This might be the worst game I have ever played to completion. Definitely the worst in my adult life.

I hear a lot that the battle system is difficult to understand, but I don't think that's true. I think the system is very easy to understand but executing the combat oscillates wildly between brain dead easy and unreasonably challenging. I have to assume at some point that all the little variables that feel off (hitstun on Sora being too long, a lot of attacks just whiffing inexplicably) are the result of moving from 2D to 3D, but I can't imagine this system ever felt great.

If you take away all the gameplay you have the story left. A lot of people say the story is what makes this game great, but coming into this as a 30-year-old with no nostalgia goggles I have to point out that the story is basically non-existent. Sora's story involves what would, in any other JRPG, be a half-hour emo phase intermission before he realizes the power of friendship, but now stretched over 20-ish hours. Villains stand around plain white voids and speak vaguely of their plans, which seem to mostly involve backstabbing each other to no clear end. Riku's story is marginally better as it feels a little more focused, but the antagonists unique to his story have a shocking dearth of characterization. I'm vaguely familiar with the rest of the series and I thought I'd be able to get into Zexion, but the only thing Zexion does before dying is sit in a barren room without the lights and announce that he's smelled things.

I'm a freak who listens to old time radio for fun and a lot of the shows that adapt novels/comic books will add a character specifically so the protagonist isn't talking to themselves. When this character is good in their own right it feels pretty seamless, but in the bad shows it becomes extremely obvious when some random dude with a tenuous relationship to the main character is there to explain the protag's job to him. Chain of Memories is the bad OTR adaptation of itself. It's a J.J. Abrams mystery box without the spectacle of lasers and space battles to compensate for boring theorycrafting. It's the recap episode finale with a promise that the next season will make the recap worthwhile. It's a load of bull, is what it is.

Justice for Larxene, the only character. She is a girlboss gremlin and I love that for her.

Looks can be deceiving. The art of Littlewood is extremely simplistic and the game looks like it's one of hundreds of farming sims, but once you dig into it it's actually pretty great! Though there's some randomness to a 100% completion, there's a lot you can do to mitigate it and the game clock is based around actions per day instead of time. This results in a game loop based around budgeting actions effectively, which feels great!

The core objective is something of a cross between Animal Crossing's town-building tools and Dark Cloud's atlamillia system. Residents move into your town and you place their houses, and then residents will request their houses be laid out in certain ways (with various furniture, close to various landmarks, etc). You have freedom to build your town any way you want within those confines, and the tools are pretty simple and intuitive to use. The constraints make the creativity fun and rewarding; once you're done building your town, it's still nice to walk around and admire it!

The thing that kept me playing the longest, though, is the character writing. Now, it's not mind-blowing or literary, anything like that, but characters have a lot of barks, and the writing is quirky, earnest, and genuine. I enjoyed learning about the world and its inhabitants and post-marriage dialogue is extremely cute.

If you're looking for a cozy little pick-me-up, you could do a lot worse than Littlewood. Believe me, I have played all them. You're not going to see anything revolutionary here, but sometimes all you want is a nice cozy mug of hot cocoa, and that is the niche this game occupies very well.

Miserable little game with a massive identity crisis. The game sells itself on being a cozy/wholesome management simulator, but management is extremely hands-off, and the game's writing constantly reminds you that wanting to build a bed and breakfast for profit is bad. By the midgame the only activity you spend any amount of time on is wandering around the game's maps like a tired, lost soul, hoping for materials to spawn or for NPCs to give you quests. There's satisfaction to building rooms, but furnishing them results in you building the same few objects over and over because there are no variants on the statistically best furniture.

By the endgame, it becomes clear there was no time for a QA pass. Guests ask for room qualities that are straight-out impossible to achieve. I'm pretty sure a cutscene that was supposed to happen just didn't play for me, leaving me wondering where my character was getting the new information he was saying. Story quests stop being marked as such in your journal, cinematic cutscenes are cut off in windowed mode, and the final exposition dump has a glaring typo in it.

I kept asking myself whether I liked this game or Moonglow Bay better, as they're similar in a lot of ways. In the end, though, I settled on Moonglow being the better game. It had a coherent story with an ending and didn't go on weird tangents about gentrification and the evils of pet owning (I think?). Stay away from this one.

This is easily one of the worst games I've ever played. It may be the worst game I've played that doesn't have some sort of moral failing, like a David Cage game. I love cats and I like management sims, but calling this a management sim is a stretch. There's no sense of progression or gameplay most of the time; sure, you find animals and learn new recipes, but you only ever need to find animals once or make a recipe once, and then you never have to interact with the mechanics again.

Character writing and questing is the same way. There is literally no way to interact with NPCs in the world outside of main story progression and asking them for quests, and no NPC has more than three sidequests for you. Sidequests often involve passing messages between two NPCs who are standing within each other's view. I've felt more empathy and comfort from Bloodborne NPCs than I have in any of the quest-dispensing fashion dolls that make up this game's roster.

So, the gameplay is nonexistent, the character writing is nonexistent... what's left? The art is... fine? Though it is frequently poorly executed, with animations that make animals feel less like cute pets and more like lifeless ragdolls and a player run cycle that, for a long time, looked like an embarrassing toddler about to fall over. And if I wanted to play a game just to look at nice art, there are a lot of games I'd come to before this.

Overall, it's a game that aspires to be a little world where you can create a nice home to escape the harshness of reality. But that world is thinner and more fake than The Truman Show, leaving me cold.

Ooof. I really wanted to like this game. I love cozy games, I love fishing, and I was excited to be playing an older character who was already married. But whatever positives this game has are vastly outweighed by how much the game wastes your time. Of particular note re: time wasting is the cooking minigame, which takes several minutes to cook a single dish... and if you want to master the recipe, you need to cook every dish nine times (and that's only if you get it perfect every time-- even a minor slip on the hardest minigame needs you to reload your save if you want to maximize your efficiency). Moreover the writing falls short of great; the setting is depressing but characters talk exclusively in quirky quips. It feels like the game is afraid to be sincere.

Absolutely cannot recommend this game. 4/10 and most of those points are me seeing potential and wanting it to be better.