izigame.me

TL;DR
It's a very flawed "action"-rpg heavily inspired by Final Fantasy, with very basic farming elements and no life-sim at all. Also overpriced as hell. If you are looking for something similar to Rune Factory, just wait for Guardians of Azuma.
First of all, this game was not developed by Square-Enix but by Live Wire, a small studio that also developed Ender Lilies and its sequel (also, way better games than this). The second lie the steam page of this game tells you is that this is as a farming / life-sim, despite lacking most of the basic features modern games of this kind have.
The "farming" / "life-sim"
The character customization screen is a joke. I see first-person games with more options. The "female" and "male" bodies are almost the same too. You either let me make my own character or at least give me options that actually looks different from each other. The pronouns are all over the place, with the same character sometimes being refered as "them", sometimes as "he/she". Good to see inclusion, but the way it was, well, included in this game looks forced.
Only 2 animals to rise, and by rise I mean add food to the feeder and "talk" to them (no brushing or milking).
The villages are full of generic NPC's, with very few unique characters (but some of them without a name).
The NPCs also does not have routines, like going to the shop or talking to another NPC or going to certain places to trigger cutscenes...nothing.
No romance either, instead there's a friendship system where you get items (NPCs) or unlock the last skills for certain jobs (companions). You can confess to one of the companions after beating the game but nothing like a married life or dating events happen. Usually in farming/life-sims the quests or dates with the NPC shows different problems or hobbies of said NPC, sometimes changing the way we see them. Here, it's just one story, divided in multiple "wait until I send you a letter" segments, and is not even good ones.
The shops are as basic as they could get, providing a few seeds, few backpack upgrades and some recipes.
There is no teenager model, so sometimes they use the child one, sometimes the adult. It took me some time to realize that and I was confused by seeing kids not talking like kids and adults talking like annoying brats.
The story
The story is kinda insteresting, but full of "you won't understand until you see it" moments to force the player to move from one dungeon to another. I know this not uncommon is fiction, but that happens a lot and that is the main reason for the protagonist to move. By the way, they apparently forgot the MC has ammnesia, because this is only mentioned in the very beggining and in the very ending of the game. The writting is kinda bad and there's only a few animations and songs, making the cutscenes with the generic NPCs even more generic, and sometimes with soundtracks that does not fit the mood quite well. I lost the count of how many characters used the same "snap fingers" animation when they had an idea or when the same fanfarre played when you saved a city from a sea monster or when you helped some kid play with his friends.
Oh, and the cutscenes are unskipable because you need to constantly pick a option during dialogs that have absolutely no effect on the dialog or the story.
The combat
The delay before casting skills plus the cooldown and the fact that enemies can hit you from very far, make it feels more like a turn-based game than an action-rpg. Some enemies, including the final boss, jumps a lot and hitting it with skills can be more annoying than it should.
The double-break mechanic is fun but the way the elements are spread between the jobs make it way harder than it should. For example, only two jobs have skills that deals earth dmg, and only one skill per job. You can't customize your skill loadout, instead you need to "equip" up to 3 jobs and switch between them mid-fight.
Stamina regeneration is too slow to be usefull, and the "fullness" mechanic also prevents you from eating food to recover it faster, making stamina management a pain specially during fights. you can craft a potion to recover stamina (and HP) but it requires a rare ingredient.
Debuffs are specially annoying because they require foods that can only be made with ingredients from specific seasons.
My first review was a positive one, because I really wanted to see the positives of the game: the game is sometimes beatifull for a Switch game and I really liked the art style. It's was made by a small studion and I am huge fan of Rune Factory....but it is hard to ignore so many problems. If that was the "first of its kind" type of game I could forgive it, but all they had to do is copy Rune Factory, or Harvest Moon, or Stardew Valley, or My Time at Portia or any of the many farming/ life-sims out there. It really feels like they wanted to make a FF style action-rpg but then someone (maybe their boss, maybe Square-Enix) forced them to add farming stuff, because it's popular.