Harvestella

Harvestella is Square Enix’s take on the farming life simulation jrpg genre popularized by the works of Natsume from their Rune Factory and Harvest Moon series. It focuses on the main character who must solve the mystery of quietus and the world around them. Quietus is the season of death that happens once at the end of each respective season. Everything dies when that happens and people stay indoors when that occurs. In contrast to the light hearted and cheery tone of Rune Factory, this game takes tonal inspiration from Nier a lot. 

There are some similarities to Rune Factory, you can craft objects to help you with farming and quests and also you can upgrade your weapons with the material you gather throughout the world. You have a variety of plants to grow and use as food. The game’s combat is average at best, most of the enemies are pretty button mashing damage sponges and are more or less the same. You can have party members help you out and each party member you recruit gives you a new class to try out in combat. The closer you get to your party members by doing character quests for them, the better your abilities will be in combat. You can take on other side quests to help the people you meet. You can unlock new perks the more enemies you defeat too. You can also unlock fairies that gives you bonuses for farming quests too. 

The graphics and the art were generally fine while the music of the game was generally ok. The characters and story wasn’t anything special. The dialogue was not really that good especially the dialogue choices that play out the same no matter what you go with. The game is fairly long mainly due to unnecessary fillers. 

Fast travel too is kind of cumbersome since its restricted to one area instead of all over the place like any other game would have had. 

Overall, it was a below average game. 

It gets 3 out of 5 stars. 

The problem with this game is that it tries too much to be like Nier and not its own thing and yeah you have to be a huge hardcore square fan to like this