Squeenix sure are busy boys right now. They had so much stuff this year, but especially since September. Since then they’ve released Diofield Chronicles, Valkyrie Elysium, Dragon Quest X Offline (for those who speak japanese), Star Ocean: The Divine Force, Harvestella and Tactics Ogre: Reborn, and then there’s a few more coming out in December with Romancing SaGa: Minstrel Song Remastered, Dragon Quest Treasures and Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII Reunion. That’s a lot of games for one company in just a couple months, and that didn’t include a few collections and ports (like the upcoming PS4/5 port of Valkyrie Profile Lenneth), and I’m actually not sure what their involvement with Front Mission 1st: Remake is as most info I’m finding doesn’t include them (which is weird since it was always published and sometimes developed by Square)… And it’s not like they were quiet the rest in the year with some BANGERS like Stranger of Paradise. There’s not a lot of companies with output like this anymore, it’s pretty cool to see.

As for Harvestella, I always thought it looked cool, but also it’s in a subgenre I have basically no familiarity with. Basically, the last farming game I played was Harvest Moon. On the SNES. I haven’t touched any since. I have yet to try the Rune Factory series, which I feel like I should. I haven’t touched Stardew Valley either. And there’s just so many farming games right now, but I haven’t played any of them. So I figured… why not start here! I did hear some people were disappointed in the demo, but that Squeenix actually fixed some of the issues people had there in the final version, so that’s great to hear.

Let’s check out if my first farming game since the SNES is cool!

Developer and Publisher: Square Enix
Release date: November 4th, 2022
Platforms: PC, Switch (Switch version reviewed)
Genre: Action RPG

Review

You play as *insert name here*, the chosen hero with amnesia and also a silent protagonist. You pop up in a world during Quietus, a thing that happens between seasons where people stay indoors because there’s these particles in the air that give you an incurable illness. Though for some reason that isn’t really explained it has no effect on you. The locals find you the day after and give you land to farm on as you recover your memories. Pretty soon though a meteor falls close to the city (and causes almost no damage) but it’s pretty weird because there’s a door and what seems like a futuristic interior, where you find Aria. Aria has minor memory loss as well, but in general knows the world she’s in is obviously in the past, as she comes from the future and stuff. There’s these giant crystal things called Seaslight in the world that are having issues, which means there’s weird phenomenon happening, from monsters appearing to natural (or not) disasters causing trouble for the populace. So alongside Aria you investigate what’s happening there. Also there’s these robot people that seem to know things about the state of the world, and there’s Quietus to think about. But yeah, you gotta stop some big villain from destroying the world and using human ingenuity and perseverance to not only save the world, but stop Quietus.

The story here ends up pretty interesting in some ways because it goes places that I was not expecting. I like how you find out about the world Aria comes from, and the efforts that went towards fixing Quietus. What I found a bit on the annoying side is that it kinda keeps going further and further, adding new villains every other chapter. Literally you stop, like, 5 different supervillains from destroying the world. The final villain itself is a bit on the “eh” side too. Another small issue for me is that all the characters in your party other than *insert name here*, Aria and Dianthus are basically useless in the main plot, after the sub-chapters where you get them to join your party. But at least they do have their own side-stories that develop them further, so it’s not like they’re entirely decoration like the characters in Star Ocean. There are 10 chapters, though chapter 10 is locked behind choosing the obviously-correct dialogue choices in chapter 9. Just do the correct choice to get the actual ending, it’s pretty straightforward. Oh, and I found it weird that there’s literally several characters with amnesia as their backstory, kinda weird.

I don’t have too much to say about performance. It’s a fairly solid 30fps on Switch, with some occasional drops in some of the maps. The drops are never too bad, rarely below the mid-20s, and the game looks good on Switch, so yeah. It’s all fine, it’s smooth enough you might not notice the occasional frame drops . The PC version unfortunately has capped framerate which is a bit ridiculous, but it does look a bit better (being able to go up to 4k) and its max FPS is 120 which is obviously much better than the 30 the Switch is stuck to. Maybe there’s some way to uncapped it, but I’d say 120 is reasonable for most people.

You’d think farming would be one of the big things in this game. And in a way, it kind of is. But overall they kept it extremely simple. You start with a small field that has a few rocks on it. One of your first quests is to make a hammer to break the rocks (though bigger rocks require an upgrade). You can use the hoe to plow the fields, making them available to have seeds planted on them, the field itself being a grid of squares. Every day, you gotta take a bit of time to water your grids that have stuff growing in them. Each type of seed takes a certain amount of days of being watered to become harvestable. Plowed squares of your farm sometimes need to get re-plowed. Also some of the plants are trees that don’t need to be replanted when you harvest them. Their first harvest takes a while to happen, but following harvest come by much quicker.

I will note there’s a time limit for every day, where you will collapse if the time goes past a certain time (I don’t know the exact time, I tend to go to bed around 10pm but I think you can get just a bit over 11pm). Same thing if you’re defeated in battle. Ending a day like this wakes you up later the day after, and the doctor comes by to steal some of your money as well. And if you do this several days in a row, your wakeup time gets later. Oh yeah and there’s a stamina system. Any action you take, as well as just the act of running faster, takes stamina. This applies during farming but also during dungeons. You can regain stamina by eating food. Some food gives direct stamina, others just fill up your stomach a bit, which give you a bit of time that your stamina will very slowly recover. A bit of an annoying system overall.

As you deal with the troubles at the Seaslight, you get the aid of fairies at your farm. They do no actual work, but they add a book in your house, which basically serves as an achievement system. As you harvest enough of specific veggies, craft certain things and so on, you get experience for that page of the book, and getting enough of that either powers up some of your farming skills (like reducing stamina requirements) or giving you charge skills, so the ability to plow more squares in your field at once, or water spaces that are next to you, or break big rocks. The achievement system also givers you devices that you can place in your field for some reason. Those are things like flour maker (put wheat, get flour), juice maker (very useful for healing items), a thing that fills up empty batteries with power (okay?), mayonnaise maker, feed maker (so you can feed your animals) and a bunch more I’m forgetting about. Also there’s sprinklers, if you’re not-dumb like me you can place a bunch of them on your field so you don’t have to water anything lol. You do need to build this stuff, there’s a crafting table in your house. Also there’s a kitchen, to make food.

I’d say most days, unless there’s much plowing to do, you’re probably not spending more than 2 in-game hours farming. Quickly harvesting, planting seeds if you have any, getting the eggs and stuff your animals have produced (there’s animals, it’s not a very important feature but you get eggs and milk which I actually used as my main healing items because I was too lazy to cook), watering the plants, deciding if you want to put things in your machines, and that’s about it. So you spend the rest of your day… doing other stuff! Oh, and of course before you go do that other stuff, there’s a box where you can deposit your harvest

So outside of farming, there’s a few things to do. Namely, side-quests, dungeons and progressing the story. The villages have shops, especially the main village which includes  a dude selling animals, a blacksmith that improves your weapon using materials and money and a dude that improves your farm for materials and money. There’s also NPCs that will give you sidequests. Dungeons have monsters to fight, and spots to gather materials, and many places also have fishing spots which I pretty much completely avoided doing. Story progress is a simple matter of “check in the pause menu where you have to go and go there”. There’s not a whole lot to talk about.

Combat is fairly simple. You have 2 party members that do whatever the fuck they want. You have control over *insert MC name here* who has a basic combo, a button to activate your special attacks (you get up to 4), and you can change your class on-the-fly (with some cooldown). You get more classes from getting other characters to join your party. So your main attack changes based on your class, as do the special attacks. There’s some thing that allows your party members to do a special attack, I don’t think it was a meter but I might be wrong. Bosses also have a break meter. Basically enemies and bosses have weaknesses, but when bosses are hit by them, the break bar for that weakness goes up (then starts going down slowly). If you fill it up you break the boss, which increases damage. I think all bosses have 2 weaknesses, so you can double break, which I think makes them take double damage while the breaks are ongoing (this is why the break meters go down automatically).

I find the combat really simple, and that’s because there’s not really any good ways to dodge attacks. You can move out of the way. You can jump which… I legit don’t know if there’s any attacks you can dodge by jumping. The only other real option is the dash, which not all that solid defensively, as sometimes attacks proc even if the enemy isn’t really in range. Your best hope defensively is to just walk/run away and hope the enemy decides to attack your teammates for a bit. Oh, and you get a button for items, which you can switch with the dpad. You will need to heal. A lot. Because sometimes that’s just what you gotta do in this game.

Oh and what I said about stamina does apply in combat. This is why you may want to cook food, as you may be in the middle of fighting a boss when your stamina hits zero and you can’t attack anymore (cooked food gives more stamina than just eating a raw egg). And yes the time system goes on in dungeons, so you’ll still want to be home before you collapse. There’s teleport nodes in dungeons so you may use that to go back home, or you can craft return bells. Thankfully you can use the teleport nodes to get back to at least close to where you were, so you don’t lose too much progress due to the time system.

The sidequests suck. All of them, with almost no exceptions, are a series of “go where the game tells you to go, suffer through boring dialogue, rinse and repeat a few times, mission accomplished” moments of boredom. What makes these sidequests even worse is that there’s no way to skip cutscenes. The only cutscenes you get to skip is if you died against a boss, you don’t have to rewatch the boss cutscene. So most missions don’t require killing anything, don’t require finding anything and don’t require, you know, farming anything. I can recall, like, 3 that I did which actually required that. This aspect of the game is so undercooked. Why would I want to do side-quests that are literally just reading dialogue? Eat shit, I stopped doing that pretty early on, except for the ones you do with your party characters. Those are the few times you’ll get any development for any of the characters not named Aria, and you actually get stat boosts from doing these, so they’re actually kinda worth doing even though they’re stupid boring shit.

There’s one side-quest that’s kinda okay-ish, which is basically what I’d call the post-game. In your farm land there’s a well. During Quietus (one day between each season), you can actually go outside if you want, but I think the only thing you actually get to do during that time outside (since there’s gonna be no NPCs anywhere, or farming to do) is go to the well. In the well is a dungeon with, I think, 60 floors. I haven’t done the whole thing, but in there you get some EXP for killing stuff, some interesting materials that might lead to decent stuff, and actually one of the few places I actually found accessories (I actually spent the entire game with the accessory you’re given for free and whatever I found I think in a store that was okay-ish). Post-game this becomes available to progress through every day.

Overall

This was pretty good, but I think a lot of this game is built on afterthoughts.

I think the farming takes a bit too much of a backseat, and essentially is just a way to get healing items, once you have your farm at a size you like. I found it annoying to have to farm materials for some of the upgrades because at some point I just wanted to progress the game, so I gave up on upgrades that would’ve been useful like getting more animals.

The fighting is okay, going into dungeons to find materials and fight monsters is fun but I feel the combat needed more movement/defensive options, as a lot of combat becomes “do you have enough healing items to win” since there’s sometimes so little you can do to avoid getting hit.

The sidequests are just awful.

This gets a mild recommendation. I had fun with it, I think people will enjoy it, but it won’t be a big mindblowing experience.