HARVESTELLA

I am actually a farming sim voyeur and connoisseur. I have played many such as GraveyardKeeper(played it twice), Coral island (who doesnt love a sob story about ocean cleanup), Stardew Valley (shamlesslessly stole 1o0 hours), Harvest moon, Palia (currently starting and still curious), and much more. This game might in fact be the moment where Square Enix has finally stole my heart, and blew my mind. Previously i could never find interesting FF series. They turned farming sim into something much more. nice characters. still wish there was more romance and dating simulation, but whatever. I think thats where it falls short. however there is plenty of characters and character growth its very interesting. PLOT: The plot and dialogue really keep me interested and coming back to this game wondering. but after you learn the movie spoiler it does become more dull but honestly this food delivery thing has some necessary rewards that you need so im working on that lol. The micro animations and Dialogue (YES THEY DO HAVE VOICE ACTING) are amazing gosh i wish i had a cute loli fairy helping me do farming work at my house. there are like 8 different characters each with personal problems and you go on a journey together with them. its so heartwarming. but again, wish there was more comedy and dating. i mean the codingyou get from other games could never measure up to the quality that Square Enix makes, and for that reason i wish they took on more niche genres in their games. ARTWORK: Okay everyone, there are male characters in this game, but what up with the muscle mommys in battle suits with high heels??? Every character in the game has stunning outfits that i have never personally seen before in this fashion, maybe im playing the wrong games i guess. but as far as the FARMING SIM GENRE goes, THERE HAS BEEN NOTHING NEARLY AS FASHIONABLE WORLDMAP: you have about 5 ultra high detail towns and dungeons where you do various chores and then there is the tiny world map that you travel on and this is where you encounter monsters. this is similar to games like Ni no Kuni. the towns are the size of the disappointment from legend of zelda BOTW. gosh that goron town was ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ tiny. but harvestella is bout 40 dollars where zelda was 65$, so..... you expect more from a 65 compared to 40$. Love how the have the multiple regions you must traverse. each town has a star juice statue that gives them power and also there is a cult surrounding these juice rocks either trying to preserve them or just whip their ropes around idk. but yea its kind of kool to see this in story telling, about the church and the visitors. FARMING: oh yea buddy i love planting me some crops. actually growing some italian seasoning in the back yard at my place with 3 cannibis plants as well. but yes get that winter melon from the ice castle village asap in the winter. check the cheat sheat table https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1jqHMS6F2iqow_56eM62nqO4jEqQ0PMMydDHg4Pqz_Ro/edit?gid=0#gid=0 for even better cash grabs. which will problably be Onion. the farming animations are more satisfying than other games, and the way you level up your farming with the fairies is a better way to explore the game IMO than paying money to upgrade your watering can. BTW money is not an issue in this game. you can hit 100k in the first year easy, so it would be waste to use that on upgrading items. but i wish there was a mechanism in the game where the NPC from other viallages are like ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ your doing pretty good and it would be a whole cutscene. This is list and i have no idea what order they are in, so do not think this list is sorted. - My Time At Sandrock/Portia - they went mad making side quests, and they side quests make you use all the crazy tools. i think sandrock i appreciated more, like I have no idea why but collecting water felt so satisfying in MTASandrock. - harvest moon: back when all i had was Gameboy Advance SP / NDS - farm ville on facebook - such alluring additing animations and reqesting your friends on facebook to visit your farm, but it probably spun out cause there was no real dating or plot invovled. - stardew valley - i think i finished this game because of the addicting feeling of restoring the Museum, which harvestella transformed in such a more powerful way. However stardew valley handled romance and dating in such an interesting way. however the graphics in stardew SUCK comapared to harvestella so... - Palia - mmo farming sim. has quests but i havent gotten into dating yet in that game so not sure. they have a realtime day/night timer that you cant skip cause your online with other players. very interestings.. super cute similar to MTA-X for instance, the museum would give you ♥♥♥♥♥♥ rewards but in this game, your water can is upgraded after doing the rewards. Harvestella did so much better job at rewarding you for collecting all the necessary 10/10 or 1/1 quests. and same with Food delivery, which im picking up now in Year 2, ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ this food delivery

已全破，劇本很不錯！而且支線挺有趣的！ 音樂滿分！！！可惜的是沒有配音 ，這大概是硬傷， 不過收穫之星讓我渡過了很愉快的68小時！整體上很喜歡這個遊戲

unfortunately devoid of a meaningful story tbh :( I kept going hoping it would get better, but it didn't. endwalker did it so much better. has 2 game breaking bug points on steam deck: before the game ever even saves but after 20 minutes of unskippable cutscenes, after the final boss and its 20min unskippable cs. literally had to borrow a pc and play on that to circumvent this. just skip it

100% was awful, farming could have been optimized, the RNG of item drops was awful, better games like it that i would recommend first. Rune factory comes to mind.

I have been fooled by the trailer, the name of the publisher and the price... This game was less than I expected, yet I review it positively despite expecting much more from both the price and the publisher... I thought this game was gonna be an ambitious open world mixing [i]Final Fantasy[/i]-like universe with incredible graphics and [i]My Time at Portia[/i] or other games like that, resulting in a casual very chill FF-like experience that lets us do more mundane things like getting interested in the local NPCs and role play as just some modest adventurer in a chill town. I actually got the concepts right. [h3]So how did this game disappoint? [/h3] [b]First[/b], it's not an open-world. [b]Second[/b], the graphics look like this game was released in 2011, really. Both these 2 points were quite the shock considering what I was expecting it to be. [b]Third[/b], I don't understand why people think this game is well written, but I really do not relate at all. I find the characters very bland, some inconsistencies and plot holes, and the background stories of each character disappointingly generic. [b]Fourth[/b], The game could use many QoL improvements to make it feel smoother regarding in game benefits on sales, stamina management, affordable dish that we can produce en masse for the adventure (this is doable only if you invest a lot in the farm and I only achieved this after the end of the story), making stats actually visible. There are skills and accessories which boost critical hit rate but they never say how much (except for companion friendship) and it doesn't even state the base crit rate we have, this makes it hard to decide what's worth building for. [b]Fifth[/b], the performance is mediocre, one can really tell it's just a console port. Despite the graphics being very... modest, the game struggles to run at 60 FPS on my GTX 1080, 6 cores CPU 4.2GHz and 16GB RAM... interesting. [b]Sixth and my final point[/b], when I first started the game, I was pleasantly greeted with a menu asking me to choose my gender, including a non-binary option. I did not use that option but I am very glad it exists. This was an incredibly aggreeable surprise. It hyped me quite a bit more than I was already hyped for this game. And it started destroying that hype the second that followed confirmation with a character customisation menu which was very poor. We are allowed to chose a bodytype regardless of gender, however, the body types barely have any sexual dimorphism. The default body being the male one, I actually thought it was the female one. The clothes were exactly the same between the female and male bodies (they both wear some kind of revealing thigh highs), and the male body --while it did have wider shoulders than the female body-- still had shoulders narrower than its hips... That male bodytype is also present on most NPC, it's quite disappointing. Meanwhile, the female body had such ridiculously tiny feet. I wish the anatomy made more sense. We can't customize facial features, we can customize hair and eyes + makeup color although with a very restricted panel of colors and the colors look very dull for the lighter one, so, that sucks if you like having vibrant pink hair. Oh, and despite this game being inclusive of non-binary genders, it does not feature any LGBT characters. That's a bit sad. Though it does allow the player to have a queer romance but that's it. And now that I think about it, there are no characters in this game with a skin tone other than white despite the climate of each area being drastically different and it translating in different clothes on NPCs. So yeah, there are many valid reasons to be disappointed in this game if like me you expected something more ambitious. And for that price, and from this publisher, I think it makes sense to expect something more ambitious and technologically and technically up-to-date. It feels like it was made by an indie studio who approached [i]Square Enix[/i] for founding and SE seems to have given them the minimum amount for developement and then slapped the [i]Square Enix[/i] price on the finished game. I will know better and be very cautious next time another [i]Square Enix[/i] product interests me. Now, after all that disappointment: I still actually enjoyed the game. I first played 2 hours being very disapointed and then kept going the next day and then more and then more. I actually really enjoyed the game. Yeah the donjons are very simple in design, maybe even laughably so, but it was a design that works. It was fun and engaging to me. I kept going back for more. The combat system is simple, not incredible, but thanks to job switching, it feels rather satisfying and dynamic, so yay! The graphics are poor, but the design of the universe is still reminiscent of [b]Final Fantasy[/b] games, so it's still enjoyable and pretty, albeit not very detailed and without cool looking shaders to enhance the whole aspect of the game. The game kept me busy for 76 hours and I still had much left to do if I chose to, but this is not because the game has a lot of content, it's all thanks to the pacing of the game. The game forces you to go back to bed. If you don't, you pass out and respawn in your bed to an unskippable cutscene that feels like it lasts an eternity (with a disproportionate financial penalty for dying), texts and cutscenes aren't skippable except for boss cutscenes if previosuly witnessed a first time. The farm is barely profitable until endgame I'd say, though I guess one could just ignore the story and spend a whole (in game) year upgrading the farm instead. I chose to focus on the story and to only upgrade my farm to sustain my adventuring needs. [b]So if you decide to buy it, buy it knowing that it is a very modest game[/b]. A very modest but good game. Which compared to other games at such price realeased in 2023 feels a bit like a rip off, but a forgiveable one.

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.

Woah! Welcome to the Stone Ages of Computer gaming! Zoning, Walls, progress is not be saved, old graphics stuttering anmations. All modern techniques have been abandoned. Should be sold for 5 Bucks. Shame on you Square Enix! You can do a lot better!