Harvestella Review (SamuraiEdgeplay)
Ok. If you're jonesing for a PS1 action RPG that pretends to have farming in it: get this at half off. For the reasons below: I couldn't see it through to the end.
The hitboxes are just nonsense. Be prepared to face-tank everything and slam 9 juices down your throat during some of the later boss fights in an effort to keep the AI alive.
The progression is of time is WAY too aggressive. Walking across town from store-to-store, that you can SEE from the other store, takes like 40 minutes. Hell if you're on the world map OH LORDY every half eye blink is an hour.
The economy just doesn't exist in this game. You know how farming games are supposed to go, right? Raise crops, buy seeds, sell crops, buy bulk seeds, earn upgrades. Not in this game! Carrot seeds cost 100g each. Guess how much you earn from selling a carrot? 115g. You earn practically nothing after days of growing and the upgrades are 5k-50k depending. Your best bet is to earn side quest money or turn in dishes to inns.
The very first job unlock is mage. Congrats you're done with combat. The break system is so silly that you can get away with using fighter and mage for every single fight and only equip a third if you get bored.
The first two party members you get when advancing the spring town storyline can carry you through the whole game. Again you just need two melee units to facetank mobs do the absurd damage in this game and it takes them all of 10 seconds out of combat to respawn to full health. You'll rarely find a reason to bother switching up the party, especially with the gold and materials cost of catching all other members up.
Stamina never regens unless you have over 0 fullness in your belly, which means you will be starved for stamina/running/hunger the entire game. Because the crop economy is borked: you'll never have enough crops to use in dishes. This leads to a rare use of meals which are the source of bulk stamina. Enjoy eating berries sparingly to get 5 hunger back so your stamina regens and you can initiate combat so your AI allies know the monster is, in fact, not tickling your face.
The 4th chapter is titled something to the effect of, "fight for the fate of the world" and boy was I thrilled to be done. JK there are 6 more chapters afterwards. It's somehow only half of the game.
The AI for teammates is just FUBAR. Watch as they: attack terrain, forgot they were fighting and run back to you like a puppy, and swap the focus target on a dime.
The story and dialogue is just not interesting. The best that I can say is that it exists. Not horrible but you'll zone out probably 7 hours in.
It's 2024 and we don't have a skip cut scene OR an auto-text advance button. Absolutely unreal. I may have stuck with the game if I could skip the massive amounts of talking, but the fluff just proved to be an exercise in wrist integrity more than anything else. Oh and lord help you if you die to a boss and have to mash through to get back into the fight.
It's a shame because all the bones for a great budget game are here: the character illustrations are nice, the music is relaxing, and the mechanics exist; but they're all horridly balanced or uninteresting. It's so close.