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Sum-Up

In-depth analysis further down.


🟩 Pros
🟥 Cons



• Despite their relative simplicity for 2023, art style and visuals are good and, at times, positively impressive.
• Good variety of subclasses to develop and dynamically switch to in combat.
• Excellent soundtrack, that emphasizes many central scenes in a fantastic way.


• Heavily recycled NPCs, enemy archetypes and locations from start to end.
• All side-quests are dull, repetitive, uninteresting, and give miserable rewards to boot.
• The farming-sim aspect is simplistic, clunky and grindy - it never feels rewarding.
• Boring, clichèd storyline that, except for some rare moments, fails to impress and feels “already-seen”.
• No character customization whatsoever past basic hair/eyes/shape settings.
• Combat is basic, generic, doesn’t get deeper, and is based on “how much healing you can spam” to win.





🟨 Bugs & Issues
🔧 Specs



• Absolute lack of visual settings past resolution and vsync. Unacceptable for a PC release.
• Unskippable cutscenes and dialogues, exception made for boss intros after the first time.
• Annoying MKB control system, maladapted from the gamepad-oriented original controls.


• i5 11400H
• 16GB RAM DDR4
• 512 GB SSD
• RTX 3060 6GB
• 1080p





Content & Replay Value:
It took me 74 hours to finish HARVESTELLA, taking extra time to explore all locations, expand the farm considerably, and finish each side-quest I could find. All content is linear: there’s no reason to replay once finished.


Is it worth buying?
No way. The regular price of 60€ would be good for this amount of content, however said content is mostly low-quality or filler, not up to par with AAA expectations (?) in almost any way. Move on to either proper, and better JRPGs, or pure Farming Sims.


Verdict: Bad
Rating Chart Here
An aborted splicing of JRPG and Farming Sim, that manages the impressive task of bringing out the worst aspects of each genre, while excelling at none.


https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3021933988

In-Depth

Writing & Worldbuilding
Harvestella takes place in a pre-industrial setting similar to Earth, with one big exception being the presence of magical implements called Monolites, which ease and improve the life of all inhabitants in various ways. The world is plagued by both ferocious monsters that roam outside the Monolite’s areas of influence, and also a continent-spanning plague called Quietus, that periodically withers crops and causes mortal sickness to people.
Companions mostly feel one-sided and never evolve their personality at any point, their quests a boring slog consisting of “talk to this NPC in 14 different locations to suddenly be best friends forever”. Your dialogue choices will never have any consequence, and are there only to give you the illusion of developing a character, while the story is on a fixed track for 99% of its runtime - no choice and consequence whatsoever.
As far as world design is concerned, Square Enix still proves to have a solid grasp of art direction: beautiful landscapes that feel varied and evocative are present throughout the adventure; combined with the solid soundtrack, one may even find some solace in their beauty, between one mind-numbing chore and the next. Dungeons and locations do feel thematically-unique enough to have their own “mood”, if you look past the same NPCs copy-pasted 35 times; yet, they’re not as intricate as one would hope or expect.
Exploration & Secrets
The world is divided into various locations, either settlements or dungeons, that you can reach through a world map initially traversed on foot, and later on with mounts and even vehicles. Overall, there aren’t more than two dozen locations overall, which is rather miserable for a 70+ hour JRPG; in fact, a lot of side-quests will recycle the same places, enemies and NPCs ad-nauseam because of how small the world is.
Dungeons are divided into floors, connected by fast-travel beacons you can unlock and use as shortcuts, since finishing an entire dungeon in a single day, before you’re forced to go back to sleep, is almost impossible. The way this game manages time is a standard for farming-sims, but days are far too short for how slow the pacing of everything is; this leads to even more wasted time to backtrack.
Exploring cities, dungeons and the overworld map are all worthwhile things to do, as many hidden chests, some of which behind devices or obstacles you’ll need specific consumables to overcome, contain rare materials or unique recipes to collect. But… guess what? You won’t need those recipes anyway, and while those rare mats can give a good buck early on, they become redundant from mid-game onwards. This means exploration, on paper, is worthwhile - but 80% of the time it’s actually redundant.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3025880079
Combat System & Bosses
Fights are in real-time, and will see you, alongside two companions, pitted against a variety of monsters and machines. The variety of foes is initially good, however becomes redundant and recycled the more the game advances. Remember how in FFXII there were 600+ unique monsters? Yeah, that was back when devs still gave a damn. You’ll have an array of ranged and melee classes to dynamically swap on the battlefield, each with their own abilities (up to four) and different elements to exploit foes’ weaknesses.
Progression of classes is grindy, as only those you equip will get XP from kills, meaning that to level up all classes equally, you’ll have to get some serious grinding done, as it takes hundreds of foes to gain even a single level at later stages. But here’s the good news; you won’t need to do that, since all melee classes are simply worse than ranged ones, and as long as you have a class combination that has all elements, you’ll be good to go with just three of them.
Bosses evolve as fights go on, and can be “broken” by hitting them with an element they’re weak against, thus increasing the damage they take for a while and also enabling your companions’ special moves, which give them invulnerability while executed, but not to yourself, so yes, you can actually die while watching your companions performing some overly-long attack animation. Boss design isn’t bad, but isn’t good either: most of the time, you’ll win if you have enough consumables, or lose if you don't; there’s no heal cooldown, so you can spam 129 fruit juices in a row and be immortal - vegan power!
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3021529659
Farm Management & Side Activities
Your farm initially consists of a single plot of land to till, water and sow; it can be expanded when you both have enough money and materials, at a dedicated trader. Depending on season, different plants will grow with different times and terrain types needed; you’ll need to stockpile in the right season, if you want to have enough to make the more complex food recipes later on. Despite various utility skills that can make farming quicker and more convenient, or implements like automated sprinklers, the whole farming component remains a drag: it’s slow, clunky, and never feels satisfactory.
It’s all in all, the same as buying healing and mana consumables at a shop, but with extra, longer steps that add nothing to the gameplay formula other than filler. Just spam the cheapest crop and resell everything for money to buy upgrades, or make the simplest available foods as consumables - you don’t need anything more than that.