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Mysticblade posted:RF5 had something of a wonky transition to 3D that makes the game feel significantly worse than it's predecessor. RF4 on the other hand is basically the 4th actual iteration of the franchise on the basically the same hardware (DS to 3DS) and pretty much an improved mechanically and slightly less anime version of RF3. RF4 also got extra content and fixes in the rereleases. This, but also RF4 just controls a lot better than RF5. The combat is a lot less stiff and a lot more fluid, with things just generally feeling a lot snappier. RF5 has a lot of animations with a lot of startup time, and that includes the dash. RF4 lets you dash around a lot better and do some small animation canceling stuff where it's easy to attack->dash or dash->attack. RF5 certainly isn't terrible, and I did enjoy it quite a bit, but I definitely prefer RF4's mechanics.
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Dec 16, 2022 22:21
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LLSix posted:Thanks. Knowing there was nothing I could do to avoid getting a bad first crop took a lot of the frustration away. Definitely don't stress about getting the best crops - the game gives you more and more tools as you go along in order to make better and better harvests. Extremely mild spoiler that you already have all of the pieces to figure out: Part of the arc of the story is that Sakuna is a spoiled brat who coasted off of her parents' work. Now she has to actually prove herself and part of that is learning how to be a harvest goddess the hard way. You can't make a good first harvest because she can't make a good first harvest.
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Dec 25, 2022 07:05
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So I dove into Kynseed for a while and wanted to chime in on it (there are some recent posts that did the same). Overall, I think it's a game has has a lot of promise, but is very much a mile wide and an inch deep. It also still feels somewhat early access. There's a lot you can do, but very little meat in each activity to really get into. The setting is also neat and bizarre in some fascinating ways, but once you figure that out, it ceases to be something that you interact with as much. For instance, every item can be rated from 1* to 5*. There are four conditions to be met to upgrade the item (stuff like "it's raining" or "have the flatulence buff" or "have a dog following you"), but outside of some very specific scenarios where you need a higher rated item, I pretty much tended to ignore the conditions. The game also feels unfinished - some of the tooltips feel like placeholders, there are signs left over from early access talking about how this area you're in will totally be fleshed out later (and is already fleshed out), and you can't actually make some items even though the game's code implies that you can. There's also some weird oddities with things like treasure hunting that were changed at some point in development and the tooltips weren't updated. I think my biggest impression of the game is that it feels a lot like if you took Fable, removed the combat, and made the businesses more central to your character progression with some more expanded mechanics. The NPCs have some interesting stories, but are otherwise interchangeable, generic, and lifeless (hell, your spouse doesn't even really get unique dialogue or acknowledge your marriage, and your kids don't do that either). The spritework on the NPCs does make them recognizable at least (and I could easily identify which was which), but it's not like Stardew Valley or Rune Factory where each NPC is an actual character with unique dialogue. Combat exists, and is even somewhat fun, but it feels very siloed away from everything else. You can craft equipment and make meals to bring, but the star rating of anything other than your charm and ward is useless, and you can't make medicines to bring with you even though it's something that is very much intended to be in the game (there's some code that shows how it would be done, it's just not implemented). Even then, there's only 3 usable items, and it is a system that is revealed to be incredibly shallow incredibly quickly. There's also a lot of quality of life features that are lacking. Planting and harvesting crops takes entirely too many clicks for how frequently you do it. Gifting to villagers takes a lot of clicks and there's no clear indicator of who you've gifted to already in a given day (it's also drat near essential to do if you want to enjoy the game - the character stories are often fairly interesting and gifting items has them tell you more about the world). Crafting is neat, but you do a LOT of crafting if you get into a business that relies on it, and some crafting can't actually be automated by employees. The businesses are neat and fun, but again feel a bit underbaked. NPC-run apothecaries have two people staffing them, but yours only have one employee, which results in some silly amounts of travel time. General stores have an oven in them and seem intended to sell cooked goods, but your employees will never actually make any cooked goods for you to sell. Blacksmiths seem to be in a good spot though. Starting a family is amusing because, as mentioned, your spouse/children don't actually say much to acknowledge that. Mild spoilers: ironically, the best option is to just pay money to adopt orphans and then send your orphans out to gather resources for you. They can level up experience in an area to eventually gather top-level items without you having to put in the effort yourself. It's very silly. I can't heartily recommend the game, but I did enjoy taking it apart and learning about the systems. It doesn't have the staying power of a Rune Factory game, but if you're the sort of person who enjoys this genre of games and has enough disposable income that you're comfortable with the purchase, it's definitely worth taking a look at. It also helps that the game files and save games are something you can just open in notepad++ and play around with if you're so inclined. If the developers keep adding to it, and especially if people eventually mod the game, I could see it being quite good in the future. It's not something that would be quick though, and it would require a lot of resources to do things like write more character dialogue.
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Jan 3, 2023 21:25
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I was going to say that Re: Legend was either abandoned or stuck in development hell, but apparently it released? I thought it had promise last time I played it, but I'll have to give it another shake and see. There were some cool pet mechanics last I checked, and it very much felt very Rune Factory in its approach to things. Forager is essentially an idle game. It's not bad, and the numbers go up can be fun, as can automating each area, but there's a point where things just get silly. Serin Fate is a game I want to love. It has some amazingly cool ideas, like a mana system where you spend mana to conjure a tool that harvests resources for you (among many other things). There's also some fun little pets that follow you around and help out in combat and some of the systems seem interesting. But, and there's always a but, the game is loving grindy as all get-out. Maybe I missed something, but very little is actually explained. There's a ton of stuff you can craft, but the stats aren't mentioned before you make them, nor do you know what the difference is between different things. I tried to advance in the first dungeon and got absolutely loving slaughtered over and over and over again. I spent a long time trying to build up infrastructure and equipment and it barely made a dent. I suspect that if I knew what I was doing, that there are some tricks to progress quickly, but if you just kind of wade in and don't know what to go for, it's extremely difficult to get started.
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Jan 18, 2023 22:37
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Metis of the Hallway posted:Yeah I think the writing and gameplay of RF5 are still as charming as the previous games, but it definitely suffered transitioning to 3D. But if you enjoyed RF4 and want to play another one -- it's definitely worth it at half price imo. The combat isn't as fluid in 5 in that you can't cancel animations into a dash as easily or readily, and a lot of animations end somewhat stiffly. It's not bad enough to be unplayable by any means, but RF4 has much nicer combat. Jack Trades posted:Is that the series with extremely questionable "romance" options or am I confusing it with a different Japanese farm sim? There's always at least one "romance" option that is indefensible, and it's the biggest blight on the series. The actual farming and dungeon mechanics are wonderful. The characters are fun, and there's a hell of a lot of dialogue that rarely repeats itself as well. The moment someone copies the formula and strips out the skeevy bullshit, I will be incredibly, incredibly happy. Sadly, Harvestella, while similar in a lot of ways, doesn't have the depth to the farming or the combat that makes the RF series as good as it is.
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Mar 8, 2023 02:55
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I picked Sun Haven back up now that it's released and I can't quite put my finger on what exactly isn't that compelling about it. There's a lot of content, but much of it feels really disjointed. It's really easy to see the seams where new content was added, and the two additional towns are more or less completely self-contained and siloed away from everything else. There's also no seasonal crops in those towns, which feels really weird when contrasted against the seasonal crops in the main town of Sun Haven. There's also a weird emphasis on wasting the player's time because there's no stamina, so the balancing factor is how slowly things go initially and how much faster you can work later on (tool swing speed goes up as the quality of tool increases). Thing is, that still means you need to click once with the hoe to till the soil, and then once with the watering can to water the crop each day. There's no sprinklers as far as I can tell, and while you do eventually get spells that let you spend mana to get a bunch of work done at once, those also feel underwhelming. The seed maker costs mana to use and takes 40 loving hours to make a batch of seeds (I modded the crafting time very quickly because holy crap is that a design decision that I do not agree with), so if you want to run your farm as a self-sustaining operation, you don't really have mana to run the spells to make farming less of a pain in the rear end. Mining is initially quite fun, but finding ore is very RNG dependent, as sometimes you'll go to a floor and it'll have 10-20 ore nodes, and sometimes it'll have 0-2 ore nodes. There's a huge amount of ore required to get anything done as well, between making keys to progress in the mines and making keys to unlock chests on the overworld, and that's before spending ore to upgrade your stuff. There are also mines available in the two other towns, and the perks you get in the mining tree for the Sun Haven mines don't work in the mines for the other two towns because reasons. Fishing is another thing that feels somewhat disjointed (which, to be fair, is true in many, many titles) and like it doesn't integrate with the rest of the systems. It's there, it's functional, and that's about all there is to it. Credit where it's due though, the skill trees are designed decently well, and while there are certainly some garbage skills, they did a good job with making skills that are somewhat interesting. I also like the food system - many foods give a permanent stat increase upon eating them. The stat increase starts very large, and then quickly plateaus and maxes out at 100 of an item consumed (the bulk of this is in the first 5-10 consumed though, so you don't need to feel compelled to eat 100 of every item). And that food system is really cool, right up until you realized that the devs bloated the everliving gently caress out of the crafting system and added a bunch of foods that don't increase stats, so now you have to sort through pages and pages of recipes to see what you want to do, and time doesn't pause in the crafting menu. There is, thankfully, a mod that lets you craft from chests and quick sort to chests, so it could be worse. On the bright side, there's a lot of NPCs scattered across the three towns, and a lot of dialogue for each of the characters. There's a lot of options for making characters, for clothes, and for decorating each of the three farms and houses in different ways. There's also a pretty heavy emphasis on non-human characters, so if you're into that, go nuts. I'd say it's a good sandbox game to approach from a very chill perspective where you just want to relax and vibe with your NPC buddies and progress very slowly. There's not a lot of mechanical meat to it, and gameplay-wise, Rune Factory or Stardew Valley trump it in every way possible. I think overall the game's big issue is that it just lacks focus. There's a lot of stuff, but 99% of it is just fluff and cruft that would have been better left on the cutting room floor. That's exacerbated by the three towns being so disjointed from one another to the point where their crafting materials aren't shared from town to town, their NPCs don't interact, and it's just very siloed in an uncomfortable way. The game is also very grindy, in large part to paper over how mechanically simple it is and the lack of a stamina system. The player resource is, quite literally, time, and boy howdy are they determined to waste it.
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Mar 23, 2023 20:31
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skeleton warrior posted:Yeah, I agree with everything you've said here. I kept playing it, and then I finally made it to a second town where they said "hey, stop working on THAT town, and come and do the exact same stuff over in THIS town" and knowing that there's a THIRD town out there which will do the same thing, I just stopped playing. Yeah, and I forgot to mention that each town has their own currency. It's very clearly the influence of a system where they didn't want to use the same currency because then the players who had already been playing in the first town and had all the things would be able to just roll up and afford everything in the new town immediately. Then they couldn't add too many food items that boosted stats to the new towns because they already had a full set in the original town, so the bulk of items you can craft with the new stuff doesn't actually boost your stats the way the original town stuff does, and the issues just kind of compound on themselves. HopperUK posted:I also feel that Sun Haven is - fine. It's fine. I love the world but dislike the character designs. For every one thing I really like there's one thing I really don't. And yeah, fine is definitely a way I'd put it as well. I think if it were one of my first games in the genre and I were a lot younger and had more free time to dedicate to only one game, I'd get a lot more out of slowly grinding out the perfect farm and boosting my stats.
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Mar 23, 2023 21:50
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RoboCicero posted:Homestead Arcana comes out tomorrow on the 21st. Notably, it's free on Xbox GamePass and isn't launching in Early Access (from what I can see). It's by the developers of, uh, Doki Doki LIterature Club Plus, apparently. Looking into the reviews, it appears to be fairly unpolished? I don't have gamepass, so I'll hold off on it until there's some better information out there.
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Apr 22, 2023 05:41
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PringleCreamEgg posted:I picked up Harvestella and it very much feels like something that would have come out on the PS2. I’m not very far in yet but the farming and crafting just seem like an additional step between killing monsters and getting upgrades, rather than just having the monsters drop gold or loot directly . I’m hoping farming gets more focus in the narrative but I’m doubtful, and it’s weird that a game with Harvest in the title basically just dropped a “hey have this house and some land, you can farm on it like this, okay peace” and that’s it? Farming is primarily there to get consumables to fight with, from what I can tell. Juices, especially, are essentially healing potions (you can't eat when you're full, so the fact that they're 0 hunger is very important for challenging fights). You also get some money, but I find that the bulk of the money comes from ranching (animals drop products that are exclusively for selling) and from missions (especially the cooking turn-ins that unlock at a certain point in the game). But yeah, Harvestella is a JRPG first, and it has some farming content to go alongside it. It's definitely not a Rune Factory or a Stardew Valley.
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May 1, 2023 04:37
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Megazver posted:Dragon Quest Builders 2, Graveyard Keeper, Forager My only complaint with DQ Builders 2 is the unskippable cutscenes that are unbearably slow at times. Otherwise a fantastic little game, and it's very satisfying to build a little village and see NPCs actually use the buildings! Graveyard Keeper is interesting in that it's a game with a lot of stuff to do, but much of the infrastructure only needs to be invested in once. Getting the automation up and running is a lot of fun though. Forager is... odd? It's not a bad game, but it is the very definition of numbers go up, and it feels kind of weird how it goes about that.
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May 11, 2023 15:12
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SilentChaz posted:I think it was in this thread, but someone said that Graveyard Keeper basically expects you to know what to do or that you're following a guide. Also, if you go for the deluxe version, the DLC is badly implemented (at least on Switch, don't know about other platforms) where it's available from almost the start even though you're nowhere near ready for it. The only redeeming feature about the day/time issue is that time passing doesn't matter (other than corpse quality, but you can just cremate them or toss them in the river instead of burying them anyway). You're free to sleep 6 days away in order to get up on the 7th if you skipped something. It's both a good and a bad thing, since the complete lack of time pressure also makes a lot of tasks feel a bit meaningless.
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May 12, 2023 05:09
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Mrenda posted:Are there any Farmin', etc. games that let you build your city/town up. I asked earlier about Dinkum, because it was putting me off that it was slow. Looking for something a bit speedier. I played Portia, enjoyed it but never finished. I'm waiting on Sandrock to finish EA. Anything else going? (Played SV, ofc.) Dragon Quest Builders 2 has some elements of this. It's not a farming game in the same way as something like Stardew Valley or Harvest Moon, but you do get to build houses and farms and other rooms for villagers and they will use them. It's also useful for you, as they'll do things like harvest crops and cook them, and you can take some of the output for yourself when adventuring.
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May 28, 2023 06:01
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Hel posted:Yeah, I'm still in first spring but it seems pretty good. Is there a way to transfer the magnifying powers to the next level of hoe, or do I have to spend 2000G as an extra tax on the upgrade? Not that 2000 is super expensive even this soon. You can use it as a tool on its own, and you can smith it to any tool, but no, there's no way to transfer the magnifying powers.
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Jun 15, 2023 09:31
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The Lone Badger posted:There's a way to make an extremely deadly sword with nothing but some bronze and a huge pile of turnip seeds, but I forget how. You don't even need bronze. It can be done more or less a couple of days after you get access to crafting. I'll detail the method in a spoiler below - don't use this unless you want to trivialize most of the first 3/4 or so of the game. So the trick is that if you have over 50 of the relevant crafting skill, and every component of the weapon/armor/shield/etc. is level 10, then you get a massive bonus to attack and damage. Funnily enough, you can both grind up the skill required to hit level 50, and forge the weapon you need pretty much at the same time. You do need one piece of level 10 iron to start. Begin by forging a sword. I use the one that costs 1 iron because it's cheap. Upgrade it to level 10 with whatever you want (turnip seeds, grass, whatever). Repeat this process until you have 14 garbage level 10 swords. Now, with a skill of 50 or more in smithing, craft a sword using the level 10 piece of iron, and 5 of the level 10 swords (you can use anything that's level 10, but odds are that you're not late enough in the game to have level 10 crops). Now upgrade the sword 9 times with a level 10 sword (again, anything that is level 10 will work), and you will suddenly have the shittiest sword in the game with +750 to attack and magic attack. Congratulations, you have now broken the first portion of the game over your knee. You can do basically the same thing with armor and shields for a massive boost to defense and magic defense that will render you virtually invulnerable for quite a decent way into the game. Eventually equipment will catch up with your inflated early game gear, and the resists and such on the equipment will start to be really relevant, but for the early-mid game, you're set.
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Jun 16, 2023 06:48
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Mysticblade posted:Speaking of 3D farm sims, this chat reminded that there was a 3D farm sim that was getting published by Square Enix back in the day. I think it was being made by a SEA developer, it definitely wasn't Harvestella. I think it was called Re: Fantasy or something? I can't find any info on it any more, does anyone know the name of that game or what happened to it? Re:Legend, and while it is technically in 1.1, the reality is that they slapped a 1.1 label onto an early access game and washed their hands of it. To be fair, I haven't put much time into it since the "release," but it was definitely stuck in development hell for a while there and I think they just kind of pushed it out and called it done.
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Jun 25, 2023 04:40
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A Wonderful Life was definitely an interesting game (I played it on Gamecube, so take what I'm saying here with a grain of salt). The big thing it did, if I remember correctly, is actually have the characters age up over time. There were timeskips built in between years, and you'd actually play the life of the farmer instead of living in an eternal and unchanging limbo. Livestock were a big deal, and there was also some sort of crop hybridization system that had some neat stuff going on. Apparently optimal play no longer involves murdering your goat with an axe anymore, so that's a plus in the new version.
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Jun 27, 2023 21:58
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If I'm not mistaken, graveyard quality increases money per sermon, while the church objects increase faith per sermon. So there is a monetary aspect to filling out the graveyard.
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Jul 11, 2023 05:43
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More or less finished up Roots of Pacha, and I enjoyed my experience with it. I don't know how much I'll continue my current run; I've hit a point where I can make 10,000 or so contribution points a day and there's just nothing to really spend it on. But at the same time, the process of tooling up to that point was incredibly enjoyable and I was spending everything I had to get to that point. There's still a lot I could do, but there's very little point to continuing to expand my farm or processing capability. But yeah, the game is definitely pleasant, and the mechanics have enough depth to make it interesting. Since ingredients can be processed in a number of ways, and can be processed in a number of ways, optimizing production, farming, and animal husbandry alongside gathering the raw materials to keep making infrastructure is a fun gameplay loop. It does peter out a bit towards the end once your engine takes off, but that's true of almost every single other game in the genre as well.
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Aug 7, 2023 08:36
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Tree Reformat posted:Honestly, if you haven't already played it, it might be best to just wait for the Rune Factory 3 rerelease in like a week and a half. I remember having a blast with that one. Hell, arguably even if you have played it before. Game is/was fantastic. Not quite as good as 4 mechanically, but it was the introduction of the fist "weapon" and a lot of fun to play.
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Aug 26, 2023 20:18
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lunar detritus posted:I have been playing it a bit and so far it seems fine but I really dislike this mechanic when you choose 'Talk'. Ah, thank you for reminding me. I remember playing the demo and that mechanic specifically is what turned me off of the game. It made it hard to actually get dialogue from the NPCs, which in turn made me not care about them, which in turn just made it into a kind of mediocre farming/dungeon rpg. And when I've got Rune Factory to play instead, well...
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Sep 22, 2023 05:40
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LeFishy posted:Edit: I'd also argue SoS isn't that great either. The series peaked (for me personally) with Animal Parade on Wii though I probably put most time into FoMT. Trio of Towns was pretty good. I liked the fertilizer system and how you could apply fertilizer by refilling your watering can with it. It had its problems, but the general gameplay loop was plenty fun.
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Sep 28, 2023 18:19
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I have to echo that Wildmender is super chill. I normally optimize the ever loving crap out of farming games because that's what's fun to me. And sure, I'm making my garden larger to get more things to make the garden larger, but the game doesn't feel like it has much pressure on me. Instead of optimizing my exploration, I can spend a couple of in-game days just chilling and planting my garden, moving crops around so that they're happier, digging trenches to keep things watered, moving around some plants that fix the soil to keep the area expanding slowly, etc. It's just so... pleasant.
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Oct 3, 2023 19:52
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Jack Trades posted:My Time At Sandrock having wormhole inventory on absolutely everything is such a great quality of life feature. Yeah, being able to fill requests by saying "Yep, I've got that in my storage, here ya go" is wonderful. Same with crafting. It still has some hiccups though - without the ability to set slots, you end up with some weird side issues where when you consume all of a specific resource you no longer have a place to stack the new supply you get, so keeping things organized is a minor issue. It's also irritating to deal with things that can be used, since the game (wisely) doesn't take things off your hotbar when you consolidate, but (unwisely) it makes it a pain in the rear end to have to remove everything from your hotbar before you consolidate things like milk or meat. The gripes are extremely minor though - accessing one chest lets you tab through every chest at the top of the screen, so no matter where you access your storage, you will find a spot to toss things eventually. I also just now keep my hotbar filled so that I don't have to worry about taking things off of it for storage.
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Nov 7, 2023 16:40
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Jack Trades posted:Wooooow...Sandrock just decided to gently caress me raw. I've gotten one with a -30% movespeed debuff. So I rerolled it. -30% movespeed debuff. Rerolled again. Still a loving -30% movespeed debuff. Sure, there were attack bonuses, and it's not like time progresses, but still, that was irritating. At this point I don't bother with the random buffs.
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Nov 9, 2023 18:18
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Jack Trades posted:Wait, you can reroll them? I didn't think to try. You can use the machine 3 times, and it will change to a new buff each time. After that, it won't work anymore for that run.
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Nov 9, 2023 18:29
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Mad Wack posted:no sandrock is done and has a full, long, three act plot Just finished the plot and it took me around 5.5 in-game months, or around 1.5 years in-game. The plot is enjoyable, the characters are fun, the festival minigames are fun, and the way that the whole "builder" thing works, you're constantly making improvements and changes to the game world, which keeps things fresh and makes you feel as if you're making an impact. By the end of the game, the area is almost unrecognizable with all of the stuff you've done to make it a better place.
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Nov 17, 2023 23:50
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Eh, farming is really not that bad, but you do absolutely have to process the food first. It also starts out kinda crappy, but half the point is that you're slowly breeding better versions of each crop to make them more and more profitable over time.
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Jan 7, 2024 07:33
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Gaius Marius posted:I get what they're saying the mechanical depth is there, but of the things you can do in the game it is pretty far down the list of things I find enjoyable. Only combat is lower I'd think. RF4 combat is pretty good though? There's a wide variety of weapons to use, the dash is great for dodging and movement, there are a number of weapon skills (and you can use any weapon's skills with any weapon), magic spells, and there's equipment that modifies your movement, your attacks, and a lot of other things. Plus you can tame monsters and bosses, you can ride and directly control a large percentage of them, and you can bring them with you to fight. You can even bring NPCs along and equip them. The farming's not bad either - the soil can be leveled up, there are fertilizers and things that can be applied to the soil, the tools can be upgraded, new crops unlock regularly and are drip fed to the player, the crops can be leveled up, crops are inputs into cooking and chemistry (and sometimes even equipment), and so on and so forth. The story of the game gives you good direction on where to go, and the requests you get every day also give you good direction on what to focus on, so your sandbox experience is gently guided.
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Jan 11, 2024 02:39
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Jack Trades posted:Sandrock solves that problem by adjusting prices after every sale. To be fair, you also really don't need to sell anything in Sandrock. Commissions are plenty of money, and the primary way by which you end up selling materials.
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Feb 12, 2024 18:20
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The most distracting thing about DQB2 is expecting all of the human characters to go super saiyan at the drop of a hat.
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Feb 18, 2024 16:55
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LLSix posted:Roots of Pacha is a fine game, although on the grindier side even for this genre. It is, sadly, not a farming game like SV. Farming is the least efficient way to make money, or pretty much anything else, that I found in Roots of Pacha. Despite the game telling you that your job in the tribe is to farm, all other activities make more money for the same time investment, frequently several times as much as what you'd make doing farming. As long as you're willing to completely ignore the story about you being a farmer and spend most of your time playing the fishing minigame, it's probably okay. Eh, farming is fine for making money. It definitely starts off not making much, and you do have to process the outputs to make them worth more, but that's kind of the point. The crops level up as you grow them, which then makes you better returns over time. And once you unlock the ability to automatically water the crops, maintaining a large farm is very straightforward.
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Mar 16, 2024 16:20
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Ichabod Sexbeast posted:Picked up Portia a week ago in a steam sale, and it's already eating my life. Just coming up to the end of year 1, and am considering restarting to better ratfuck that prick Higgins out of every city commission, instead of just most of them. (Actually, does Higgins have a love interest? Gonna seduce them) One thing to be careful of - once you play Sandrock, it's really, really, really difficult to go back to playing Portia. The quality of life improvements alone are immense, and the characters are leaps and bounds better. Also as nobody has mentioned it on this page yet, Rune Factory 4 is quite fun if you're looking for a good farming/dungeon diving gameplay loop. It definitely has a bigger emphasis on the dungeon side of things than most similar games, but the combat is quite good and varied with magic attacks, a variety of weapons, and weapon arts (which you can use with any weapon, which does lead to some amusing animations). The caveat is that it leans very heavily into anime tropes.
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Apr 8, 2024 18:01
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socialsecurity posted:Sandrock is definitely way better but its not too fundamentally different if you didn't like the basic flow of Portia Sandrock won't fix that for you. I heartily disagree here, because the NPCs are just that much better. Portia's NPCs just lack something. Sandrock's NPCs make the world feel more lived in, and the characters are fun and quirky in their own ways. There's little things like weekly concerts, storytelling, folks walking through town to look at stores, folks out scavenging for resources, or checking on the local flora, etc. And the gameplay loop is much more convenient, since all chests share inventory, and you can craft from chests directly. Combat is still a bit anemic, but guns are fun and the flow is miles better than it was in Portia.
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Apr 9, 2024 01:55
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Snooze Cruise posted:if you are making a video game with romance options and there isn't a woman like catori among them then what is the point... Seriously. There need to be more marriage candidates who are adults that have children and are single for various reasons. It's a breath of fresh air that Catori was included.
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Apr 10, 2024 14:59
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Gaius Marius posted:Sos and RF can often feel aimless if you aren't good at setting your own goals and are familiar with its systems. RF gives you really nice concrete goals to shoot for every time you talk to the mailbox/request board/hat rack/whatever. "Harvest X of Y type of seed" or "Harvest a level 2 crop" etc.
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Apr 16, 2024 13:58
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Snooze Cruise posted:Yeah like as much as I like RF4 like, those characters, while I would say don't feel flat or lifeless, are ultimately just cartoons. Sandrock also has the characters do more stuff together and interact in a more "human" way. Your fellow builder runs around collecting stuff, the tree patrol go out to check on the trees and the water sources, the peacekeepers ride around town and the surrounding wilderness, families visit each other, there are concerts, speeches, donation drives, storytelling events, the church, and so many other little things that just happen around town to make it feel lived in. Contrast that to games like Stardew Valley and you see how little the cast actually does around town. RF4 suffers from it a bit as well, but it helps a lot that the town is small, so characters do hang out together a lot, and they shout hello as you walk by. You see people doing things like fishing or eating, and families trade off shifts at their stores so that their counterparts can go out around town.
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Apr 22, 2024 18:43
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socialsecurity posted:Yeah them giving you two other farms to manage was a huge loving miss, I mean they give you ways of growing the other crops at your main farm but its was a bad idea. I think it would have been fine, except that all 3 towns are completely separate and siloed from one another. There's even separate currencies for each area, forcing you to start from square one in each zone. It reeks of early access development where each stage was added to give veteran players some more to do in their saves that had already done everything. Fast travel between the farms is also nontrivial, as is any degree of automation. That all being said, it does do some cool stuff. The game is very sandboxy, and the three areas do give you a lot of content. Food items give permanent buffs based on how many you have eaten, so you are encouraged to grow different crops, make new dishes, and chow down for more stats. That's your progression that carries over from zone to zone - you become much stronger over time. The magic is mildly interesting, and there's some hilarious stuff you can do with the bubble spell that catches fish. Overall though, I'd give it a solid 7/10. It's not a bad game, but I'd rather just play Rune Factory 4, as that series has much better dungeons, much better mechanics, and more interesting characters (even 5 blows Sun Haven out of the water). Or My Time at Sandrock, which is less farming focused, but is a hell of a lot of fun and has great NPCs.
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Apr 30, 2024 13:36
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LLSix posted:I kind of want that now. Bait for trapping. What started out as snares for rabbits has evolved into late night organic farmer's markets designed to lure in hipsters from out of town for the most dangerous (and delicious!) game.
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Apr 30, 2024 19:39
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LLSix posted:If you are looking for an adventure, Harvestella or either of the Rune Factory games are good picks. Worth noting - Harvestella is a JRPG with farming mechanics attached to it more than a farming game in its own right. RF also leans heavier on combat, but is far more farming focused. Both are a lot of fun and a great blend of farming + RPG mechanics. RF4 is the best in the series mechanically by a large shot, but 5 is serviceable. 5 does add some neat mechanics, but the change to 3d has some issues, there are performance problems on the switch, and the combat feels a bit clunkier in the way the character model attacks and dashes (there are more full stops in the animations and less animation canceling than in 4).
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May 1, 2024 13:34
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