむものであれば、まず問題なく気に入ると思う。全体的に出来はいいで楽しめる。 ただあれは牧場物として出ているからなぁ。 あれ方面は絶望的、畑以外はその陰を見ることは無いほどないだよね。結婚を結婚と呼ばないし後の生活でもいるようないないようなものだ。 そしてRPGとしては必プレイとも思えない。 戦闘は微妙のスキル連発で敵の攻撃は半分回避不能ので脳筋プレイに近いし装備のカスタムはないに等しいしダンジョンは物語的に急ぐのにマップはでかいで数日かかるから緊張感はないし、敵の種類も少ないで使いまわしは激しい。 物語・クエスト全体は面白くても一々本当の意味で問題はなく平和で善良な世界そのもの、町そのものはからっぽで旅をしている気はしない、固有キャラの方に至っては同じことしか言わない、全員の絡みはいいが始めに出会うキャラはすぐに物語からなくなるので肩透かしを食らう。会話中の動作も地味に全部同じで少ない上にがちがちので時々まじで雰囲気を壊す。 会話での専門語も、自分より上位の世界とは思えないほどこっちのものを連発しているしこっちの科学は現在星に関して結構あやふやで仮定の上に成り立っていることを思いもしない感じがしてて本当の進歩を舐めている気もするし、他のキャラは普通に専門語を呑み込むのも変で。 とまぁ、細部を見るとちょっとあれな所はちらほらあるから絶対やった方がいいとも言えない。 しかし単純に良作のRPGをやりたい場合はすすめると思う。それなりにいい経験になる。 ただ、馬と老人に結婚できるってスクエアエニックスの内情を知ると絶対物語と関係ない変質者どもの意見だろう、プレイヤーを思った上の選択じゃない。 普通に引くわ。

The writer for this game should probably be put on a list. Almost every single side quest in this game involves you helping/playing/socializing with very small children. I don't mean teenagers I mean children from about 5-9 years old. The protagonist is 20 btw. Even when a quest seems normal at first, it will very often loop back around to suddenly you need to have long conversations with an 8 year old. The main quest also incorporates playing with small children as well with an orphanage playing a prominent part at one point. I am so sick of discussing the "mean parents" or "secret forts" with children. I just want to farm leave me the ♥♥♥♥ alone. The writing as a whole is very annoying and creepy. I'm trying to ignore it but damn. They do not let you skip any dialog or cutscenes and each dialog text box is very slow since they tie the text boxes with animations. This game so desperately wants to be Rune Factory but its worse in every way even compared to the older Rune Factory games. Even if for some reason you love spending hours of your time chatting up children, you can really do better as a game. Just pick up Guardians of Azuma.

I can't recommend this game. The combat is clunky, the only good thing about farming is that you don't need to refill a watering can, and the writing is bad. I might play some more but overall, I did not have a good time. Buy on sale.

I really enjoy the game play of this. It does have the mechanic of needing to be in bed at a certain time like a lot of games with farms but that is easily offset by being sure to repair things along routes so that you can get back to where you left off quicker. I love how you can swap between a bunch of classes and have really enjoyed the story. It is also visually rather pretty. Using a controller to play myself and find it rather easy though sometimes I accidentally eat when I don't mean to. Whoops. Still have a bit to go to finish it. I've also been enjoying the side quests as well.

"Oh, the world is in danger? Sorry, I can't help, I ran out of stamina planting tomatoes" I really enjoyed this game, it's like Final Fantasy but you also run a farm. It does feel a bit immersion-breaking at times when there's apparent impending threat, but you can spend as many days as you like tending to your farm instead of progressing the story. It's a decent game, nothing ground-breaking. A solid 6 or 7 out of 10 I'd say. [h2]Story/Characters[/h2] The story itself, although somewhat predictable if you've played enough JRPGs, was fairly enjoyable. Aside from the immersion breaking I mentioned above, the narrative pulls you to keep going to find out more. The characters are on the blander side - no-one is outright dislikeable, but most of them are just "fine" and the character stories you go through with them as bonding quests are mostly forgettable with a couple of exceptions (Heine, my love!). And the side quests although they sometimes have interesting stories attached, are a lot of running back and forth between characters in different locations and can get a bit tedious to get through. [h2]Gameplay[/h2] So the gameplay is split between your general RPG exploration and combat, with a farm to run on the side. [b]Exploration[/b] - the game has a nice loop where you'll explore for a while in each new map, and at certain points you'll unlock shortcuts within the area to take you back quickly, and make it easy to resume where you left off the next in-game day. If you're used to fully exploring new areas in one go, this is a change of pace from that, as the way it's set up expects you to do each new area in chunks. The pacing works quite well when you come at it from that angle. [b]Combat[/b] - fairly simple combat with basic attacks and skills for each job class. Every enemy is weak to certain attack types and elements, so finding out the combination of your jobs and skills that work well for each enemy is quite fun. it does come down to a bit of a stat game though, where once your stats are higher than the enemies, they become trivial, but trying to take on enemies too soon can often result in death. Death isn't too punishing, you just lose some funds and wake up later the next day. You level up when you sleep, and the pacing works well with the exploration loop above so you never feel like you need to grind levels, at least until the post-game. [b]Farming[/b] - Again it's fairly basic, and feels a bit slow at first until you unlock upgrades. It's your only real source of funds in the game as there's a limit to side quests and they don't give a lot, so you do need to engage with it, and it also gets you ingredients for cooking/processing which you can then take with you when you're out exploring as your stamina is likely to run out if you don't. There's a nice variety of crops and you unlock processing machines which (when you get higher level ones) increase the money you make. There's not much automation besides sprinklers, but it never takes too much time out of your in-game day except maybe on the first of each season, so you still have plenty time to explore after tending your farm. [b]Stamina/Day Cycle[/b] - This is the one part that frustrated me a little. My attempts to do anything were always cut short by either my stamina running out really quickly (yes, I can use food, but I play JRPGs and we all know using any item of any kind is just not a thing we do in JRPGs, we save them for later just in case) or the day cycle coming to a close and having to teleport back to my farm. I do think they could have been less harsh in both aspects, but you do get used to the cycle and knowing what your limits are each day. [h1]Steam Deck[/h1] I played entirely on the Deck. When I first loaded the game it just kept crashing, so I had to change the proton option to get it to run, but once I did, it ran fine the entire time I played. I did have two crashes at random, but never lost much progress either time. It does feel like a perfect Steam Deck game (once you change the launch settings, anyway).

This is a farming/action/story RPG, and while I have a hard time giving negative reviews, I cannot sort this among my recommended games. It feels as though the game [b] cannot really decide what it wants to be [/b] - whether it wants to be a farming simulator the likes of Stardew Valley, or whether it wants to be an action RPG, or whether it wants to focus on its story, and it ends up doing all of those things, but none of them very well. [list] [*] The [b] farming [/b] has really rigid controls and actually very little focus on it. You become a farmer because, uh... well, you just arrived in town and there is a free plot of land, so here's a toolbox and now get to work. The crops are essentially real-world crops but with slightly different names such as Carrops, Cucumbles, Strawbuddy, and it ends up feeling just a little silly, as the game seems to take itself seriously in terms of story content rather than try to give off this light-hearted, whimsical feel that the item names carry. At the same time, there really isn't that much time to do the farming, because the game mostly pushes you towards the next point: [*] The [b] action RPG [/b] - You venture outside of your farm, weapon in hand, and fight some mobs. A lot of them. You fight your way through branching maps which are filled with nothing but clusters of the same mobs over and over, occasionally recoloured or with ominous effects to indicate they're stronger than usual. And, well, that's it! Which brings me to my last and biggest issue with the game: [*] The [b] effort and polish [/b] - It honestly feels like the game had a lot of potential, but it's lacking that extra bit of effort to really make it work. Mouse click response times are very slow, leading to unnatural pauses in dialogue, characters are "animated" in the sense they strike the same range of a handful of poses occasionally, the combat controls feel very rigid, but worst of all, I feel the overall story and aspects of the game are disconnected from each other in a manner that can hardly be ignored. Some story elements and explanations are just skipped over, some decisions feel like they're made to move the story forward without much logic behind them, and the side-quests, at least in the starting town, are just not very engaging. I was okay with the first quest following the story of the village children, but after discovering that it's a multi-quest saga of you spending many in-game days just babysitting while the game acts as though you're meant to be extremely invested in these children's problems, it got tedious really quickly. [/list] Due to the above-listed reasons, I just cannot bring myself to recommend the game. If it picked one aspect and focused on it fully to do it efficiently and in a way that's fun, polished, and engaging, I think it would be much better.