Sakuna is bizarre mix of charm, jank, attention to detail, and sloppy, obtuse mechanics. It's a lot of fun, and I recommend it if you're into ambitious, Japanese PS2 games.
Pros:
* This game doesn't just plop in farming mechanics, they _really_ want you to know about rice cultivation. Their love for it is honestly a little infectious.
* The physics-y combat is pretty fun, with swinging enemies into each other, and gliding around with the raiment is very zippy.
* The dialogue and character animations are charming. While not set in real-life Japan, the game is overflowing with affection for Japanese culture and mythology.
Cons:
* The platforming and combat can feel _very_ stiff until you play it the way it wants you to play. Dashing is one of the few things that cancels animations, and you can even dash through enemies. You can also jump cancel your dashes, so there's a lot of attack -> dash through -> jump cancel -> grapple to next enemy.
* The combat build part is a bit opaque. If you're struggling to do damage, is it the food you ate? Last year's rice harvest? Element type? Time of day?
* The farming and gathering mechanics are all kinda-sorta intuitive, but a lot of it isn't explained at all, while other parts are tediously overexplained.
* Many enemies are too slow, too passive, and too one-note to pose any challenge, so they compensate by throwing 85 enemies at you per encounter, with a bunch of hard-to-see and unpredictable explosives. If you've played the hot garbage levels in Mario Maker, it feels like that, but with more swords.
* The main game loop requires juggling your farming with your exploring, and a lot of progression is locked behind "exploration level", which is achieved by farming pointless side-objectives in each area. Instead of building a narrative pace, you often have to stop to revisit previous areas to kill 40 enemies with blunt damage, or harvest 10 salt, etc.
Overall, the game requires some tolerance for janky, old-fashioned experimental design, some slippery controls, and forced pauses in the narrative to go appreciate farming or revisit previous areas. If you enjoy that kind of thing, you'll love Sakuna. Otherwise, you could find less frustrating action platformers and/or farming games.
