absurdly long time from when i started to when i finished the game, lol. there may have been a couple Incredibly Long real life gaps in progress, tee hee :3c
but i recently got a switch 2 to have ready for fire emblem and since i don’t have any other switch 2 games for it yet (aside from the kirby dlc) it was time… to finally return to the one that got away…
also technically the First Farming sim that i reached the credits on. i love a good farm sim, but they do tend to reach a point in the end game where the general farm tending gets to the extent i gotta pause. plus the whole thing where you find out to progress the next plotbeat you need a material you didnt save in the summer and now you’d have to play through The Entire Calendar to get there again.
luckily! plot progression in harvestella is tied basically entirely to the jrpg dungeon crawling part of the game, with farming getting you more resources for the dungeons. so even with a couple large gaps, the next dungeon portion was Always accessible to continue when i returned.
as for the jrpg/farming sim hybrid mix id say harvestella was around 70% jrpg, 30% farming sim. and i think it works! the lighter farm system is still fun to organize, and its format creates a very interesting flow in how it forces the jrpg portions to be paced out. there are so many important plot beats that happened on a random rainy Tuesday bc i didnt have to water my crops that day and had full stamina for battle.
and then the rpg section… Oh Man. despite the game clearly working with a moderately smaller budget, the whole story Screams of ambition. the game is constantly unafraid to swing for the fences in its dense prose, it’s melancholic scenarios, it’s high sci fi concepts. you meet at least Five separate characters with amnesia. you and your girl bestie nearly get executed by the church. you find the moon landing flag. Yes. That One. that’s not main plot that’s just a Side Story.
speaking of girl bestie!! this game is girl loaded. of the starter 3 adventuring chapters, only the first (and the worst, sorry) is centered around a dude. the next two are both centered around the female character for the area! and then, after the party is gathered and you get into the true plot, Both of the most plot important characters are girls. Hell yea…
and the endgame. you can feeeeel the game struggling against its budget, but it pull through and Delivers on one hell of a jrpg escalation. you Will save humanity in this farming sim. but which one?
there are so many rough edges. the prose gets verbose to an extent it can serve as a barrier you gotta work through at times. the combat system doesn’t really require the complexity the devs tried to create for it, healing brute forcing remains constantly a top option. there are so many themes the game keeps hammering in to the point of repetition in some of the sidequests. (and on my own front it is a little unfortunate that the gaps in playing had my memory foggy of some of the early sections by the end)
harvestella is a Masterpiece.
i say this because of the (three, chronologically isolated) times i enjoyed with it. but mostly i say this because
can’t you imagine the child, playing partway through but not finishing. thinking of it again years down the line and going ‘wait… what was going on with that one’ and playing through Properly. and getting to go ‘what the Hell was i playing??’
beautiful, fascinating, interesting game. it was never afraid. I recommend it. what the Hell was harvestella
