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TalkBack / Harvestella (Switch) Review
« on: December 12, 2022, 06:22:57 AM »A farm sim for people who like JRPGs.
http://www.nintendoworldreport.com/review/62169/harvestella-switch-review
The reveal, rollout, and release of Harvestella from Square Enix has oftentimes felt like an enigma. At face value, it looked like Square’s take on Harvest Moon or Rune Factory. In practice, it’s foundationally more of a traditional action RPG with a heavy dose of life sim elements. You might spend time taking care of a small farm, but the crux of the action is world-saving quests that take you all over an expansive world. The end result is compelling, even if a handful of rough edges keep it from being amazing.
Your amnesiac protagonist shows up in a world where giant crystals, called Seaslights, guide the world. After an all-encompassing tutorial, your quest becomes focused on rescuing the Seaslights from trouble while trying to solve the mystery of a time-traveling new friend as well as the conundrum that is Quietus, a time between seasons where everything dies. It’s a mouthful to start, but once you have some autonomy, the game opens up significantly. The main story quests take you to the Seaslights and major characters and bosses, but a variety of side quests color the world with charming stories revealing nice character moments and enjoyable world lore. You don’t have traditional genre-trope romances per se, but all of the characters that join you have optional quest lines that tell more of their stories and give you in-game benefits.
Like the farming sims it is inspired by, Harvestella runs on a day/night cycle where you have to make sure you go to bed before midnight. The days can go by quickly (and were already tweaked to be longer after feedback to the September 2022 demo), wrapping up in about 15-20 minutes unless you get stuck in a dialogue-heavy quest. The writing is mostly engaging, balancing between quirky and emotional, but it’s regularly long-winded without any means of speeding up the process. That’s not helped by the fact that even basic movement feels slow. You can sprint, but sprinting quickly drains your stamina and the only way to regain it during the day is to eat stamina-rejuvenating food. It’s easy to keep a stockpile of food, but the whole process is clumsy enough that I just stopped sprinting because it became a hassle. Every 30 days of in-game time, the season changes with a single day spent in the dark Quietus. The only real thing to do in Quietus is to work your way through a lengthy dungeon, but that sense of monthly progression works well in the context of this game being a fusion between traditional JRPG and farm sim.
It doesn’t totally stick the landing, but the way various aspects feed into each other in a circular manner is what helped to drive me forward. Farming and harvesting crops can help you generate income and resources, which can then be poured into crafting tools and meals, which can be used to generate more resources that can then help you solve quests, giving you more crops from which you can farm and harvest. It can be a slow burn, especially if you get distracted by side quests. Even still, new wrinkles kept cropping up as I progressed, whether it was different farming biomes or additional combat classes. It’s also a gentler farm sim, in that a lot of what’s ahead of you is laid out cleanly with quest markers and crystal clear goals. You don’t need to do anything arcane to upgrade your farming skills; those skills will be available if you interact with farming enough.
While I stand by the fact this leans more towards the genre of straight RPG than farm sim, it’s telling I’m only mentioning combat now. I regularly went in-game days without really engaging in much combat and when I did, it was relatively basic. You start off with a simple Fighter class, but as you meet new characters, you can access their classes, which hit the expected notes of mage, tank, and more. Complexities develop as you unlock more skills for classes, but combat is primarily very button-mashy and simplistic. Whether you’re using a melee or ranged character class, the best strategies seem to be to find a spot next to an enemy where they aren’t directly attacking and just wail on them, especially if you can attack the element they’re weak against. You have special abilities that can be reused after cooldowns and some classes have basic attacks that can be charged up. You usually have two party members alongside you and you can have three classes equipped at once that you can switch between as battle necessitates. The battle system reminded me a lot of the recent Trials of Mana remake, though with far less nuance.
Thankfully even in spite of less than stellar combat, the whole of Harvestella is greater than the sum of its parts, because the combat helps to feed into other aspects like I mentioned previously. Defeating enemies earns you resources and drops, which can be used to complete quests and craft more goodies. I wish I could move faster, but even still, the feedback loop was enjoyable.
Harvestella feels like a farm sim made for people who like traditional RPGs, or maybe you could position it as a traditional RPG for people who like farm sims. Either way works. It’s a unique balance that is rocky at times but won me over more often than not. This is a game with a lot of heart that I kept wanting to explore even with its messier aspects. If you’re looking for a farm sim mixed with a JRPG or a JRPG mixed with a farm sim, this is perfect for you. And if you go into it with the right mindset, you’ll enjoy the relaxing stroll of this world and its gameplay.
