After playing Sakuna, it's hard not to feel like gaming as a whole has missed the mark by reducing every "farming sim" to absent-mindedly picking a tool and left-clicking squares on a grid. I don't hate these games - I have way too many hours in Farm Together - but it's hard to feel like there's any art to it, any appreciation for the discipline. In Sakuna, though, there's so much reverence for and attention to the labor of traditional rice farming that the idea of planting enough seeds to cover the game's single plot of land can feel daunting when you start.

This is why I think it succeeds. It's not that it's got sluggish animations - some of Sakuna's movements in the field are snappy enough that they'd be considered violent if you recreated them in your garden - but the fact that individual steps of the process are given time and attention that most games just skip right past with the plant-water-harvest loop. You till the land by inputting each individual swing of a hoe, you plant seeds one at a time as you tiptoe backwards through the field, you dehull the rice with repeated up-down movements on the analog stick. Your rice will only be evaluated as a batch at the end of the season, but the process instills in you an appreciation for each seed as its own plant. It's not hard to see the laborious, quasi-spiritual exercise of caring for the rice mirrored in the diligence and effort it takes to become a kinder person, to cultivate healthy relationships, to break a bad habit. This journey for Sakuna - the character - is not strictly about farming.

The elephant in the room is the combat, because everyone I've spoken to has agreed that this game's combat is serviceable and not much else. I literally do not care at all about the combat, so I will not speak of it further!

No game out there is in the same hemisphere as Sakuna when it comes to depicting farming as a craft, how the process and its results tie into culture and history and science. If we're lucky enough to see Sakuna inspire a wave of games with similar respect for farming as something that requires diligence and discipline, I suspect it'll be easy to look back at Sakuna and wonder what was so special, because this very much feels like the kind of game that gets eclipsed by its spiritual successors. I wouldn't wish for this game to fade into the background, but if someone can use the foundation Sakuna has laid to climb a little higher, then I welcome it.