I've complained before that Persona 5 was a bunch of mini-cutscenes that are way too short and ultimately only create superficial plot. Haven uses a similar structure to Persona with short slice of life events but with a single change: there's only two characters and every event relates to the two of them. And boom! The game is only ten hours long but it gives its story more depth and manages to create something meaningful.
I really enjoyed playing through this game and it is a solid example of slice of life in video games. I strongly appreciate how they don't hold just make the entire concept of a physical relationship disappear like many games do, in the spirit of puritanism, but instead they freely refer to it, just like traditional French works.
I do have to complain that the gameplay is too simple and gets repetitive very fast. What's more, the controls of your most common action, moving, are pretty bad. The game hardly renews itself: every map is the same with exactly the same things to clear out and every so often you have to fight a few monsters to clean the area. It doesn't help that you'll usually miss one spot or a monster which is not obvious, which just makes things more tedious.
The environment variety is also poor: there's only four biomes and 90% of the game is in the same one. There's more variety to monsters and I did feel like I was progressing through the combat until I unlocked everything, knew how to deal with monsters and then some of the last battles were just tedious too especially when I had to clear multiple groups per map.
A lot of the game's rhythm relies on the pacing of slice of life events that come up throughout the adventure or when you go back to base. The slice of life is a genuinely enjoyable experience, however most of the game is spent cleaning similar islets of the grasslands, looking for that one last hidden thing to clear the islet and hearing the same repeated overworld dialogues.
I really enjoyed playing through this game and it is a solid example of slice of life in video games. I strongly appreciate how they don't hold just make the entire concept of a physical relationship disappear like many games do, in the spirit of puritanism, but instead they freely refer to it, just like traditional French works.
I do have to complain that the gameplay is too simple and gets repetitive very fast. What's more, the controls of your most common action, moving, are pretty bad. The game hardly renews itself: every map is the same with exactly the same things to clear out and every so often you have to fight a few monsters to clean the area. It doesn't help that you'll usually miss one spot or a monster which is not obvious, which just makes things more tedious.
The environment variety is also poor: there's only four biomes and 90% of the game is in the same one. There's more variety to monsters and I did feel like I was progressing through the combat until I unlocked everything, knew how to deal with monsters and then some of the last battles were just tedious too especially when I had to clear multiple groups per map.
A lot of the game's rhythm relies on the pacing of slice of life events that come up throughout the adventure or when you go back to base. The slice of life is a genuinely enjoyable experience, however most of the game is spent cleaning similar islets of the grasslands, looking for that one last hidden thing to clear the islet and hearing the same repeated overworld dialogues.