@rolento25: what an incredible display of cowardice. you do care, you just lack the confidence and emotional maturity to admit it. GameFreak made a bad game, and if you weren’t so insecure you would say that now. Be a good little boy and use your big, enormous brain to salvage what little dignity you have left and apologize to me immediately before you get hurt.
@inari: How are the sprinklers any different from hiring the nature sprites? They're both rewards for putting the initial work in to make the game more automated so you have more time to focus on other aspects of the game, like socializing with villagers, foraging, fishing or mining. Harvest Moon has always rewarded the players hard work with automation tools. In fact the sprinklers require a lot more work to unlock than the sprites, especially the purple ones which are late game items, whereas I was able to request the help of the sprites before the first spring ended. It's totally fine that you prefer watering crops yourself, but the inclusion of automation options as a reward acknowledges that players eventually want to focus their time on other parts of the game.
@saturatedbutter: I'm actually not a huge fan of the cooking system. I enjoy discovering new recipes from villagers and the TV, and you can learn some by using recipes you already own, but I think it's pretty disappointing that you're not able to just combine ingredients and experiment without recipes at all. Seems like a missed opportunity. I totally agree about the art style, I found the new look pretty generic. It looks like a bad mobile game.
I'm a lifelong fan of the series, I got this game on launch, and I think a 5 is a totally fair review. Marvelous has done very little to improve the series over the years and while I'm enjoying this game quite a bit, it has a lot of issues that are frustrating and difficult to ignore. I think James is right on the money complaining about the sprites minigames. They're fun the first time, and just the first time, but I was horrified when I realized how many times you need to do them to make meaningful progress. They clearly intended it to be part of your in-game daily routine which is insane, no one in their right mind would want to do this as many times as the game asks of you. The whole mining system was something I was really hoping they would completely rework, and I was incredibly disappointed to see that it remained unchanged. I have a hard time believing any fan of the original FoMT found mining to be one of the enjoyable parts of the game. It's a terrible task that you do out of necessity, not something you look forward to.
On top of that, there's a general lack of quality control and polish on the game that just comes across as either incompetent, lazy or just untested. The horse, for instance, feels too big for the game, and trying to dismount it while in town is a nightmare. You'll either be prevented from dismounting, or you'll dismount in the wrong direction and the horse will be blocking you from where you wanted to go. NPC's can walk through your horse, why can't you? Animals will often stack on top of each other forcing you to wait for them to randomly walk outside of each other so you can interact with them, and it boggles my mind that they aren't programmed to avoid clipping into each other but nearly every day I walk into the barn and many of them are all standing inside one another.
As an audio engineer myself, I found the sound to be particularly irksome and I don't know if other people will notice it as much, but the mixing and general sound design comes across as incredibly amateur. Certain sounds will blare in volume over the rest of the mix and the music really doesn't sound any better than midi tracks imported into a DAW using stock instruments. For a console/PC release remake of a GBA game, I would have loved to hear some real recorded instruments. One of the winter pinao themes stood out to me as being exceptional, though. Audio aside, there are other issues with slowdown in certain areas/seasons I've noticed, as well as some glaring inconsistencies graphically, whether it be flickering textures or art assets that are so low resolution that they look completely out of place, and this is only magnified when you place the Switch into docked mode on your TV (the carpet in the shop is a great example of this: yuck!).
Even with all of these complaints, I'm still very addicted to this game, but I honestly see no reason to choose this when there are so many series out there today that emulate this formula far better. If you don't have the same sensation of nostalgia for the series that I do, I think you're better off playing Stardew Valley, My Time at Portia, Graveyard Keeper, RuneFactory 4, or maybe some of the more recent entries in the Story of Seasons series. I've heard Doraemon Story of Seasons is quite good too, but I haven't played that one!
@Ph00p: lol they're completely different games with different mechanics, goals, rewards, and gameplay loops. In Animal Crossing you're playing in real world time, you have all the time in the world to meander around your island catching fish and doing trivial tasks. In this game you're on a very tight schedule and you need to use your time wisely, and fishing just isn't rewarding and it requires an obscene amount of in-game hours to progress. I've put hundreds of hours into AC and already over 20 hours into SoS:FoMT and I don't think there's anything with what the reviewer said. I've been a Harvest Moon fan my entire life but I think Stardew Valley solved a lot of issues the Harvest Moon/SoS series has been plagued with for years, yet they do very little to actually innovate or listen to community feedback. I'm really enjoying this remake but there's no denying it has a lot of issues.
This game is so easy, I breezed through it pretty quickly and I had a lot of fun along the way, there were some moments that felt relatively challenging but nothing that got frustrating or felt unfair. There's also little to no consequence for dying, so if you do it's not really a big deal. No idea what this guy is talking about. Even if you thought some of the combat felt frustrating or unfair, that sounds like more a 5 out of 10. A two out of 10 is insane, sounds like Funké was just having a bad day. The game isn't broken or unplayable by any means. Seeing only the extreme sides of a spectrum and ignoring any middle-ground is generally indicative of a personality disorder.
@darkangel1276: how was I triggered lol. i wasn't even upset, i was just saying it was a logical business decision, pewdiepie doesn't offend me personally. i also never said he used millions on the video, i said disney was paying him millions in ad revenue, which is true. whether or not he donates to charity is completely irrelevant. upgrade your reading comprehension and stay triggered, snowflake.
@vicsrealms: it's not really "outrage culture" it's just bad business to continue paying someone millions of dollars who uses that money to pay people to hold up signs that say "death to the jews" - joke or not, disney would look a lot sillier to keep him under their payroll. grow up.
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