Of the games I've played where you alternate between two game genres, I'd say this is one of the best. A lot of games like that have trouble making both halves fit together smoothly, either favoring one half or the other, or making it feel like two separate games crammed together, but Sakuna manages to avoid that. You want to take care of your rice and that directly makes you stronger when you're out fighting, and you have to go out fighting to get resources and story progress to make it easier to grow your rice. And both halves feel like they've gotten a lot of polish (though the combat isn't quite as deep as the rice growing, though that isn't that much of a slight given how crazy deep the rice growing is).

Moment to moment, when you're growing rice, there's a lot to keep track of and it's all about making small adjustments and remembering and sticking to a long term plan. There's enough details to adjust and details that are mostly out of your control that there's always something to improve. When you're out fighting, the combat feels good, trying to maintain a combo, smash enemies into each other, get out of the way of the big attacks, etc. There's also a bit of exploring the levels looking for rare materials and equipment.

The experience of the game is a back and forth between needing to deal with the urgent needs of your rice, the ticking clock of daylight, and wanting to get further into the levels to progress. The year-long cycle of growing the rice forces you to plan well ahead, and you learn how to best grow it in bits and pieces, which both serves to not overwhelm you and to keep you interested. The story also does a good job keeping you moving forward between years.

Should you buy this game for the aesthetics? The game and characters are cute and enjoyable to hang out with. All of the art is well made, though there's a few hiccups in the animations. Overall I wouldn't say the aesthetics alone are impressive enough to sell the game. They're not hurting it either though.

Should you buy the game for the story? Maybe. It's well enough written and localized, and the setting and characters are interesting. While the major story beats may be a little predictable, that's not such a bad thing. It does a good job of keeping you interested throughout the game's runtime. And there are a few surprises along the way.

Should you buy this for the gameplay? Definitely. This is both one of the best examples of how to mash two genres together as well as one of the deepest farming sims I've played. Unless you just hate beat-em-ups or farming sim games, it's definitely worth playing.

Sakuna: Of Rice and Ruin, is a game that tries really hard to mix... rice and ruin, in a gameplay in which you'll find yourself both fighting/exploring, and growing your little field of rice.
The first thing that catch your eyes in the game is its visuals; a very charming and "genshin impactish" cell shading effect, that makes you feel like you're playing a Ghibli movie, making everything look SO cute (I myself just bought it because I saw a clip of Sakuna holding 2 DOGS AT ONCE), and pleasant to look at.
The elephant in the room is this obvious and obscene contrast between a (fucking deep) farming game, and a side-scrolling action adventurer, and let me tell you at once, they don't merge quite well, at least for me, they always felt like their both separate universes, and obviously the action sections are much more fun, while the farming ones are frankly boring (slightly relaxing), and if you don't wanna fuck up your stats, you better not let an NPC handle it.
But despite all that, Sakuna is a game that OVERFLOWS with love and passion from its creators (damn, I even cried at the end), characters are all so adorable and well developed (except Yui), and they all really grow into a family with you, your little Mountain Pass is a character on itself, I felt SO HAPPY during the festival, that really touches my weakspot damn.
However, I think the game could be slightly shorter, I'd be pretty happy if it ended just before the volcano eruption (not in a plot sense, but a time sense [if it makes any sense]). My main complains revolve around some very small combat details, such as days being too short, the very shallow weapon type/weakness mechanic, and the grappling mechanic can be really stressfull at times, but none of it really matters when my screen is filled with awesome shiny numbers showing how much of a badass I am.

Sakuna: Of Rice and Ruin, man, it's like a perfect symphony of farming and combat. You know, it's like when Anthony Fantano says, "I'm thinking... a 10" – that's how good this game is. It's not just a game; it's an experience. The way it combines the serene art of rice cultivation with kick-ass combat is mind-blowing.

Fantano would probably give it a 10 just for the sheer creativity and uniqueness. The visuals, the storyline, the whole vibe – it's a masterpiece. Sakuna doesn't just entertain; it immerses you in a world where growing rice is as thrilling as kicking demon butt. If Anthony Fantano were reviewing Sakuna, he'd likely give it that coveted 10, he's not here to do so, so I'll have to take the wheel instead:

I'm thinking... a 10

Some games are harder to drop than others, and Sakuna is one of those titles I'd file in the category of "I wish I could finish it." I like the game, I really do - it's such an odd mash-up of genres wrapped in a charming package and surprisingly high quality despite being developed by such a small team. After about five hours or so, I had gone through my third cycle of growing rice and felt like I had really gotten the hang of it. By the time of my fourth harvest, I was incredibly satisfied with what I had accomplished.

Then I realized I had another 20-25 hours to go and it sunk in that I didn't have it in me. I had seen all I needed to see by that point.

For as much as I genuinely enjoyed the meticulous tedium that went into the planting, cultivating, and harvesting of rice, it was Sakuna's combat that did the game in. It's a shame there too because the combat does kinda work; it's fast and snappy and the movement Sakuna's raiment provides is pretty fun. But it's also incredibly repetitive and wears thin after a few hours of beating up on the same handful of enemies. The combat is also surprisingly sweaty at times, really pushing you to be on your toes which feels completely at odds with the rest of the game's pace. It can also become grindy, requiring you to wait for harvest time when Sakuna's stats level up before you can progress in areas you've had unlocked for a while now. It became difficult to see myself pushing through all this to reach the end.

The sad thing is I could easily see a game like this being reworked into something more my speed; if this was a turn-based RPG instead of a budget beat-em-up I probably would have stuck with it. But that wasn't the game they made. Still, there is something truly endearing about Sakuna: Of Rice and Ruin, so it's hard to be too mad it. Bonus points to Sakuna herself being voiced by Naomi Ōzora, also known for portraying Hana Uzaki in Uzaki-chan wa Asobitai (making her the perfect choice for such a bratty character). But for now...I think I've harvested my last grain of rice. And much like eating actual rice, I walk away feeling like I should have had something more fulfilling than what I ultimately got.

At first, I hated this game enough to write a frustrated review, in which I noted that I could that there was more to this game than first impression might indicate and that I was giving up because of two major design flaws. I kept playing mostly because I didn't know what else to do with my long weekend and because something inside me wanted to find out if there is more to this game and if it is more likeable than I first thought. The short answer is yes and no. The longer answer is the rest of this review.

When I first heard of this game, I thought it was kind of a dream come true. Hardcore farming mixed with japanese character action in a sidescrolling adventure with light metroidvania vibes? That's about as me as a game can get, and it also might be why I ended up liking this game more than I think it actually deserves, and I did end up being both impressed and having a great, addicted time, while also thinking that there are a lot of unfortunate choices here.

First of all, the game is extremely inviting and simply cozy. The graphics may not have the highest polycount or the crispest textures, but it just feels welcoming and, for lack of a better word, fuzzy in the way that a puppy is fuzzy, except in polygonal form. Also because there are actual puppies on your farm in the game. The music is pleasant and the typical kind of shamizen type stuff you'd hear in a game like this, the sound effects and the UI are equally pleasing, the characters are typically japanese silly and there are even some oddly touching moments, like the singalong when your entire team plants their first major rice harvest together. It's also worth being clear that you can have five dogs you can send on fetch quests (hah!), up to five cats that just hang around and sunbathe around the farm, as well as ducks that chase bugs in your rice field for you and a cow that will help you till the field once it's leveled up. Every morning starts with your group of ducks waddling to the rice paddy and you can end every evening with a shared meal with your gang of rice farming adventurers, which does give you gameplay buffs for the next day but is really mostly about being cozy and chill. I kept forgetting about the duck army coming to save your rice from bugs almost every morning, so every day I got to re-discover that there's a row of ducks marching towards the rice and was delighted every time. It's all very charming and likeable! It's even so charming that anime-haters like myself can very much enjoy the charm even though the game is filled to the brim with, for me, frustrating anime-style dialogue.

The gameplay is also interesting once you get into it and overcome the obstacle that is the early game, and charming in both aesthetic and game design ways. It's always satisfying to be able to level up more or less everything, and this game lets you level your farming skills up in various ways while also working on your weapon and magic attack proficiency during the combat segments. The farming upgrades are often of the subtle and unexpected, but very welcome, kind and while upgrades to your tools are extremely common in games like this, the upgrades feel very earned here because there are only a few, each of them matter and there is a little bit of story explaining how you got the tool in question. Especially the hulling tool is a showcase for how much an animation can matter for how fun a gameplay element is, because the original hulling, which is just you smashing the rice with a stick, is quite boring and tedious because all you do is flip the left stick up and down repeatedly like a thousand times, but not only do you get to upgrade the speed with which you smash rice, you also get a big contraption that Sakuna gets on top of and she starts smashing the rice by stomping the device with her foot with makes a lever-operated hammer rise and fall with each stomp. The gameplay is still the same and all you to is flip the left stick, but the much more fun animation of Sakuna stomping (plus the added mercy of having the hulling be faster as you level up) really makes a big difference. The final hulling upgrade, a water mill, is standing unused in my farm because I actually enjoy seeing Sakuna stomp the rice lever.

Combat is the lesser of the two halves, but is still entertaining simply due to the large amount and variety of special attacks, and the fact that you level up your magic attack proficiency by simply using the skills. In fact, and as a side note, all leveling up is done by using the actual skill that you may level up, and I'm not sure why this method of leveling up still isn't the videogame standard. It obviously makes so much more sense to level your cooking up by cooking and not by bashing monsters in the dungeon and distributing skill points however you see fit. Anyway, I think the key to how addictive the magic attacks are is the fact that they evolve over time as you level up. It depends on the attack, but there is usually a major upgrade to how the attack behaves around level 9 or 10 and then there might be another, more subtle, upgrade as you reach the maximum level of 15, which constantly made me feel like I really wanted to keep using this or that magic skill to see how it would change as it evolves. Doing this is so much fun that I'm still playing the post-game dungeon, partially to try to get the plus versions of all the items to see how powerful my rice farming goddess can become, but mostly because I'm still enjoying upgrading the attacks I still have left to upgrade. And, oh yeah, this game has a 300+ floor bonus combat dungeon as well as another combat minigame available as a post-game endgame, which is always nice.

However, and even after all of this praise, there are some serious issues with this game that is holding it back from the maximum score. The biggest one for me is a weakness in the combat. The combat is based around directional attacks, so up and light attack performs a different attack than just light attack with no stick input and while all of that is fine, I just cannot stand how this game has a useless lunge attack tied to forward and light attack, and doing a more effective and useful multi-hit combo is attached to attacking without stick input. On top of that, the game is a tiny bit laggy in recognizing that you've let the left stick go, which means that I ended up accidently doing the lunge attack when I really wanted an attack combo, and it happens literally constantly. I have no idea why they would do this and didn't switch the inputs there. Forward plus attack should've been the aggressive attack combo, especially since this game is so heavily focused on juggling (because you can smash a juggled enemy into another enemy for huge damage). This sounds like a tiny thing that you can just learn to get over, but I struggled with it throughout the entire game and it was a constant source of annoyed frustration.

The rice minigame, for all of its complexity, isn't all that amazing either, unfortunately, and simply due to the fact that you can so easily and accidently break it. Simply put, the combat in this game was never challenging for me (until the gear-check post-game dungeon) because I didn't understand how fertilizing your crops worked and I thought you had to fertilize it very often. There doesn't seem to be a ceiling for how well you can grow your rice, so the fact that I over-fertilized it meant that I was making myself massively overpowered without even understanding that I was doing it. If it wasn't for the fact that magic proficiency ended up being satisfying and fun for me, I probably would've given up because I unknowingly made the game so easy.

As a second however, however, I think my final conclusion on this game is that it really doesn't matter that it isn't perfect. This game has heart and soul, and might have the power to remind you why you fell in love with gaming in the first place, and that's more valuable than perfection in every aspect of the game. While you might be frustrated with the mistakes in combat design, or how the farming is needlessly complicated without being as satisfying as it is complex, you would have to be a heartless bastard not to fall in love with the fact that you can pet and carry your puppy, and then you can walk over to one of your cats and lift that without dropping the puppy. How could you not love that?

Sakuna: Of Rice and Ruin (10/10 title) was incredibly charming in its presentation but man the combat felt super clunky thanks to some of the strange unchangeable controls: a single tap in the direction of an attack to parry, double tap forward to dash (hardly ever used this, so useless), and - the worst offender - double tap R1 to dodge. Right up to the very end of the game it felt like I was half fighting against the controls. You better come to a full stop before you use a quick attack or you're locked into a dash attack that has absolutely no follow-up capabilities and leaves you wide open.

Also why were the directional inputs so unnecessarily sensitive? My controller doesn't have any stick drift yet countless times I found myself locked into an animation facing the wrong way. Early on I hated how little you could do to knocked down enemies (without doing fancy aerial juggling stuff with the raiment) but the game would be so brainless if you could just stun lock everything lol

I probably tried too hard to optimize my rice farming considering you have unlimited years to farm but I suppose that was part of the fun (plus how you avoid overlevelling). Farm sim games probably aren't particularly for me though if they're like this half of Sakuna - it was neat and surprisingly deep but I don't find it relaxing or "comfy" thanks to my silly optimization anxiety (le gamers will optimize the fun out of their games)

The story was fine but the point was definitely the characters - Sakuna herself had a very endearing maturation from her arrogant, lazy brat start and there was a nice "found family" vibe with the farming gang humans. Each member of that gang could have used a tad more fleshing out though (I'd happily sacrifice combat missions for more side stories). That one side quest reveal of Yui's origin shocked the hell out of me lmao (those who know, know)

Oh yeah I played with the English dub and Laura Post was fantastic as Sakuna! Rest of the cast sounded solid too, although I never bothered to compare them all to the JP dub

First game I finished from start to end after a long gaming break.
Honestly a super charming lil cozy game with an addictive gameplay loop and gorgeous art (huge spirited away vibe btw).
But sadly I have a bit too much to complain to call it 'real great'.
First off while I liked the crew I'm so disappointed by the story, there's only a few (2/3 mealtimes talk per quest) and it's kinda difficult to follow. I kept notes of everything and most of it was irrelevant (useless worlbuilding for the most part) and lots of side stories were left off. I know it's sequel bait but well...
For a supposed cozy game gameplay was frustrating, kinda buggy and clunky. Raiments abilities were difficult to use and dodging is the worse. When you take the hand it became kinda satisfying though (pushing enemies against one another were just pure fun !!).
For the agricultural part it's way better with so many layer of depths (maybe a bit to cryptic) but it can also be played brainless for those just wanting to relax (typically me). I just didn't like the progression pace, I was constantly underleveled because I'm a time management addict.
At the end a surely non perfect game with TON of charm and a unique idea. While it has lots of issues I had plenty fun times with it. And I'll always be amazed of what one or two passionate people are able to create when they put their hearts to it.

What an interesting game. I wish I could love it.

I picked this game up quite a while ago because it looked beautiful and the idea of a rice farming game with platforming and combat was too weird to pass up. Of course, I then never played it, because it takes me an eternity to get around to anything. Once I finally started the game, though...

In my first two hours, I got to the first winter. Planting the rice is nice, I like the slow and free-form system to it, and the fact that the camera is always moving and doing its best to make sure you can't move in perfectly straight lines makes it feel natural unlike basically any farming game. Tending the rice seemed more and more complicated the more I thought about it, looking at all the bars and numbers and such, which was interesting... but none of it was explained at all, so it was also overwhelming. Only after getting to the final stage of growth did I realize I was supposed to be talking to the big guy every day to get the basic information, which is odd considering how much other information the game forces onto you with extensive dialogue and cutscenes. After harvesting the rice, I then found out that you must thresh the rice... which was alright. The repetitive but satisfying sequence of inputs to do that combined with the satisfying animation and sound, topped off with the relatively fast pace of progress leads to a sort of zen feeling. It took me 45 seconds. Less fine is the hulling. Up, down, up, down, up, down, nothing else, nothing satisfying about it, and it took several minutes to get white rice. Not exactly what I would call fun.

Then there's the combat. While the idea was interesting, the execution leaves me wondering why it's even included at all, aside from thematic relevance. I can see what they were going for, and they failed on every level. Clearly the goal was to have a fast paced beat-em-up style of combat where you can blast through small enemies in great numbers and need to work a little harder on large enemies, but nearly all of the combat system is redundant, the pace is stiff and inconsistent, the movement is slow, and the enemies are a total nuisance.

The combat pretends to have depth by giving you some options for different move types, but fails to account for the fact that mashing the light attack button is all you ever need. It pretends to be skill based by requiring you to dodge and making the dodge move extra flashy, but makes you completely invincible for the entire dodge animation, and while the game does apparently have a parry, it didn't ever tell me it existed and I couldn't figure out how it worked. Directional inputs change your moves, usually into something worse or undesirable, and even a 1% tilt on the stick is enough to trigger it. The insane direction sensitivity also makes it easy to accidentally start attacking in the wrong direction because of stick bounce, which is then made worse by it being impossible to change direction mid-combo, forcing you to either find a way to cancel, hope something walks into you, or let the animation finish. It kills its own pace by putting insanely long recovery times on several of your moves - sometimes over a full second - and making the enemies invincible when they're downed, forcing you to wait several seconds for them to get back up so you can deliver the last hit. Some enemies have little to no telegraph for their attacks, or have projectiles that are extremely difficult to see if there's anything else on the screen. Nothing about this combat is fun to me, and to top it all off, the game also creates difficulty not by making the enemies actually do interesting things - no, they all have two or three moves and spend most of their time not attacking - it just gives them bigger health bars and throws more of them at you. Ironic that the developers said on record that the rice planting works the way it does because "[they] didn't want it to be a process that you could finish with the push of a button" while also making the combat be exactly that.

This all boiled over when I reached the first boss fight, which was just a bigger version of a normal enemy with an obscenely large health bar... and infinitely respawning smaller enemies, including a smaller version of itself, and a ranged enemy. Unless they all got bunched up in the same spot, it was very easy to run into an attack, making taking damage an inevitability that felt unfair and broken rather than challenging or difficult, and of course the fight wasn't fun at all since it's no different from any other, just spam light attack and dodge whenever an attack winds up - and by "dodge" I mean the raiment, because the actual dash move is bound to double tapping a direction on the analog stick, doesn't make you invincible, and barely moves you at all, making it 300% useless. All of that combined with the low drop rates of myriad items that I was just starting to figure out were required to progress made it quite clear that the only thing the combat adds to the game is a dull grind, and I'm sure it wasn't meant to be that way. Beyond disappointing. I would prefer if the game had no combat at all over this fundamentally broken and wildly unpolished system, thematic relevance be damned.

But I kept playing.

Thankfully, most of my issues with the rice side of the game were noticeably improved by the second year. It seems intentional, because the quick growth of skills and unlocking new abilities both figuratively and literally reflect Sakuna's growth, which is the real reason I kept playing. I do still wish the hulling took less time though, and I honestly don't understand the point of the hand thresher, because it doesn't make it any faster, it just makes it less fun by simplifying the input to a basic right-left alternation instead of down-right-left which can be performed as a half-circle. The rice pounder, for its part, sucks in its own way because it only makes the hulling process even more boring in exchange for a minuscule time savings. Everything else is good though, because things get tangibly faster and better with every season, absolutely nailing the sense of progression and satisfaction, and the depth of fertilizing and tending the crop went from overwhelming to intuitive and fun very quickly... at least, on a basic level. There are a lot of variables at play for every step, and balancing those variables just right apparently makes the rice turn out better, but I never really got the hang of truly maximizing it. Honestly, I would probably enjoy a dedicated farming game that plays like this.

My problems with the combat, however, never got better at all, so I turned the combat difficulty down because it sucks, I hate it, it's not rewarding, I get nothing from it, and it's not even relevant. I didn't even notice a difference with the difficulty lowered, I'm not convinced it changed anything at all. If anything, it all got worse with time, because all but one of the bosses are just bigger versions of regular enemies with giant health bars and infinitely respawning nuisances, and the platforming became obnoxious. Poison gas, falling rocks that you can't easily dodge due to the dodge move being bound stupidly to double tapping the left stick, big floating balls of water that you have to wait around for and swim in that make you move in slow motion that also harass you on the ground during combat... I suppose I could have spent a few years just tending the rice without doing more than the bare minimum of combat so I could overlevel and trivialize the rest of the combat, but that seemed like choosing between a rock and a hard place.

I did at least eventually kind of figure out the parry. It seems to be similar to Metal Gear Rising, where you move the stick towards the incoming attack and press a button with perfect timing, but I never fully understood it, because even as I got more and more consistent with it, I would still often get hit anyway, regardless of how good my timing was, and other times I would parry successfully without trying to, not to mention the times where trying to parry triggered a dash attack instead. As the game progressed and I got more special moves, I could at least start to pretend the combat had something to offer by varying up my attacks, but mashing light attack never stopped being optimal.

I never knew how much of a story there was in this game since I pretty much bought it entirely on the concept of rice farming and the combat, but the story quickly became the best part. Not because it's particularly groundbreaking or amazingly written or anything, it just happens to appeal to me... after switching to the Japanese voices, that is. I tried the English ones, I really did, but the English voices in this game have the same problem that turn me off of almost every other English dub of Japanese media: Painfully overacted, feels faker than fake, and at least one of the voice actors puts on an incredibly grating voice. (This is often true for even a lot of native English media as well, and dubs from other sources of course, it's just most common with Japanese stuff in my experience.)

Sakuna is cute, but very stupid, and a massive brat. Watching her grow up over the course of the game, coming to terms with being made to get her hands dirty and work the field, slowly forming connections with the children of men she previously looked down upon, finding her place in the world, I like that. Also she can pet a cat, which is nice. All the other characters are charming in their own ways too, and I always enjoyed seeing them interact and doing their side quests. And rest assured, there were plenty of opportunities to see the characters interact, because short little scenes are peppered in everywhere - many of which also trigger new side quests - to keep things fresh, which I think is this game's biggest strength. All those little charming scenes keep the pace moving slowly forward, which does a lot to prevent the game from getting dull when you're not farming. Some kappa even show up. I like the kappa.

It also helps that the game creates an impeccable mood with its art, music, and sound design. Not one of these things stands particularly strongly alone, but together they are more than the sum of their parts. The character designs are wonderful and the world is beautiful to look at, the soundscapes are fantastic, and the music is perfectly composed to elevate the experience without taking undue precedence or becoming repetitive and boring. The only nitpicks I have are that the soundscapes are a lot louder than they could have been, sometimes making it quite a shock when you step into a building and it all suddenly stops, and the bloom is absolutely ridiculous at times... but I can't decide how I really feel about either of those things. The sound being so loud seems bad when I describe it and the feeling of it suddenly stopping is definitely weird, but it never really bothered me. I also turned the bloom off and on multiple times, and sometimes it's better off, other times it's better on, and that's coming from me, an avid bloom despiser.

But then it just... keeps going... and going... and going. Story progression for most of the game is locked behind your "exploration level", which you increase by completing objectives in the different levels, which means you have to spend more time in combat. Some of these objectives are very easy, some aren't, some are just plain annoying, and none are entertaining. After a certain point, you even discover a dungeon or gauntlet level with 100 floors, because apparently the developers were really confident that the combat was good enough that it would be fun for that long. Around that point, I started feeling the drag, because I always knew how much combat was waiting for me, along with more platforming that slowly but surely continued to get worse and worse, even though I just wanted to farm rice and enjoy the atmosphere. I will say, though, at least the first few floors of the dungeon were the best combat the game had shown me yet, because it was almost all ground enemies bunched together in great numbers, so there was always something to hit and I was constantly knocking enemies into each other. I would almost call it satisfying, if not for the fact that the combat still has no depth, no enemy variety, brain dead AI, stiff and clunky controls, and nonsensical recovery times.

Then it continues. Even still, it continues. That wasn't even the halfway point.

And after getting past the halfway point, when every single element of the combat and the enemy variety has been well and truly wrung out for every last drop, it recycles all of the same things even more, because for some reason, the developers really thought that a game of this scale with such a tiny enemy variety and combat that barely works at all could stretch out for 30 hours. Making things worse for me specifically, I triggered the midway point literally on the day my rice was ready to take inside and finish up, not knowing that the midway point negates all your work, so I ended up losing the whole harvest at the finish line and having to deal with lower stats than I could have had during a part of the game that lowers your stats, AND throws you at enemies with higher stats at the same time... including one that heals them all, and given how strong some of them are, it's entirely possible to be unable to deal damage faster than they heal. Oh, and just for good measure, enemies come in much higher quantities on top of it all.

This game has its flaws and its strengths, but it seems to go out of its way to hide its strengths, and not only highlight the flaws, but focus on them, almost glorify them, because it's quite clear the developers lacked the experience to create the game they wanted, and lacked the assistance to figure out the problem before it was too late. This is an 8-10 hour game stretched out far beyond its limits that actively works against itself the whole way through, making absolutely certain that the experience is worse than it should be.

It is at this point that I began to actively dislike playing the game.

But despite my growing disdain, I continued. A small and further shrinking part of me remained compelled to see this game through to the end, and once I got there, I was happy. Not just because it was finally over, but because the conclusion of the game was genuinely satisfying. I do love me a bit of the ol' indomitable human spirit. As the credits rolled, I put the controller down and smiled. That's the true strength of this game. It made me happy.

If every part of Sakuna was charming, endearing, enjoyable, satisfying, and rewarding, except for the gameplay, then it's a failure of a video game. It failed to deliver the experience that it was meant to, and yet, it delivered in so many other ways. The look, the sound, the style, the atmosphere, the charm, the love that clearly went into bringing it all to life... I truly believe that Sakuna would have been better made as an anime instead of a video game, but alas, Edelweiss is only a two person team. Wouldn't you know it though, there is a Sakuna manga that tells a different story, and it's wonderful.

The fact that Edelweiss is a two person team makes my grievances feel so much worse, because for all my complaining, all my criticism, all my vitriol that I believe is entirely valid and true... I still want to applaud the developers for what they accomplished. It is a genuine work of art that they should be proud of. If the gameplay is fun for people other than me, that's even better, I don't mind being a stick in the mud. If its massive success in Japan is anything to go by - half a million sales in its first month, nominated for five separate awards at the Famitsu Dengeki Game Awards 2020, including game of the year, and winning three of them (but not game of the year), plus an award at CEDEC 2021, and another from the Playstation Partner Awards - I probably am being a stick in the mud. I don't hate the game at all, and I'm not trying to bully or insult the developers with my criticism, I just wish the game was better so I could have loved it in full.

They have said that they want to make a sequel one day, and I sincerely hope that if that day comes, they can learn from the problems in this game, get some outside help if they need it, and take feedback early in development to ensure that the combat can shine as bright as the rest of the world does. Look at Dust: An Elysian Tail, for instance, another 2D side scrolling action RPG platformer, released eight years earlier and created almost entirely by one person. Devil May Cry it is not, but the combat is leagues ahead of Sakuna.

The world that Edelweiss have created here is a beautiful one that I would love to inhabit again one day, be it through a better video game, or through any other medium. But I will not be playing this particular game again.

In the end, Sakuna is for me the epitome of the phrase "I really wanted to love this".

(from my web zone: https://kerosyn.link/sakuna-the-rice-is-ruined/)

A game that has absolutely no reason to be as addictive as it was, Sakuna is a fun hybrid between farm simulator and an action-RPG.

The combat is good if a little finicky and confusing at the start, as some elements are not clearly explained.

But is the leveling up system that can be a little frustrating as you are forced to complete your harvest to level up. So you can get stuck in a level forced to wait until you level up when you reap your harvest.

The story on the other hand is simple, but the characters are very charismatic. You can't really help but like them, and some of their back stories can get into very dark territory

Overall Sakuna hybrid still is not for everyone, but I had a great time with it and I hope we can get a sequel at some point.