Ebonwing (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
ebonwinged_nova) wrote2023-07-13 01:09 pm
ebonwinged_nova) wrote2023-07-13 01:09 pm
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Harvestella Review
I've been talking elsewhere about getting back into reviewing video games, and then completely forgot to actually do it! but I took extensive notes on the game while I was playing and I remember it well enough, so I might as well do it anyway.
I played the Switch version of the game.
So! Harvestella is a jrpg-farming game hybrid developed by Live Wire and published by Square Enix. I've had a bumpy road with farming games in that I enjoy the underlying gameplay loop, but I get bored of it quickly if there's not enough content surrounding it to break things up. I'd hoped, after seeing the game on stream and playing the demo, that the fantasy world, story and combat would help with that.
The TL;DR of the review: Yes, it absolutely did that; I've never stuck with a farming game for as long or as happily as with this one, but it may or may not hit the same for other people.
What does a jrpg-farming game hybrid look like, exactly? In this case, it takes the form of the customisable protagonist, by default named Ein, waking up during Quietus, the season of death, and subsequently collapsing. After being saved by the village doctor Cres, Ein realises they don't remember anything and subsequently moves into a small hamlet near the village. That hamlet is, of course, an old farmhouse that's fallen into disuse, with the farmland being overgrown and filled with rocks.
There's some obligatory farming game intro stuff (you get handed some seeds, you learn how to plant them, the usual) before the story kicks in again with a mysterious crystal falling into a field behind the village. Inside is a woman named Aria who claims to be a time traveller from the future and staunchly refuses to elaborate further on any of that. Naturally, she moves in with Ein while trying to figure out how to get back to her time, starting by investigating the Seaslight—four giant crystals placed throughout the game world, the significance of which becomes apparent later in the story.
In other words, it's a very jrpg plot setup.
Now, the game features the usual day cycle of a farming game, in which the clock starts ticking at 6am and if you're still out and about when midnight hits you collapse and have to pay some money to the doctor as punishment. (I think, anyway? I only ever made it happen once and like I said it's been a while.) The demo had a punishingly short daycycle, but they thankfully adjusted it to be longer in the full game. That being said, how does this integrate with a jrpg plot?
Outside of conversations in town, playing through the story generally entails going through combat areas; these can forests or caves but also castles or other special areas. As you go further into these cutscenes will play and culminate in, you guessed it, a boss battle at the end more often than not. These areas have clearly been built with the day cycle in mind. They're all too long to do in one day cycle, but they're littered with shortcuts you can unlock and they also feature warp points at select intervals. I don't think I ever had to return home without having unlocked either one of those whenever I went dungeoneering. Each trip will lead you further into the area until the end is in reach. It adds a surprisingly potent element of feeling accomplished over progress to the gameplay when every trip you make has that kind of tangible result.
Near the end of the game the process did start getting a bit stale, but maybe that's just me. Or maybe even feeling that accomplishment is just me. What do I know.
Additionally, these combat areas also drop a variety of items, either from defeating enemies or from gathering spots. Sometimes those are seeds you can use on your farm; more often they're materials used in crafting or cooking. Crafting everything you might want does in all likelihood require some farming, but I didn't find it too intrusive.
Speaking of cooking, the food illustrations in the game made me very hungry, and I felt compelled to cook every dish just so I could see them all. There's are sizeable rewards for handing in dishes in town too, so it's well worth doing.
In terms of combat it... well, it exists. It's not buggy. It's not really great either though. Battles rarely take too long so it wasn't a huge deal, but this is an area of the game that could have benefited from a little more depth, even if it's just a dodge or block move. As it stands, if an enemy decides it wants to hit you that's just going to happen if it's not a telegraph designed to be dodged, because all your attacks root you in place for too long to dodge attacks. Healing with food is easy enough so Ein ends up being a damage sponge, but still, the combat system could have been a lot more fun with just a little bit of extra.
The farming, on the other hand, I did like that. It's fairly standard, your farmland is divided into squares, each square holds one crop that requires X days to grow and needs to be watered, with crop types being restricted to the corresponding season(s). You can get autosprinklers eventually, they make things a lot faster when you've got the entire farmland unlocked. You can also buy livestock after paying the carpenter to refurbish the pens, and they're very cute and I want to pet them. They're also a good source of money, as they eventually start dropping sellable bonus materials so long as you keep feeding them.
After every season is one day of Quietus, season of death; this will kill all crops that aren't permanent trees, so keep an eye on how long things take to grow if you don't want to waste your money buying seeds that will never be harvested. Despite being the season of death you can actually go out and do whatever you want, it doesn't actually hurt you.
There's also fishing! It's pretty straightforward, cast your rod and wait for a bite then press A. Bonus points for being able to play it without having to look, the audio cue is good enough for it. It's not something I did a ton of, but it was a nice way to fill the gaps between other activities when I had daytime leftover but not enough to go anywhere else.
Overall, there's not as much farm customisation as in Stardew Valley, just to name a well-known example, but I found that I didn't miss it much.
Integrating these mechanics as well as sidequests into a jrpg story... works surprisingly well! It gave the game a nice amount of variety, where I could decide if I wanted to focus on farming on a given day, or try to get the materials I needed to build another sprinkler, or sidequests, or main story, or try to kill some of the area bosses (these are optional strong enemies you encounter as you go that have no story relevance)... Whenever I got bored with something, I just did something else for a bit.
As for the story itself, it's specced down from a full scale jrpg plot. If it were a jrpg without the farming bits, there probably would have been more twists and turns and complications, but I'm ultimately glad they didn't go all the way. I don't think it would have meshed with the trappings of a farming game that requires you to go back home every day. As it is, after a slow start in the first three chapters the story starts picking up and... goes to some very unexpected places at times.
Overall, I wouldn't say it's a top tier story but once I got out of the opening section I found myself getting into it a lot more. I enjoyed it well enough. The sidequests were overall quite nice too, I didn't get the feeling I was doing pointless fetchquesting. Each character who joins your party also gets their own questline that explore who they are and where they're coming from, and while I still have to go back and complete the rest of them I liked the ones I already did.
The music of the game was very good. Apparently Go Shiina composed it, which makes this unsurprising. They didn't include a whole lot of tracks so you'll definitely be hearing some of them more often, and there were a few scenes where the track they picked didn't quite seem to fit, but overall I found it nice to listen to. There's close to no voice acting, which is fine by me. Unfortunately, some of the voice acting you'll be hearing the most are the voice lines by your farm helper fairies which... grate. Excessively.
Graphically, the game isn't really much to write home about. Now I have low standards for this on account of growing up on N64 and Gameboy games; I don't need games to be ultra HD hyperrealistic or anything, but this definitely feels outdated. Also, there were framerate drops, albeit not commonly and not to a degree I found intolerable, and rarely there was a weird display glitch in Ein's home where half of the screen momentarily turned green, although that never lasted.
(That being said; this sounds like ultra copium, and it probably is, but truth be told the outdated models gave the game a certain oldschool charm in my opinion... Also, the character designs were still good.)
Also, there's romance, but I haven't tried that so you want to look for other reviews if that's important to you.
Overall, as the TLDR already said, I enjoyed this game a great deal. It's not a GOTY contender or an amazingly hype game, but it successfully solved the personal issues I always had with farming games and while the price tag is steeper than the average farming game, I didn't regret shelling out for it one bit. Whether you, the hypothetical reader, would enjoy it as much depends on what you want out of your farming games and/or jrpgs.
(I don't give numbered ratings to games anymore. I don't find them helpful, and I don't want to think about keeping the scale consistent if I do more reviews like this.
I played the Switch version of the game.
So! Harvestella is a jrpg-farming game hybrid developed by Live Wire and published by Square Enix. I've had a bumpy road with farming games in that I enjoy the underlying gameplay loop, but I get bored of it quickly if there's not enough content surrounding it to break things up. I'd hoped, after seeing the game on stream and playing the demo, that the fantasy world, story and combat would help with that.
The TL;DR of the review: Yes, it absolutely did that; I've never stuck with a farming game for as long or as happily as with this one, but it may or may not hit the same for other people.
What does a jrpg-farming game hybrid look like, exactly? In this case, it takes the form of the customisable protagonist, by default named Ein, waking up during Quietus, the season of death, and subsequently collapsing. After being saved by the village doctor Cres, Ein realises they don't remember anything and subsequently moves into a small hamlet near the village. That hamlet is, of course, an old farmhouse that's fallen into disuse, with the farmland being overgrown and filled with rocks.
There's some obligatory farming game intro stuff (you get handed some seeds, you learn how to plant them, the usual) before the story kicks in again with a mysterious crystal falling into a field behind the village. Inside is a woman named Aria who claims to be a time traveller from the future and staunchly refuses to elaborate further on any of that. Naturally, she moves in with Ein while trying to figure out how to get back to her time, starting by investigating the Seaslight—four giant crystals placed throughout the game world, the significance of which becomes apparent later in the story.
In other words, it's a very jrpg plot setup.
Now, the game features the usual day cycle of a farming game, in which the clock starts ticking at 6am and if you're still out and about when midnight hits you collapse and have to pay some money to the doctor as punishment. (I think, anyway? I only ever made it happen once and like I said it's been a while.) The demo had a punishingly short daycycle, but they thankfully adjusted it to be longer in the full game. That being said, how does this integrate with a jrpg plot?
Outside of conversations in town, playing through the story generally entails going through combat areas; these can forests or caves but also castles or other special areas. As you go further into these cutscenes will play and culminate in, you guessed it, a boss battle at the end more often than not. These areas have clearly been built with the day cycle in mind. They're all too long to do in one day cycle, but they're littered with shortcuts you can unlock and they also feature warp points at select intervals. I don't think I ever had to return home without having unlocked either one of those whenever I went dungeoneering. Each trip will lead you further into the area until the end is in reach. It adds a surprisingly potent element of feeling accomplished over progress to the gameplay when every trip you make has that kind of tangible result.
Near the end of the game the process did start getting a bit stale, but maybe that's just me. Or maybe even feeling that accomplishment is just me. What do I know.
Additionally, these combat areas also drop a variety of items, either from defeating enemies or from gathering spots. Sometimes those are seeds you can use on your farm; more often they're materials used in crafting or cooking. Crafting everything you might want does in all likelihood require some farming, but I didn't find it too intrusive.
Speaking of cooking, the food illustrations in the game made me very hungry, and I felt compelled to cook every dish just so I could see them all. There's are sizeable rewards for handing in dishes in town too, so it's well worth doing.
In terms of combat it... well, it exists. It's not buggy. It's not really great either though. Battles rarely take too long so it wasn't a huge deal, but this is an area of the game that could have benefited from a little more depth, even if it's just a dodge or block move. As it stands, if an enemy decides it wants to hit you that's just going to happen if it's not a telegraph designed to be dodged, because all your attacks root you in place for too long to dodge attacks. Healing with food is easy enough so Ein ends up being a damage sponge, but still, the combat system could have been a lot more fun with just a little bit of extra.
The farming, on the other hand, I did like that. It's fairly standard, your farmland is divided into squares, each square holds one crop that requires X days to grow and needs to be watered, with crop types being restricted to the corresponding season(s). You can get autosprinklers eventually, they make things a lot faster when you've got the entire farmland unlocked. You can also buy livestock after paying the carpenter to refurbish the pens, and they're very cute and I want to pet them. They're also a good source of money, as they eventually start dropping sellable bonus materials so long as you keep feeding them.
After every season is one day of Quietus, season of death; this will kill all crops that aren't permanent trees, so keep an eye on how long things take to grow if you don't want to waste your money buying seeds that will never be harvested. Despite being the season of death you can actually go out and do whatever you want, it doesn't actually hurt you.
There's also fishing! It's pretty straightforward, cast your rod and wait for a bite then press A. Bonus points for being able to play it without having to look, the audio cue is good enough for it. It's not something I did a ton of, but it was a nice way to fill the gaps between other activities when I had daytime leftover but not enough to go anywhere else.
Overall, there's not as much farm customisation as in Stardew Valley, just to name a well-known example, but I found that I didn't miss it much.
Integrating these mechanics as well as sidequests into a jrpg story... works surprisingly well! It gave the game a nice amount of variety, where I could decide if I wanted to focus on farming on a given day, or try to get the materials I needed to build another sprinkler, or sidequests, or main story, or try to kill some of the area bosses (these are optional strong enemies you encounter as you go that have no story relevance)... Whenever I got bored with something, I just did something else for a bit.
As for the story itself, it's specced down from a full scale jrpg plot. If it were a jrpg without the farming bits, there probably would have been more twists and turns and complications, but I'm ultimately glad they didn't go all the way. I don't think it would have meshed with the trappings of a farming game that requires you to go back home every day. As it is, after a slow start in the first three chapters the story starts picking up and... goes to some very unexpected places at times.
Click for a spoilery example.
Let me tell you, I did not expect to be asked to decide which half of humanity should live and which should die in a farming game. (It works in the context of the story though!)Overall, I wouldn't say it's a top tier story but once I got out of the opening section I found myself getting into it a lot more. I enjoyed it well enough. The sidequests were overall quite nice too, I didn't get the feeling I was doing pointless fetchquesting. Each character who joins your party also gets their own questline that explore who they are and where they're coming from, and while I still have to go back and complete the rest of them I liked the ones I already did.
The music of the game was very good. Apparently Go Shiina composed it, which makes this unsurprising. They didn't include a whole lot of tracks so you'll definitely be hearing some of them more often, and there were a few scenes where the track they picked didn't quite seem to fit, but overall I found it nice to listen to. There's close to no voice acting, which is fine by me. Unfortunately, some of the voice acting you'll be hearing the most are the voice lines by your farm helper fairies which... grate. Excessively.
Graphically, the game isn't really much to write home about. Now I have low standards for this on account of growing up on N64 and Gameboy games; I don't need games to be ultra HD hyperrealistic or anything, but this definitely feels outdated. Also, there were framerate drops, albeit not commonly and not to a degree I found intolerable, and rarely there was a weird display glitch in Ein's home where half of the screen momentarily turned green, although that never lasted.
(That being said; this sounds like ultra copium, and it probably is, but truth be told the outdated models gave the game a certain oldschool charm in my opinion... Also, the character designs were still good.)
Also, there's romance, but I haven't tried that so you want to look for other reviews if that's important to you.
Overall, as the TLDR already said, I enjoyed this game a great deal. It's not a GOTY contender or an amazingly hype game, but it successfully solved the personal issues I always had with farming games and while the price tag is steeper than the average farming game, I didn't regret shelling out for it one bit. Whether you, the hypothetical reader, would enjoy it as much depends on what you want out of your farming games and/or jrpgs.
(I don't give numbered ratings to games anymore. I don't find them helpful, and I don't want to think about keeping the scale consistent if I do more reviews like this.