October Assassination #1 (SG Win/PoP Pick)

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Harvestella is a game that might be worthy if bought on a deep discount, but not full price.

Imagine a PS2 game that was forgotten in a closet for two decades and then released as if no one noticed. The game has incredibly beautiful environmental art and the music is top-notch, but the praise kind of stops there. While you eventually end up building a daily rhythm to your progress, at no point the game truly feels satisfying -- everything you do in the game is a bit worse or more tedious or more slow than it had to be, and I think a lot of that comes from the fact the game still has design conventions from the early 2000s, but in the early 2020s. The graphics, animations, textures, sound effects, menus, everything feels like it was meant to be from 3-4 gaming generations ago with no good reason for that. We as gamers demand a bit more today, and this game simply fails to deliver in so many aspects that I find it very hard to recommend.

Take farming. It is bare bones. You have three tools, a choice of a few seeds every month, very limited planting room, expensive upgrades, crops that are not profitable, high cooking requirements (which incentivize you to hoard ingredients instead of selling them), and a massive range of transformation machines but which usually only have one or two inputs. You eventually unlock biomes, but they add very little to the overall farming. It looks like a lot, but it's so incredibly basic that each day I would be done with farming by 8AM, even when I had a lot of stuff to do. It is not enough to keep you hooked, but many other gameplay systems rely on outputs from farming, so you have to put some effort into it.

The crops you harvest during farming are really helpful for cooking, which is your main way of progressing through dungeons (since stamina drains absurdly fast). Which takes us to combat -- a MMO-style combat with no block and an uneffective dodge, limited healing and no tanking. Which means combat is a DPS rush against enemies. You're supposed to combo weaknesses to achieve breaks, but the elements and weaknesses is poorly communicated and you don't have access to all jobs and elements without first going to a save spot, meaning you either cheat and read online about the upcoming encounters in order to be prepared for them (as I did), or go blind into battles, die, waste your time and money and then repeat them. There is close to zero skill involved in combat, and your AI companions are close to useless most of the time. Anytime you encounter a FEAR enemy, expect a fight that is harder than the mainline bosses.

If the game was mostly farming and combat, it wouldn't be a great game anyway, but it would be a better game than it is. But there's also story and side-quests, and here's where the game biggest issue lies. The side-quests are an incredible, incredible pacing drag. Everytime you trigger a new quest, expect 10-15 minutes of unskippable cutscenes with no voice acting, which very quickly becomes insufferable. The scenarions and NPCs might even be interesting, but the whole stop-start nature of these interactions gets very old very fast, to the point I started mashing X while reading on my phone just to get through with those interactions. Even worse, they unlock a lot of passive combat buffs and much-needed money and seeds, so you are incentivized to suffer through those. To hurt the pacing even more, sometimes the game brings a cutscene, gives back control, asks you to walk 3 meters, and takes back control for another cutscene. Another common time-wasting tactic is giving you dialogue choice, which you think might matter, but always lead to a same generic response that applies to both of your answers (which usually are the same thing said differently), and them the game just goes back to being linear. It's deceptive, it's a pacing killer, and just made me slowly hate the game.

Again, there are decent elements to the game, but overall it's not respectful of your time, and a game that could be over in 30-40 hours insists to drag itself for 70+ hours just because it thinks it's cute. There are much better farming sims, much better dungeon crawlers, and much better life sims out there. I am hard pressed to understand why anyone would spent $60 on a PS2 game released 2 decades after its time.