Nintendo Switch Review code provided by Square Enix.
Harvestella marks Square Enix’s foray into the farming sim/RPG genre, a relatively nascent category that has seen some impressive entries in recent years. Square Enix is renowned for its devotion to role-playing video games, having pioneered some of the most memorable in history. With this in mind, you might expect Harvestella to distill the best qualities of both genres into a polished, final product.
Unfortunately, you’d be pretty far off with that estimate. Harvestella is a complete game by most standards, but the vision just isn’t here for a memorable gaming experience. It has farming, RPG systems, combat, and even an outlandish story that takes place across a visually distinct continent, but each of these elements feels like a pale attempt at something more interesting.
Story
Harvestella follows the adventures of an amnesiac hero who wakes up in a world filled with magic, monsters, and a dangerous season known as Quietus. This strange season doesn’t seem to affect the main character the same way it does everything else, furthering the mysterious nature of our protagonist.
There’s also a feisty leading lady named Aria who claims to be from the future, though she has no idea how she got here either. The game spends its opening hours building the stakes between each of these characters along with the introduction of powerful, armor-clad beings known as Omens. After that, though, the plot takes a sharp left turn into some truly tedious territory.
Four crystals, one for each season, have exhibited strange behavior lately, and it’s up to you to investigate what’s going on. This is loosely linked to your own fate and the origins of Quietus, but it will take you hours upon hours of tedious combat and voiceless dialogue to uncover any of that. Balance that with both the ridiculous time and stamina systems and you’ll need days of in-game time just to see one pivotal story beat.
All of this effort might be worth it if the story were compelling, but it loses steam pretty quickly. It hews pretty closely to your standard JRPG tropes, replete with a silent protagonist, a womanizing pretty boy, and an over-eager sidekick. There are glimmers of inspiration here and there, but they never really come together in a way that made me want to keep going.
The one upside to this though, is how interesting the side quests are. Each side quest gives you the chance to spend more time with the often overlooked side characters, and many of them kick off quest chains that deliver a surprising amount of payoff by the end. One in particular tasks you with helping a trio of kids in your village repair their friendship as they prepare for a relatively traumatic event in their young lives. I genuinely cared about these kids by the end of the final quest in a way I never did for any of my party members.
Gameplay
Technically speaking there’s nothing wrong with Harvestella’s gameplay. It meets all the necessary qualifications to be considered a video game. That said, it always felt more like an obstacle than something I enjoyed doing.
Farming is a literal chore that requires you to regularly tend to your crops with a system that somehow requires multiple button presses just to get to a watering can. You’ll also have to navigate your way around large boulders on your farm until you reach a certain upgrade, but that information isn’t provided in advance.
It doesn’t help that the in-game economy feels entirely out of balance. Selling crops nets you a decent amount of money, but you also need these same crops to produce powerful healing items to explore dungeons. You might also expect to receive a better price for these produced items, but that’s just not the case. I struggled financially for much of my playthrough, even after unlocking the majority of features on my farm.
Once you’ve finished cultivating your crops, it’s time to head out to one of the game’s many dungeons to fight some monsters. Combat is definitely more fun than farming, but it’s still a far cry from what I would expect from a Square Enix RPG.
There are multiple classes, each with its own standard attack, elemental affinities, and special techniques. At the end of the day, however, you’re mostly going to be hitting that Y button as fast as you can in the hopes of killing your enemy before they can hurt you too much. Avoiding enemy attacks is a slog, so you’ll need plenty of healing items whenever you venture beyond your farm.
The class system seemed interesting at first, but it’s about as bare bones as they get. Each class earns points when used, and they each have an extremely simple skill tree that unlocks new attacks and passive buffs. The worst offense is the lack of meaningful customization between classes. The best they could do was give you three class slots to hot-swap between during battles.
Keeping with this odd, watered-down motif, Harvestella strips gear customization down to two accessory slots for the main character. Weapon upgrades can be bought at a local merchant, which simply boosts the stats on each character’s weapon for a fee. Party members don’t have any gear to speak of outside of their weapons, and their functionality in combat leaves much to be desired.
Audio and Visual
Harvestella sports a shockingly cohesive artistic design, both in terms of its sound and visuals. The music spans a wide range of emotional effects from harrowing danger to idyllic tropical scenes. I was never bored with the music, and it effectively conveyed the tone of whatever region or plot point it backed. I do wish this game had voice-acting though, as it might have helped the lackluster main cast pop a bit more.
Harvestella is a surprisingly beautiful game filled with breathtaking vistas and colorful landscapes. Each biome feels distinct, offering a visually compelling area to explore. Even the urban locations were impressive, evoking some of the stronger designs from Square’s past like Kingdom Hearts and Final Fantasy. The one area the visuals suffer is in the character models, as they all look like knit dolls come to life. The up-close character art is striking, but the 3D models just don’t match up to their surroundings.
What Could Be Better
The first thing Harvestella could have done better is build a more robust farming system. It feels like an afterthought at worst and a chore at best, as you do need to engage with it somewhat in order to get to the rest of the game. But the same could be said for the combat, so I suppose adding more depth to all of the game’s mechanics is necessary. Harvestella never commits entirely to one side of its genre or the other, nor does it balance the two well, so it just feels like a game without a soul. It also needed full voice acting to help its underbaked story feel a little more lively.
Verdict
Harvestella is not the grandiose entry into the farming RPG genre I would have liked to see Square Enix make, despite some solid artistic choices. It feels like a game made by a committee; a soulless, corporate attempt to cash in on the success of games like Stardew Valley and Rune Factory. In the end, Harvestella doesn’t commit to either of its central mechanics enough to really be considered fun.
Harvestella is available now for the Nintendo Switch and PC.
