First of all, I'm not sure if I can say I've actually "completed" the game. I rebuilt the community center, finished the mines and got to 100 on the skull cavern. I made some progress on Ginger Island but I didn't complete all of the golden walnut request things, nor the fossil, nor the vaguely racist frog's quest.
It's an alright game. There's lots of polish put into it, it streamlines a lot of farming game mechanics that feel slow in other games, it has a decent amount of content and it's very moddable. Pretty much all the problems I have with this game are personal preferences. Except fence decay, I think that's just stupid.
I think the streamlining of the mechanics works really well for most people, but it just made the game both too overwhelming and too slow for me. Since you can cram more activities in a single day, it's very easy to make a schedule for yourself that gets completely ruined if you don't optimize every single day. Or plant too much and then lack stamina for literally anything else.
I think farming games should be a little obtuse! There should be things in between you and the farm. Not too many things to the point where farming has no point (Harvestella), but having a story to follow or just some unique (non procedural) dungeons to go through make the whole experience more diverse. During the later parts of the game, it was pretty much just a numbers game. Ironic how even doing the community bundle instead of Joja makes you hyperfocus on productivity.
I'm not sure how much the game wants me to care about these characters. They're all interesting and have at least some backstory, but the way it's presented doesn't really click with me. Some of the writing feels... borderline tone deaf, such as the whole thing with George and treating his disability as a flaw. Shane is a dickhead for most of the game as well, I don't know how anyone can like him. Between Shane, Clint, Pierre and Lewis, a lot of people in this town are questionable and I simply don't feel like becoming friends with them at all.
There's the whole lore about the dwarves and shadow people war, the empire and republic war, the elves dying out, the literal wizard, and yet the game doesn't really tell you anything. It feels like it doesn't want to tell you anything. It feels like all these details were made to justify making flavor text more interesting, without making said lore interesting by itself.
But to be fair, that's sort of the point of the game. The community center - and the community as a whole - are broken and it's your job to fix it. But even then, it doesn't feel like anything you do is meaningful. Barely anyone visits the center when it's restored. Making a house for Pam to live in instead of her trailer has an emotional cutscene, but only really affects her schedule. Linus and the wizard continue to be somewhat ostracized no matter how much friendship you gather. What's the point? I'm simply a source of number go up for this town whether I'm serving Joja or a couple supernatural beings that use their tremendous power to... rebuild a community center no one really seems to truly care about. Robin certainly doesn't care enough to even consider repairing it herself.
It's an alright game. There's lots of polish put into it, it streamlines a lot of farming game mechanics that feel slow in other games, it has a decent amount of content and it's very moddable. Pretty much all the problems I have with this game are personal preferences. Except fence decay, I think that's just stupid.
I think the streamlining of the mechanics works really well for most people, but it just made the game both too overwhelming and too slow for me. Since you can cram more activities in a single day, it's very easy to make a schedule for yourself that gets completely ruined if you don't optimize every single day. Or plant too much and then lack stamina for literally anything else.
I think farming games should be a little obtuse! There should be things in between you and the farm. Not too many things to the point where farming has no point (Harvestella), but having a story to follow or just some unique (non procedural) dungeons to go through make the whole experience more diverse. During the later parts of the game, it was pretty much just a numbers game. Ironic how even doing the community bundle instead of Joja makes you hyperfocus on productivity.
I'm not sure how much the game wants me to care about these characters. They're all interesting and have at least some backstory, but the way it's presented doesn't really click with me. Some of the writing feels... borderline tone deaf, such as the whole thing with George and treating his disability as a flaw. Shane is a dickhead for most of the game as well, I don't know how anyone can like him. Between Shane, Clint, Pierre and Lewis, a lot of people in this town are questionable and I simply don't feel like becoming friends with them at all.
There's the whole lore about the dwarves and shadow people war, the empire and republic war, the elves dying out, the literal wizard, and yet the game doesn't really tell you anything. It feels like it doesn't want to tell you anything. It feels like all these details were made to justify making flavor text more interesting, without making said lore interesting by itself.
But to be fair, that's sort of the point of the game. The community center - and the community as a whole - are broken and it's your job to fix it. But even then, it doesn't feel like anything you do is meaningful. Barely anyone visits the center when it's restored. Making a house for Pam to live in instead of her trailer has an emotional cutscene, but only really affects her schedule. Linus and the wizard continue to be somewhat ostracized no matter how much friendship you gather. What's the point? I'm simply a source of number go up for this town whether I'm serving Joja or a couple supernatural beings that use their tremendous power to... rebuild a community center no one really seems to truly care about. Robin certainly doesn't care enough to even consider repairing it herself.
2 Comments
I feel as if majority of non-asshole characters are the more uninteresting ones, which is a huge shame. Also I found the punishment of fainting in a dungeon to be surprisingly harsh for this kind of game. "Lose a lot of your items, but you can get only one back for a small fee, and the rest is gone for good." I don't know I feel that it doesn't suit the mood this game is going for.
Erato_Heti
1 year ago