HARVESTELLA

Every time I sat down to play it I ended up playing for like 6 hours. Had a good time. Game would have been drastically improved if they cut the last 30% of the story and made the last few dungeons just something to explore and learn about the world with a few bosses to fight instead of the crap fest the story ended on.

Medium overall score at best, no way to skip convo. A shadow of rune factory or Harvest moon at best. The story concept is pretty good but is about the only saving grace this games got. Job system is okay: if you have played Final Fantasy Tactics, Final Fantasy 5 or heck even Final Fantasy X-2 with its dress sphere you know what it does, you can change between 3 classes in fight and use the skills of the class to fight. Your companions are stuck in one class. Aria is Martial Artist, Ayle is a Spearman, Durthina is a Caster and so on, while you can switch around. However the actual combat mechanic is clunky, and honestly boring, I think I would have had 10 times more fun if it was turned based and flashy fighting than this crayon drawn action combat... and we know they can do better, FF7R 1 and 2 is infintivly better and smoother and their Tactical RPGs and Classic Turn Based RPGS of the past have always been solid if not great. My take is that they tried to make a farming sim with relationship and friendships with villiagers from the local town and even other towns but didn't commit enough to it. The Farm is how you grow resources for food and gain money, thats it. but it is placed so far on the back burner that all you do is water crops go out kick monster behind and rince and repeat with a bad fighting mechanic and bad farming mechanic and a abyssmal slow releationship growth. If they had made the farming, upgrading the farm and so on more enganging this would get a thumbs up. If they had made the combat better and more fun, be it a cleaner and smoother Action RPG or a classic Turn based one then this would get a thumbs up. If they had made exploring more important than it is, then heck it would most likly enough to squeese into a thumbs up. Because the story is actually good, or at least I like it a lot. But it simply isnt enough, and as saving is a chore in this game and loading can make you have to listen to the same convo yet again, then urk... yeah. A good exsample of Square Enix taking multiple concepts, and instead of making it properly in each aspect they make it halfbaked in each and hope it is good enough. If you are really in need of a RPG with farming fix you can do worse, but honestly you can do much better as well.