So I’m currently working on getting to the third dungeon of RF:ToD which, from what I gather, means I’m a little over half way through the main plot?
First of all, the game is gorgeous, I absolutely love the “Wind Waker, but with farming” aspect of it, Aden and Sonja are pretty fun protagonists (Aden is so randomly savage I love it), and TBH I actually like the focus on taming monsters over the actual farming. I also think it was a neat idea to have little events you have to watch before you can get villagers up to the next friendship level! It gives them a lot of personality
I just wish you could tame more monsters total. I believe there’s something like 90 different monsters but you can only keep about 30, and that’s kind of depressing because I love taming all the monsters in RF games. I think the game would also be much improved by having a way to bulk craft a bunch of items at once and an easier way to quickly transfer full stacks of items, because the best way to do it is esoteric enough I didn’t figure it out for about 25 hours of gameplay. I’m guessing because the game was originally made for the Wii, which has a lot fewer buttons than the PS3. But that’s nitpicky stuff
I’d say my biggest complaint is that you can’t play Sonja from the beginning of the game (and instead have Aden be the one trapped in her body. I get that there’s probably some plot thingy with that but just like. Change the plot so you can have a female protag from the beginning?), and you can’t get married before the end of the main story. Since, from what I gather, there’s really not much to do in the post game aside from marriage since you’ll probably have maxed out your monster capacity and there’s only one little post-game combat challenge to speak of. IDK how much I can motivate myself to keep playing when there’s literally nothing to do aside from talk to NPCs and pass time, since I’m not the biggest on completionist aspects like finding all the fish or maxing out all the skill levels or whatever.
I can definitely see why people consider this one a “black sheep”, even if I 100% don’t agree. It’s the farming. The farming in this game is extremely pared down, which frankly doesn’t bother me too much. I mean, in 99% of RF games you’re just taming monsters to take care of your crops anyways. All this does is take some player control away from what you grow and when, since you no longer buy seeds, but your crops grow so fast in this game that it’s not really that big of a deal? You’ll get plenty of everything once your monsters are friendly enough. Too much involvement in farming honestly would have taken a lot away from the ocean exploration aspect anyway, since it takes up so much of your time.
So yeah, it’s not bad. It’s different (which IME tends to be a hallmark of black sheep entries, not bad but not what people were expecting or necessarily wanted).
