Been playing this the past few days. I have 15 hours in it right now, and I'm halfway through Summer. And I wanna talk about it! Spoilers, obviously, for this new game, if that's a thing you care about.
I'm real into farming sims. I don't talk about em all that much, but I played a bunch of Harvest Moon as a kid, and more recently, a shit ton of Stardew Valley. And I often get That Itch to play more. I have a fair amount of choices to choose from, but most of the time, I just wanna play Stardew Valley again. But also I've been stopping myself from doing that, because well, I've done like five god damn playthroughs of Stardew Valley. I don't need anymore. So lately I've been really craving a farming sim.
Thankfully, Mistria dropped this month. It has been worked on for a bit, but I hadn't actually heard of it. Someone was like "Hey Liz have you heard of this", I took a minute to look at it, then bought it lol. My immediate reaction, prolly 10-15 days in, was that this game is EXTREMELY derivative of Stardew. Which, like I said, is kinda what I was looking for. And it's not like Stardew isn't derivative of Harvest Moon's earlier work. Every big launch moved the window a bit, building on the last, and adding something new. But as I've been playing it, I've realized that there's a lot more here than I was initially giving it credit for.
Not gonna beat around the bush, the #1 best thing about this game is its writing. And its not that it's extremely high quality writing that makes me go "holy shit" every five minutes. It's not Undertale, and its not Disco Elysium. No, the thing about this games writing is there's a fuck ton of it. See, when Stardew came out, the amount of writing that game had was actually pretty above average, but these days, it feels pretty empty in some ways. Characters have like, 3 things they'll say to you, cycling between seasons. They'll have one thing to say to you if you give them an item, which leads to funny shit like your wife saying that the hunk of crystal you gave her looks delicious. They maybe talk about each other, but outside of cutscenes, they don't really interact with each other. And they have the same schedules, basically. You can know when and where they're gonna be pretty easily, just memorizing their daily routines.
Fields of Mistria is not like that in the most ridiculous way.
Characters have SO much fucking dialogue. Their dialogue changes depending on the time of day. The season. The DAY OF THE WEEK. WHERE THEY ARE at that moment in time. They walk around going about their day, and often stop to talk to each other, and you can join in and listen to these conversations. If you gift someone something, they will often comment on that specific item. There's also weekly events that they do, which I LOVE.
So on Fridays, the entire town gets together to chill at the inn. A good ol' night at the pub. You can go in, and listen in on their conversations. That group of older women are all drinking at the bar, and a dick measuring contest of who's more into wine is getting WAY out of hand. The table over there is a big poker game, and everyone is getting a bit distraught that the himbo keeps winning every week even though he doesn't know how to play the game. And my favorite, the tabletop RPG table, which runs the WHOLE gamut. You've got the min maxer ruleslawyer, the roleplayer, the guy who made a character named "Bad Brad The Big Bard", and DEMANDS you say the entire name each time you refer to him, and Snicklefritz, the ranger, which is a guy who sat down at the table and got roped into the whole thing and finds it kind of stupid, but gets REALLY into it by the end of the month. And the following month, everyone swaps around, doing other things around the room. And Snicklefritz's player is now the GM! It's so cute. And characters can comment on these going ons as they walk around town. It's honestly stunning.
The characters are also all pretty good, I have no qualms. Some of them are a little more flat than others, but they're all enjoyable. I'm having a hard time choosing which person I'd want to marry. I of course like Juniper, the ohoho witch who's a real bitch, and Valen, the pleasant older doctor, who is quite Gender. But I also love how many PoC there are. I love how sweet Celine is. And I really love Adeline, her whole extremely work focused "Gee I sure do love doing taxwork!" dork energy is something I kinda dig. That's not to say the ones I haven't named are bad! They are all charming in their own ways.... for the most part. I know a lot of people are very pro March, in the same way they were pro Shane, and y'all need help. Someone could stab you and you'd go "I can fix him".
Aesthetically it's really nice too, but I really love that 90s anime art style it's obviously riffing on, it is just extremely nostalgic for me.
But how's the gameplay? It follows all the same beats as Stardew, which is why my immediate reactions were "this is Stardew again, but a few things are moved around". Think about a mechanic in Stardew, it's probably in this game, but slightly different. ...But all those slight differences are things that subtly improve the formula. The fishing? Plays more like Animal Crossing. Pretty fast and pleasant, and if you're looking for a specific sized fish, you can just move along. A bit better than Animal Crossing, cause you can't scare them away by accident. The movement? You can jump, including jumping down cliffs and things. You can even jump in rivers and swim! Instead of the town meeting space, which no one ever seemed to use, we have the museum, which works very similarly to something like Animal Crossing. It even has bugs, which also don't get scared which is really nice. AND EVERY SINGLE thing you donate to the fucking museum has someone in town COMMENT ON IT. MORE WRITING. MOOOOORE. There's also a magic mechanic, where every 4 days, you regain a mana orb, which you can use to cast spells, like regain all your stamina, cause rain, grow a 3x3 square of plants instantly.
You've got a bunch of skills, which you can upgrade using skill points you obtain from just doing things. My only issue with this one is Woodworking, which feels extremely strong cause it ALSO connects to how much wood and stone you can harvest, but its really hard to upgrade, exp gains feel so sloooow. I had to waste literally 300 stone making stone paths I just sold to get to level 15, while my blacksmithing skill is already level 30 in the middle of Summer just from playing the game naturally and smithing my own tools.
Animals are here too, and there's a lot of them! They feel like more of a minor thing though? You feed and pet them. And they just drop the item they produce every day. You walk into your barn, pick up the bottle of milk that Bessy oozed out of her udders and meticulously bottled for you, feed her, pet her, and go on your way. They each have a relationship meter tho which is cool. Also you can breed them to make different color morphs. I haven't done that yet, but you can do it!
For a game that is in early access, there's a LOT here already. But I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop. I'm really worried that the game will suddenly run out of content for me. I might be hitting that wall already? Relationships are capped at 4 hearts, and there's no dating or marriage yet, even though we know all the people who ARE dateable. But with steady updates, this really does have the chance to be the best farming sim lol
