Harvestella Review: Is This The Farming RPG Sim We Have Been Waiting For?

Square Enix’s new RPG Harvestella is a life simulation game. In a world full of life and color, players will tend to their crops, make friends with the locals, dealing with threats, learn about the world’s history, and find out what caused the disaster.

Harvestella was supposed to be the chosen one – the mix between an RPG and a Farming Sim that players have been waiting for so long! Does it live up to the hype though? Stay tuned for this review will state its pros and Cons. Let’s get started.

Is This The Farming RPG Sim We Have Been Waiting For? – Harvestella Review

Harvestella is a game made published by Square Enix but worked on by a study with around 24 employees! So this is not a AAA title. It just recently got released on the 4th of November 2022. It is heavily attacked and bashed by all sorts of negative reviews. The main reason for that is that the players are actually looking for a farming sim.

If you’re looking for a farming simulator in Harvestella do not even bother! It is a JRPG with farming sim elements that support and follow you through the game’s progress. Despite players being misinformed and leaving negative reviews because of this, the game is still very bland and has big issues. Let’s go over the Pros and the Cons.

Pros

What is the good side of things?

Character Progression

With each quest that you do and the farming period of the game, you will progress through a certain time zone. This way you feel as though something that you do has an impact on the world that you play in.

To help with this is the character progression. You will see the characters around you actually change a bit with the choices that you’ve made before. You will as though these NPCs around you actually have a life and evolve with you.

World

Everything is blurry. The devs made this system so that it can fit the whole fantasy world. But you will feel as though you are blind. Still, the world in itself is beautiful.

While there can be a lot of things said about how some worlds and maps are extremely small, we must say that they are very well crafted and designed and each are different from each other. You will see many types of different biomes as you travel through the story in this game.

It is also aesthetically pleasing to enjoy just walking through these lands and exploring the land, flora and fauna. You will have a map to travel across and sometimes you will just enter a land to explore it primarily for the looks alone.

Music

The music is by far the best thing that this game has going for it. Each of the environments has its own unique set of tracks that go alongside them extremely well. The world on its own is designed well, so following up with a piece of fantastic music will give a good ambient experience.

Relationship Building

The relationship system is here and works pretty well. You will have a big portion of quests that you can complete for a big portion of the villages and towns that you visit. You won’t be able to however befriend all characters in the game. You will do this just with the key ones.

It is a pro of course because it has a system with quests that will pull you in to keep exploring, but you won’t be able to talk to these NPCs outside of the job quests. So yeah, even this need more work. And yes, the characters are as cliche as they come.

Cons

Let’s go over the list of the many cons that we are many other players have with Harvestella.

Price

The biggest and most negative thing about this game is definitely the price. Currently, Harvestella is priced at $60, but if you are lucky and manage to get it at discount you might get it around 35-40$ if you are lucky.

This is completely overkill and extremely overpriced. It doesn’t offer anything more than $25 at the best and the developers have gone and overpriced it anyway. If you do plan to buy this game we strongly recommend that you wait for a sale and a discount.

Character Customization

Not having the option to customize your character sucks. You will have the option to choose between female and male and that’s it. Plus on top of all that, the female and male It’s that the female and male characters are pretty much just copies of each other. It seems more like laziness than a way to be open to everyone.

Also, there doesn’t appear to be a method for changing your hair in the game, and the fact that your outfit changes when you switch jobs doesn’t matter because cutscenes and occurrences show you in your default outfit.

Farming

Farming is boring and made badly. You can be playing for 10 hours and might have planted 20 things but then you use the hammer and you can only break the smaller rocks still. The progression is poorly made which will drive you crazy.

You won’t comprehend how the farming might work because the system that it offers is terrible and you will be left with YouTube videos to guide you. Oh yes, and watering can is something that will exhaust you. You will lose so much time watering your farms.

Food is crucial throughout this game, and we like how the cultivation to sell is not the main goal. In most farming games, you sell the crops and use the money you make to buy so many seeds or tools that you can make even more money. In this game, you save your food so you do not really starve in battle.

Dialogue

Most of the time you will be left out with these choices for an answer:

• Cowardly
• Rude
• Confused

So you won’t have all that much when it comes to actually immerse yourself and talking with the NPCs or the important head characters in the game. This is mostly because of the bad translations.

Bad Translations

The translations of it are still not fully made and probably this might not be a con in the future, but as it is right now there are a lot of things that aren’t translated at all.

You will get things in the background and in the world that weren’t touched at all. The things that were translated were just the dialogues and chat bubbles but even they are done poorly and very bland. You will sometimes laugh out loud in some sad and emotional conversations because of the translations.

Plus on top of all that, the voice acting is simply not there! This is also a very big minus that will take away from your immersion.

Combat

The fighting could be anything and is basically a big ‘meh’. There is no skill involved, and every game from Japan has some kind of elemental affinity system that doesn’t do much to spice up the boring “click until it’s dead” gameplay. Deaths happen quickly or don’t happen at all. Either you get everything done or you die.

You will fight bosses in the game that might come off as harder to beat with a unique set of skills but even they seem easy. So most of the time you won’t feel a challenge at all, especially if you are an experienced gamer.

Skill Tree & Progress

The skill tree of how you actually make your character better is very boring. You won’t get a lot of options and most of the time you will stick with the same traits over and over again.

The character’s progress on its own feels like a very stereotypical type of protagonist which will have very illogical options to use in the dialogue at times making you feel very weird when talking and interacting with someone.

Overall & Rating

Overall Harvestella is a very weird game with very big flaws that we cannot comprehend why the devs even added them in the first place. This can be a good thing but also a very bad thing too. You won’t know where to start off when playing it or what to expect. But even so, you will feel as though it can have a lot more and it is simply very bland.

Some of you will really enjoy it if you are an extremely big fan of JRPGs, but for a lot of other gamers, you will most definitely want to stay away from it, especially because of its high price.

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