• Male, female, or non-binary
• One of the 8 bodies in the screenshot above
• Masculine or feminine voice

Falconier111 fucked around with this message at 23:43 on Jul 28, 2023

We start off strong with a wistful theme featuring pianos, violins, harps, and a quiet bass backing. I know not everyone can will listen to the music while reading this LP and I don’t think skipping the music will ruin the experience or anything, but I strongly recommend you at least listen to the first minute of this track to get an idea of the sort of thing you’re always hearing in the background.



Character creation is simple and entirely cosmetic; no character classes or anything here. Still, I really do appreciate the flexibility the game takes towards how you design your character, even if most of its options are explicitly masculine and feminine (you just choose which ones you want to apply).



I’ll be going with a completely default character for this first update since I’m writing it before the initial vote closes; expect the force of democracy to kick in once we hit update 2. We’ll be keeping the default name, though.

I remember… A diamond.



We start off in this quiet village with a brief, unobtrusive tutorial on movement. We also learn something that’s… Well, I know this is petty, but it makes me froth at the mouth. I’m using an Xbox controller on the PC version, and for some godforsaken reason they mapped the confirm button to B and the cancel button to A. You know, the opposite of like 80% of games that make sense? You can change which controller buttons do what in the key input screen, except for those two. You actually have to leave the game, find the Xbox controller settings specifically for Harvestella in Steam, and change the button mapping there to get things to work right, and by the time I figured that out I’d already built up enough muscle memory to make the switch pointless. Why? Why would you do that?

Whatever, I need to move past this.



Anyway, we don’t have far to go before we find our new friend again.

I think you can do it... I think you can be the one to save her…



Most dialogues give us a chance to pick between a few options every once in a while, enough that for a silent protagonist Ein actually comes across as rather chatty. The vast majority of dialogue choices at most change the next couple lines, though, so don’t get too excited about player choice. We’ll run into a few very important exceptions eventually, but that’s a long, long way away.

We get a moment to walk around, but we can’t exactly go anywhere interesting.



Whenever the game wants to seal off part of the game world (usually for boss fights), it throws up a little blue hex barrier like this. We’ll be spending quite a bit of time in this area, but we have plot to attend to for now.

Harvestella’s towns tend to be rich in NPCs with plenty to say. Unfortunately, most of what they say is boring and they take too long to say it; this guy went through four screens just to get his dialogue out and he’s hardly exceptional. Add a text speed that’s just a little bit too slow and no way to skip dialogue and now you understand why I don’t talk to background NPCs in this game if I can avoid it.



Anyway, the clinic really isn’t that far away.

Falconier111 fucked around with this message at 01:19 on Jul 27, 2023

Falconier111 fucked around with this message at 21:44 on Jul 24, 2023

What, did you forget this was a farming sim?





The basic mechanics of farming are relatively straightforward. You need a hoe and a watering can (both of which you get for free) as well as seeds (which you can buy at a store, find in a dungeon, or get from completing the quest). You hit the soil a couple times to prepare for planting, then scatter the seeds by selecting them in your inventory and getting them into the Y slot there.



You then water every unripened crop once a day until it matures. Simple enough.

We’re quickly shuffled off to our next destination, the first dungeon in the game (despite the open sky). In my first playthrough, I actually spent some time wandering around the rest of the currently-accessible game world looking for a weapon before venturing into combat. If I didn’t have a hammer, why would I expect to have a sword?



Turns out one comes pre-installed. Combat is standard light action RPG fare for the most part; you go up against small knots of hostiles and hit them with combos and the occasional special attack until they fall over. These early monsters are absolutely no threat to anybody, so I don’t have to worry about tactics here.



They do, however, drop goodies. Monsters will occasionally drop things like seeds or rare crafting materials, but they usually drop the sort of things you pick up through resource gathering in the area. This berry, for instance, restores a whopping 50 HP in a game where a starting character has 600. It is also far more useful than it appears, but for now we just have to squirrel it away until opportunity strikes.



Speaking of common materials, every dungeon has two kinds of resource deposits: organic deposits that give you things like food and leaves, and mineral deposits like this one which give you mostly crafting materials. You want to hit these deposits as much as possible, especially because interacting with them marks them on your map when they respawn during future visits. Just keep in mind that they, like everything else, costs stamina to harvest.



Of course, no JRPG is complete without inexplicable chests, usually also containing seeds or rare crafting materials. This game never provides you with potions, weapons, or sophisticated equipment directly; instead, you have to use a crafting system which won’t kick in for another couple updates. I know I keep saying “I won’t tell you anything about this mechanic until later”, but Harvestella really does try to keep the flow of new mechanics well-controlled. It can feel restricting, but never overwhelming.



But this first area is only so long. We have a pair of mysterious figures blocking our way.

Falconier111 fucked around with this message at 22:09 on Jul 24, 2023

The game takes a moment to start tutorializing at us again, but I’ll bottom line for you. As you might expect, all your crops have different growing times, but most of them mature in less than a week. Those that take longer than four days or so usually bear multiple harvests or have some special property that makes the wait worth it. Today the carrops (all the crops have stupid names, roll with it) I planted yesterday are ready to pull, and tomorrow I’ll be able to harvest the dress lettuce and stellar wheat as well. For the first couple days on the farm I’ll dump everything in the shipping box just to get a healthy cash flow, but before long I’ll start setting aside large numbers of crops for the cooking mechanics. You always want to set aside some of your produce for cooking, especially crops that only grow in spring given how long it takes for the year to loop back around.



We also get the chance to use a little exploit. During tutorials or while the game’s waiting for you to run to the next cutscene, time doesn’t pass and stamina isn’t spent. Usually the game disables interactions with anything that isn’t whatever it wants you to do (though it does effectively give you infinite sprint for the duration), but it doesn’t always remember and sometimes you can squeeze some free work out. Since we’re going through a farming tutorial right now, I took the opportunity to replant and water everything I could; it doesn’t take that much time or stamina right now, but once you start farming on an industrial scale you can sometimes save several hours and half your stamina bar like this.



We also are formally introduced to that sewing machine in our house. Anything you make that is isn’t food comes from the crafting table: utility items, attack items, farm equipment, even area openers that undo things like that rockslide from last update. You unlock recipes gradually over the course of the game, but for now we can only make return bells (universal escape items) and that hammer Cres mentioned earlier.







We can use the hammer three times on any of the smaller rocks to break them up, but it hoovers up your stamina and we can’t break the big rocks yet. Fortunately, the hammer doesn’t drain stamina until a rock breaks, so you can find out those boulders are invincible by spending half the day hitting them without knocking you on your rear end for the rest of the day. Don’t ask me how I know this.

And that’s basically all we have available to us today. This game starts out VERY slow paced; we collect crap from the rest of the farm, beat up some monsters, clear all the small rocks, and run out of things to do before dinner time.

Falconier111 fucked around with this message at 12:21 on Jul 29, 2023

The game takes the opportunity of this not-actually-very-serious battle to introduce us to the job and skill system. Your character can equip up to three jobs at a time, each of which gives them a different stat spread and attack list when active. As you use a job in combat, you gain job points that unlock panels along that job’s skill tree, activating or enhancing skills (each job has three and one end-of-super attack) or giving you a utility boost like less stamina consumed while sprinting or faster job changes. Fighter here is Ein’s default job, but the rest are connected to party members, letting you echo their combat abilities and locking the top of the skill tree until you get so far into their storylines.





The fighter job is fast and flexible, best suited for quickly killing knots of weaker enemies but useful any time you need to pump out melee damage without getting hit, and its skills (like Blaze here) complement that. They do burn through stamina, but that’s true for every job.

I’m pretty sure the cuts hit in the translation budget. As you can maybe tell from that directly-translated kohai and whatever pun didn’t survive the transition to Stumblebum, Harvestella suffers from too literal translation sometimes, especially with everything outside the main plot – which is unfortunate, because Harvestella is an incredibly wordy game, featuring long, elaborate sidequests with sprawling conversations. Some of those sidequests definitely deserve a look, but the rest of them… Well, they’re about as exciting as that sequence.



After we rescued the kids, the game frees us up for another uneventful day. Well, except for one thing. Sometimes when collecting food items, you get a gold version like this berry. Gold items give a little extra HP if consumed and sell for a little extra, but they’re most valuable in the kitchen. Unfortunately, our kitchen isn’t active yet and cool berries aren’t much use in there anyway, so this one goes straight in the shipping box. But also get a bunch of seeds in the mail from the Mayor, which was nice of him.

Falconier111 fucked around with this message at 15:43 on Jul 31, 2023

Monathin fucked around with this message at 20:03 on Jul 31, 2023