HARVESTELLA

Fair warning, this is not a cozy farming game. It is in fact a fully-fledged, party-based JRPG with a (big) farming part. The farming part is well realized and fun and there is a lot to do in it alone. But to progress you need to play the story as well, which takes a lot of time doing main-, party-member and side-quests that all come with extensive, non-voiced dialogue. So if you are just in the mood to do some farming and ignore the “social” and dungeon crawling parts, this is not a game for you. In Harvestella you will always go back and forth between farming, dungeon crawling and story bits. That said, all the parts of this game are well made and work together hand-in-hand. For example, everything you need for healing life and stamina is made by crafting which is done with components you grow on your farm. There are obstacles in dungeons like broken bridges that need to be repaired with components created during the farming parts. Farming is your usual affair of breaking down rocks, collecting wood in the wild and planting and watering all kinds of seeds during the four seasons. Some stuff can be automated later in the game. Earned items can be sold for money, used in crafting or invested into farm and weapon upgrades. Combat is pretty simple and reminded me of MMORPG combat where you mostly dodge area of effect attacks shown with red circles and lines while spamming standard and special attacks that are on a cooldown. There are twelve different character classes that all come with their own special abilities. Three can be equipped at once and freely changed during combat. You only control the main character Ein who can be female or male, while party members engage on their own. The story itself is surprisingly deep - if you are into convoluted anime-stories - but the presentation itself is probably the biggest downside of the game. While the graphics and artstyle are pretty, it shows that this was made on a tight budget. There is tons of non-voiced dialogue transcribed in mildly animated ingame-cutscenes. The character animations repeat over and over, there are maybe a dozen of different animations for character interaction. The same goes for the music. While the music itself has some great tracks, they loop way too often over the play-time of 60-100 hours - depending on how much stuff you want to do in this game. It doesn’t help that some of the dialogue, especially the minor side-quests, is overly long. It really hampers the pacing of the game. I’d say, if you really focus on doing all the side-quests, Harvestella is ⅓ farming, ⅓ dungeon crawling and ⅓ dialogue/cutscenes. The game runs great on the Steam Deck, but it doesn’t show video cutscenes which happen mostly at the beginning of a new chapter. There are only a few of them, but it’s still a big oversight and can hamper the enjoyment of playing this on Deck. I also had one part very late in the game where I just got a black screen after a cutscene and I had to play that part on my PC instead.

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.

It's not a terrible game but, it isn't my cup of tea. There's not really much to the farming aspect of the game and I felt that the area that you have for the entire time I played the game was way too small. The farming controls felt awkward and I never really looked forward to tending the garden like I do in other similar games. The combat is the worst part for sure. Switching jobs/classes mid combat is a cool idea however, every attack I used felt like it had zero weight or impact which made combat in general an unpleasant experience. While the story was somewhat interesting, I feel like this game tries a bunch of things but doesn't do any aspect particularly well. It makes it quite difficult for me to personally recommend.

仅推荐5折或更低价格购买

Une journée type dans ce Stardew like : -Je me lève -J'arrose mes champs, y'a des jolies tomates -Je donne à manger aux poules -J'engueule ma voisine venant du futur -Je caresse mon lapin-cerf géant -Je fais top-là à la fée de feu car c'est ma bestie (et je la foure dans ma poche) -Je prend mon vaisseau spaciale pour aller acheter mes graines -Je passe voir la sirène qui chante au bar -Je sors des flingues pour tirer sur 2-3 robot piloté par des IA -Je me téléporte pour aller dodo. Car demain c'est jour d'apocalypse, faut se coucher tôt !

TLDR It's a good game for people who enjoy Farming RPGs, but I wouldn't recommend it to everyone. As a whole, the game has a lot of potential, but feels very unpolished in many aspects. Buy on sale if you're interested in it. If they ever make a sequel, I'd get it with the hopes of seeing this cleaned up more. Gameplay is distinctly split between its two genres: Farming and ARPG and neither feels very cohesive with the other. Both genres are oversimplified to the point where I can't say I had a lot of fun. It felt rewarding in the sense of accomplishment and I enjoyed learning about the story/world, yes, but it wasn't fun. Farming has crafting and unlockables but I found myself waiting for the next season to come around just to unlock stuff because they fueled my weapon upgrade expenses. In any one season, there's maybe 10 crops total to choose from across 3 biomes. Processing any produce is very limited and is only to sell or cook with. Money is then primarily used for buying more seeds or upgrades. The cooking is mainly to keep your hunger/stamina levels up besides one brand of sidequest. Speaking of hunger, I understand the need for food in this kind of game, but it does become a nuisance when just running around large maps and battling require you to eat every minute or so. As for battling, it's clunky. There is a dodge on melee classes that seems more useful for mobility than dodging. You eventually unlock 4 abilities per job class, each with their own cooldown, but other than that, it's spam attack and heal as necessary (tip: use juice, it consumes instantly and doesn't fill up hunger). Battles are relatively balanced without grinding excessively (minus the postgame final boss, but that's a challenge you're looking for if you find it). You can pick 3 of up to 12 jobs at save points to switch between in combat with 8 different damage types, and monsters share 3-4 weaknesses in the same general area so you can stack your party to exploit them relatively easily once you know what they are. Also the daily time constraint of being in bed by midnight or pass out does put pressure on you to find the next save/fast travel point or create a shortcut before then. They're mostly scattered so you do get satisfaction progressing with a new one or two every day you explore these mostly linear dungeons. The writing is pretty typical for Square. I enjoy it and find it really interesting, but the main plot does come down to [spoiler]fighting a god with the power of friendship[/spoiler] so take that as you will. Character development is superb for your companions. However, the gameplay really detracts from it because they try to pace companion events across 10 days each so there are several times where they will have an urgent request that needs to be taken care ASAP, but your companion will then turn around and say "Let's prepare for now. I'll write to you tomorrow when I'm ready," thus breaking the immersion. For main/side quests, there'll be breaks in dialogue scenes, just for you to regain control so you can walk to the other side of the door and continue the scene again. Seems like they could have streamlined this. There's also a lack of some QoL stuff like auto-play, fast forward, or skip dialogue (failed boss fight intros can be skipped but that's it). Music is phenomenal, but quickly becomes repetitive as it isn't varied all that much. You'll know what to expect in any emotional cutscene solely based on the music. This would be fine for the thematic development across the game except here, the songs get used without considering the degree of emotion e.g. the same sad song gets plays whether it's a "I want to play with the other kids too" kind of scene or [spoiler]"I am now the last of my species"[/spoiler] scene and it undercuts the feeling once you realize. Maybe I'm just getting greedy and want more... Now for misc. stuff. I noticed dropped frames pretty frequently so I wonder how optimized this game is for PC. Visuals have never been what I look for in a game but I'll say that it is stylized to its advantage. There are some unique creatures, bosses, and environments in this world. Character models however don't show much emotion and their bodies move pretty rigidly for a 2022 game. Voice lines are minimal and usually along the lines of a personalized "Good morning!" or whatever line the character says. I'd really like to have more voice acting as what lines they do have add quite a bit of flavor but is somewhat grating when they repeat it every time. The world map is somewhat small, but it works for this game, especially lore-wise. The environments and dungeons do feel unique and beautiful, but a lot of NPCs and enemies are recycled. I honestly forgot there was a character customization, but it's bare minimum i.e. body type, eye color

This game is hard for me to recommend. The quest line paired with the farming aspects just really doesn't make sense IMO. The world is on the verge of destruction!!!!! But make sure you travel home, get a good night's sleep, and cook plenty of food and juices before you save it. Your (SPOILER) was (SPOILER)!!!!!! But you're tired because it's 10 pm so maybe try again tomorrow. Idk to me it's a weird blend of JRPG and farm sim that doesn't totally work. The urgency of most quests paired with the need to have food buffs and juices on you at all times just pulls me out of the game. I don't want to go home and sleep, cook, and farm when the situation is dire.

Runs perfectly on steam deck. I really love this game and all of the characters.