It’s a little hard to tackle a beast like this, and I can easily chalk it up to trying this out for the first time co-operatively, but I think if it weren’t for playing with friends, I wouldn’t even have gotten into it at all. I actually know that to be true, because this has been sitting in my Steam library for years utterly untouched, even as I would get hard back into the Animal Crossing and Harvest Moon series. Something about it just turned me off, and I think it was the fact that I had soon gotten over the style of pixel-art used in this game, or maybe its reputation among the “cozy gaming” pseudo-genre that was probably borne of this game’s immense success (along with Animal Crossing: New Horizons). So much success that we’ve not gone a single Nintendo Direct over the last two years without a new cutesy farming sim being announced.
Though, I’m knee-deep into a playthrough of Harvest Moon: Back to Nature that also has me thinking about this genre a lot, so we’ll save that discussion for then. Right now, I just want to focus on what I think makes this game not for me, in particular. Mainly, it just feels really overwhelming. The town just felt impossible to navigate, especially at-first. Getting lost constantly going from and to my farm. In Harvest Moon’s Mineral Town, all the roads are straight, and it makes it pretty easy to memorize where certain things are, especially since the point-of-view allows you to see just enough to know where you are at all times. There’s also just a dozen more things going on here than in other games in this genre. There’s a wizard, dwarves, slimes. The Minecraft of it all definitely casts a shadow over it. I actually don’t get how this is “cozy gaming” because the amount of stuff there is to do and put time into is just crazy! I cannot imagine finding time to water an entire farm, harvest crops, go to the mine, contribute to the community center, get married! My brain just doesn’t have the capacity for it and if not for the fact that the role I was playing in this RPG was “assistant to my friend who was the host of the server” I definitely would not be having fun. The fact is, the whole time I was playing this I just kept thinking, “imagine if ‘Friends of Mineral Town’ had this kind of co-op play?”
Though, I’m knee-deep into a playthrough of Harvest Moon: Back to Nature that also has me thinking about this genre a lot, so we’ll save that discussion for then. Right now, I just want to focus on what I think makes this game not for me, in particular. Mainly, it just feels really overwhelming. The town just felt impossible to navigate, especially at-first. Getting lost constantly going from and to my farm. In Harvest Moon’s Mineral Town, all the roads are straight, and it makes it pretty easy to memorize where certain things are, especially since the point-of-view allows you to see just enough to know where you are at all times. There’s also just a dozen more things going on here than in other games in this genre. There’s a wizard, dwarves, slimes. The Minecraft of it all definitely casts a shadow over it. I actually don’t get how this is “cozy gaming” because the amount of stuff there is to do and put time into is just crazy! I cannot imagine finding time to water an entire farm, harvest crops, go to the mine, contribute to the community center, get married! My brain just doesn’t have the capacity for it and if not for the fact that the role I was playing in this RPG was “assistant to my friend who was the host of the server” I definitely would not be having fun. The fact is, the whole time I was playing this I just kept thinking, “imagine if ‘Friends of Mineral Town’ had this kind of co-op play?”