Harvestella: An ordinary JRPG with a not-very-robust farming minigame tacked on

Cryptic BS go!

Yo! I’m back to report on my progress with Harvestella. One of the reasons why I write several posts on a single game instead of waiting to finish it first is that my opinions and attitudes towards a game can changed drastically as I keep playing, and I want this blog to reflect that. The amount of games trying to skate by with a strong beginning that fizzles out to nothing is too damned high!

I’m still playing Harvestella and getting along fabulously. Level 54, Autumn 30, mucking about in the Orbital Cradle maintenance block. It’s a fine game that hasn’t changed much since I started, but I can’t help feeling deceived by the whole farming thing. It plays a much, much smaller role in the game than I had expected when I bought it. Is it a decent RPG? Yes. But decent RPGs are a dime a dozen, and Harvestella doesn’t do much to stand out. Honestly, I wouldn’t have bought it if not for the farming gimmick, so yeah, I do feel a bit weird about the whole thing.

I’m not the kind of gamer to do challenge runs, but as far as I can tell, you could do a no farming run very easily in this game without feeling much friction. Make juice with wild berries, make Mountain Stir Fry stamina food with mushrooms and wild leafs and you’re good to go. Sidequests give enough money for upgrading your weapons, and you don’t need to worry about other equipment. In fact, the farming could be taken out entirely and the game wouldn’t change.

More cryptic nonsense. Why should they explain themselves to you?

Well, complaining is easy enough, but how would I want Square-Enix to fix this? TBH I think it’s okay to have farming on the side, as “that thing you do when you don’t feel like adventuring that day.” If they want to make a story-heavy JRPG with a farming minigame, there’s nothing wrong with that. But once you name it “Harvestella” and base your marketing on the farming aspect, then the farming must be meaningful, robust and fun to play. Purely for example:

  • It could unlock skills and items or grant stats that make battling and exploration easier.
  • Or you could use the crops in optional weapon and armor recipes.
  • I lowkey dislike Harvest Moon-style relationship building, but you could also use dishes to get closer to major NPCs and get good loot that way.
  • Processing machines should be streamlined and allowed to take items straight from the Storage Box, because they are as annoying as heck.
  • I want a seed maker/more random seed drops so I don’t have to keep running to the grocery store for more seeds.
  • And my farm should be easier to rearrange and decorate, because it is currently ugly as heck. At the very least I should be able to move the trees around.

Those are random suggestions off the top of my head that would keep farming optional, but make it more appealing and rewarding. As it is, I’m starting to feel like I’m wasting time on crops in the morning, and I’ve been growing fewer and fewer crops since Summer.

A character who actually has a nose!!!

The rest of the game… it’s a JRPG all right. Lots of people standing around talking about stuff but never quite explaining themselves. “Could it be… but no, that would be…” OUT WITH IT ALREADY! I estimate I’m about 75% done with Harvestella simply because a character actually explained something to my party instead of telling us we’d find out later. When is later? Why can’t later be now?!

Of course they didn’t tell us everything, that would make too much sense. Instead I’m supposed to head to the Orbital Cradle for more info, but of course for the sake of very obvious padding, we’ve had a breakdown and have to make a long detour through some very boring stages. I believe I said the dungeons in Harvestella weren’t long last time. More fool me, this is getting ridiculous.

Combat is still fine, BTW. I’m still rocking my Mage class and still using Heine and Emo as party members because I can’t be bothered to switch them. I like games where you can grind levels to make up for your laziness and/or lack of skill.

I should be done by the weekend if I keep going at this rate, then I’ll return to spoil the story and give my final thoughts.

Harvestella is a fantastic game except for the combat

You ever start a game and realize almost immediately what you’ll eventually quit over? It doesn’t happen often, but sometimes I can tell right away what is going to be a pain point down the road, whether it’s a character, a plot point, or in Harvestella‘s case, a game mechanic. To put it plainly, the combat sucks!

I’m getting that out of the way early because I really like Harvestella. I think it’s a very well-designed game, great soundtrack, nice variety of crops, tasty-looking recipes, moderately-paced day and night cycle, the whole shebang. And I’m going to say as much later below. But there’s a real possibility that I’ll make a future post saying “Harvestella dropped!” and it will be like “what is wrong with this old lady?” so I’m just putting that out there: great game, sucky combat system.

Yes, yes, I shouldn’t expect too much from a farming ARPG… except the Rune Factory series exists and it’s been way more fun to play right from the first clunky game on the DS. The problem with Harvestella‘s fighting is that it’s an ARPG, but you can’t roll or dodge properly to escape enemy attacks. Google is telling me that I’ll eventually unlock some kind of dash dodge… except I’ve already unlocked it and it’s hard and frustrating to use. You can see the boss’s attack aiming for you and your character just. won’t. move. COME ON!

It seems you’re just supposed to stand there and trade hits with the enemy until someone dies. If that’s the case, then why not make it a turn-based game? Square Enix is good at turn based games, and I don’t have a problem with them either. An ARPG with poor mobility and positioning is super frustrating.

Also there are super powered enemies dotting the maps, called FEAR. Think of FOES in the Etrian Odyssey games. I really, really, really hate that kind of thing in video games. Especially in open world or semi-open world games. If you don’t want me to explore an area too soon, block it off. Otherwise just leave me alone, sheesh. So far the FEAR haven’t been too hard to avoid, but if they get too annoying, I will delete Harvestella without a backward glance. It’s the only way these companies will learn.

Love the quest markers, they make life so easy.

“But other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?” The rest of Harvestella is fantastic, actually. Okay the story is a bit bland because it’s about Ein, the usual farming story amnesiac. And since it’s a Square Enix game, there are these giant crystals all over the place which are acting up so we have to figure out what’s wrong with them. And there are bad guys who are going to turn out to be not so bad in the end because that’s just how JRPGs roll. I really like that while Harvestella strongly hinted at the direction it wants me to go, they left it up to me to decide which crystal secretly evil abomination seaslight to travel to.

I’ve done all of them now, unlocked the Waterside and Cave biomes, almost at the end of Summer in the first year. Although days pass, there are no hard deadlines like in the Persona or Atelier games so it’s very chill. Since I’ve finished all the available dungeons, I’m right on the cusp of unlocking the next stage of the story (I just need to sleep and wake up), hoping they don’t mess things up too much. Did you know that farming games don’t need stories? But if Harvestella insists on having one, I hope it’s a good one.

Other random notes on why I’m liking the game so much

1. The maps are very easy to navigate. I haven’t gotten lost once, the game clearly marks quests and collectibles on the map, and it has by far the least irritating ice dungeon I have encountered in all my years of gaming. I’m also a big fan of all the bridges, ladders and other shortcuts that cut travel time and reduce frustration by a lot. Square-Enix clearly put a lot of thought into not making the dungeons annoying (based on their decades of experience in making annoying dungeons), and I appreciate that the results respect my limited time and energy.

2. The sidequests are a bit, no, very wordy, but they’re chained and develop as the game progresses so they’re interesting to follow. And they’re very rewarding for a perpetually-broke player like me.

Why is everyone dragging me into their romantic drama tho

3. Speaking of which, I like being broke. Too many farming games make you rich too quickly and then there’s nothing to save up for or prioritize. I’m enjoying not being an instant billionaire (mining in OG Rune Factory, those were the days) so that every improvement feels hard-earned and rewarding.

4. For all my complaints about the combat system, I’ve made it this far without too many wipe-outs. Lorelei was a beotch though. I’ve accomplished this by playing exclusively as a Mage so I can hang back while my party members tank hits for me. There’s a non-zero chance that this will come back to bite me in the tushie before the end of the game, but well, if I end up dropping the game, so be it. It is enough to play a whole lot of Harvestella.

5. I like the faerie achievement system. I like achievements in general. I really like being rewarded for stuff I would do anyway. Nothing beats Rune Factory giving experience for walking and sleeping, but as long as I get something just for playing, I’m happy.

6. I already mentioned the great-looking recipes, but I’ll add that I love them including meat dishes. I didn’t have a problem with Harvest Moon‘s pescatarian lifestyle, and Animal Crossing‘s English localization scrubbing all mentions of eating fish or using animal products was a certainly a choice, but… just feast your eyes on this beauty.

Harvestella BBQ Churrasco

Mmm, looks so yummy. Here’s another one:

Ah, so rich and juicy. Nothing against meat-free games, but when I imagine my ideal farm lifestyle, it definitely includes thick cuts of meat and hearty stews. GIVE ME MEAT! Also cozy winter nights spent knitting in front of the fireplace with a bowl of soup. Let’s see if Harvestella can keep my dream alive.

7. Fast pace. No scene, plot arc or dungeon lasts long enough to become annoying, everything moves along snappily. Even the flavor text is short. Love it. One of the things I dread most when starting a new RPG is the endless reams of text, tons of forgettable lore and backstories, and the never-ending cutscenes that developers seem to think is mandatory these days. For once Square-Enix has understood the assignment: if you make a farming game, let the players farm! Keep the convoluted stories for Final Fantasy and let me farm!

8. Simple controls. I’ve played games where swapping tools or equipment is an ordeal, and it wears you down slowly but surely. Here it’s pretty easy to map an item to a button and use it right away. It took me all of 10 minutes to master the system, which is more than long enough.

These flowers and this whole stage remind me of 7th Dragon 2020

9. And on the theme of simplicity, I also like the simplicity of weapons, accessories, etc. in Harvestella. There’s no armor, leveling your weapon just means paying for upgrades, and your party members are super independent so you don’t need to worry about their equipment or skills or attacks, or anything. Like I said, let me farm!

And so on, and so forth. There are other things I want to talk about, but my throat is all scratchy (am I getting a cold?!) so I need gaming therapy right now. 2026 is my year of slow gaming and taking my time with every game so I’ll be focusing on Harvestella even more going forward. See you next time!

Happy New Year 2026!


Happy new year, everyone! If I’m not much mistaken, this humble little blog will be 17 years old in May 2026, and this is also the 14th edition of my New Year’s greeting (the first was a whole lifetime ago in 2012). No idea how much longer I’ll be doing this, but then again I never set out to blog with any specific timeline or goal in mind, so I’ll just keep taking it one day at a time. Hope you all had a nice restful Christmas break and didn’t pig out disgracefully like I always do, haha haha… ha… (my head still hurts)

Here’s the full list of all the past “Happy New Year” posts btw, if anyone’s really bored.

2012
2013
2014
2015
2016
2017
2018
2019
2020
2021
2022
2023
2024
2025

This year I’m not gonna sully your eyes by making New Year’s gaming resolutions I won’t keep… even though I did attempt some of the games on last year’s list. I played almost all of Xenoblade Chronicles X, I’m still playing Triangle Strategy very very slowly, I started Monster Hunter Rise, created a character and then dropped it immediately, and the only reason I didn’t play Atelier Ryza 2 is because I hear Nintendo is coming out (has come out???) with DX versions of the Ryza series and so I have to wait another year or two for those to go on sale. Yes, I’m cheap, how did you know?

But I’m thinking that setting goals for the year may have contributed, at least subconsciously, to the pressure I felt to finish Xenoblade X last year, with less than optimal results, so 2026 is going to be the year of just playing whatever, whenever, no matter how long it takes me to finish it. Actually I bought a whole bunch of games on sale over the holidays, but I won’t say what they are in case that jinxes it. Okay, I’ll mention just one: Harvestella. Been wanting to play that for a while, even though I don’t know if I still like farm sims or not. Barring any grand cataclysm, I’ll be playing that sooner rather than later.

On the gacha game front, nothing has really stuck with me except Epic Seven and Love Nikki, and again that’s okay. I won’t force myself to drop them if I’m having fun, and I won’t force myself to continue the minute they become a chore. I dropped Chaos Zero Nightmare because it was super tedious and repetitive, but thanks to that I’m interested in card games like Slay the Spire, Chrono Ark, and Darkest Dungeon. Might try some of those this year but zero promises. Negative, even. I may have doomed them to eternal non-playability just by mentioning them.

Enough with the rambling, I guess? I don’t have to work until the 12th, but I’m filling the time with food, manga, food, food, sleep, sleep, and just a little bit of videogames. IRL my only goal is to read a few more books and practice a little more on the piano and I am doing exactly zero of that right now. Down with resolutions! Up with going with the flow! And that’s my mood going into the rest of the year. See you guys around!

My Xenoblade Chronicles X! I’ve failed you! (spoilers)

So… I dropped Xenoblade Chronicles X. It’s been three days and I’m still feeling absolutely rotten about it. That almost never happens to me because despite popular rumor, I don’t drop games that easily. When I let something go, it’s because I’m sick and tired of it and don’t see myself going on any further.

In the case of XCX, however, I was still having fun. Not with the story, which was surprisingly not completely crappy and not completely nonsensical for a Xenoblade story, but with the gameplay. Although I said I was getting tired of the game in my last post, once I got past that fake final dungeon, I got back into the game again in a major way. There were still tons of quests I hadn’t finished when I dropped the game, especially the affinity quests, and while I wasn’t planning on taking down superbosses like Territorial Rotbart, I was definitely aiming to beat some of the bigger ones like that big Xe-Dom in Sylvalum that kept attacking my Skells. And I still had one party member to unlock and test. And I hadn’t yet found the best combination of weapons and skills to make me truly overpowered.

Come on, they’re not THAT much bigger.

Why did I drop the game, then? Short story: pure stupidity. Longer explanation: there were two reasons. First, as I mentioned in the last post, I set myself a deadline of finishing the game before the end of November (and later before the end of the year) so I could play Persona 5 Strikers (which I don’t even want to play now because I’m still upset). I felt I had been playing just one proper (offline) RPG all year long so I should try something else. Thus even though I wasn’t actually ready to move on, I forced myself to continue the story.

Secondly, despite loving the heck out of the sidequests and exploration, I definitely spent too much time on them at the expense of progressing the story so I admit I was a tiiiny bit sick of the game and okay with it ending at that point. I should have paced myself better on that front. That said, I definitely wasn’t sick enough to drop it like I did.

Stop raising those flags!!

Combining the two reasons meant I started forcing myself to rush through the game, only to find that there was a lot more story and game left than I had bargained for. You know when I said last time that I probably had a few dungeons left to go before the game ended? Yeah no, I was waaaay off. Finding the Lifehold is only like 60% of the way through the game. In fact, it’s when the game’s story really begins. That’s when they introduce the real bad guy(s) of the game (we all knew it couldn’t be the Ganglion), explain stuff like why Earth was attacked, how they got such fantastic technology like space travel in such a short time, what and where Mira is, etc. They also introduced new characters including some great hero with his awesome Skell that everyone’s fawning over when I’m just rolling my eyes like “Whatever, just let me finish the game already!”

Excuuuse me for not bowing at thy feet in worship, o great hero

I’ve rarely, if ever, been this sorry about dropping a game as I am about Xenoblade Chronicles X. In retrospect, why was I forcing myself to finish a game just because I felt I “should” move on? I’m not sharing the Switch with anyone, so this was 100% self-imposed pressure. What’s more, I bought XCX full price on day one, so why didn’t I just slow down and get my money’s worth? I can’t even rant about the story now because I skipped huge chunks of it thinking I was practically done.

At this point, readers who haven’t played XCX might ask, “Well, why don’t you just download it again and continue?” Unfortunately, XCX has a pretty final point of no return where everything on Mira and New LA is destroyed (zomg spoilers), meaning that all the quests are gone as well. The superbosses, the continents, the secret areas, all gone. The game does warn you about this, but I blithely clicked on and saved to boot because I thought for sure I was just going to fight the final boss and finish the game at that point. Nooooope.

Annoying thing about the game is they kept asking my opinion like they actually cared.

So I did fight the boss and thought I had won, but then he had a massive temper tantrum and scattered my whole party. I got tossed onto a whole new continent and had to wander around searching for everyone and all our Skells before we could take on the boss again. I was just done at that point. And that’s sad, because if I had taken my time and gotten to the boss organically, I might have been like “Aww noo, I don’t wanna finish XCX, I wanna explore more!” And then I might have been absolutely thrilled for one last chance to run around before finally finishing the game. I really should have keep a much earlier save, but hindsight is 20/20 and all that.

Well, at least I learned a powerful lesson from this, which is not to pressure or force myself game-wise in 2026. Some years ago, I set a motto of “It is enough to play just a little bit of a game,” and that made it easier for me to drop games that weren’t fun, whether I had given them enough of a chance or not. It’s time to set a caveat motto: “It is okay to keep playing a game you’re enjoying.” Even if I only play one game in a year, or two years, or heck a whole decade, it’s okay as long as I have fun with it.

I’m sorry about Xenoblade Chronicles X, I really am. It deserved better. I deserved better. 2026 isn’t here yet, and I can’t say for sure what, if anything I’ll be playing then, but I won’t force myself to play if it sucks, and I won’t force myself to stop playing it if I like it. I never want to feel this way after dropping a game again.

115 hours into Xenoblade Chronicles X – Almost done!

There comes a time in every gamer’s life when you can feel yourself about to drop a game. You start skipping text where you used to read everything. Little things start to piss you off. You’re tired of hearing the same songs and sound effects. You still play, but not as excitedly as before. That’s your cue, my cue, to start wrapping things up in Xenoblade Chronicles X before I end up dropping it. Plus I had fun playing Persona 5 Royal at the end of last year, so it would be fun to close out 2025 playing Persona 5 Strikers, which I hear is extremely robust for a spin-off game.

And yet… I can’t bring myself to finish it. I’m suffering from a terrible, terrible case of Last Dungeon Fatigue and I don’t know how to get over it. The stage is literally right in front of me and I just don’t want to go in.

It’s right down the street, just behind the McDonalds.

Wait… I’m getting a signal from my dungeon-dar… Let’s see what the readout says. “Since… the characters swear that this must be… the final dungeon… there must be two or three more stages after this.” Good golly gosh, it’s right! So I’m NOT en route to the final dungeon; this is just another area to explore!

Phew. Oddly enough that makes me feel better about things. The more I play JRPGs, the more I hate final dungeons for being so long and plodding and tedious (they’re all like that. All of them). But if it’s business as usual in Xenoblade Chronicles X, then I’m all for it. After all, despite some early annoyances and some ongoing annoyances, I’ve had a fantastic time with this game. Definitely worth the day-one purchase and worthy of being the only “regular” game i.e. offline game I’ve played this year. I’ve got a busy weekend ahead of me, but I’ll try to finish it before the end of November, God willing.

In other gaming news, Epic Seven has gotten super boring, so I’m planning to pull Swift Flagbearer Sigret, try (and probably fail) to get School Nurse Yulha and then take a log-in only break for a while. At least until headhunt is announced, as well as whatever Smilegate is cooking for us for Christmas. I recently started their new game Chaos Zero Nightmare. I had some thoughts about that and I was going to write a post, but then they released their first update and gave me even more food for thought, so I’ll need to re-think and re-evaluate things. More on either CZN or XCX next time, depending on which one appeals to me more and actually gets played.