Harvestella is Square Enix’s major foray into the farming sim genre. As a simp for Square Enix and farming sims, I am basically designed for this game. And it hits the notes. A plotline arc that starts with helping small town folk with their errands and ends with fighting (or becoming) God? An ensemble harem and reverse-harem cast of anime tropes coming to love you? Farming simplified for people who just want to run around with their swords out? Dungeon crawling simplified for people who want to half-play while an episode of Riverdale is half-watched in the background? All checked.

FARMING FOR DUMMIES (LIKE ME)

I reserve all of my organizational capacity for my day job. I am not organized for fun. When I start any farm sim, I always enter with the best of intentions. This is going to be the time I design a schema for my storage chest collection! This is going to be the time I plan my farm plots so I know what grows where and is harvested when! This is going to be the time I set up a sprinkler system with maximum efficiency!

Reader, this will literally never happen. It’s going to take three in-game days to realize I don’t have a chest for something I picked off the ground, and I don’t have 25 wood to make it now, and I’m going to stick it in one with space and never move it. The first time I receive free seeds, they are being planted anywhere. Sprinklers cost too much iron or have to be replaced (Who has time for that? My small town farm dreams are not to be a one-man sprinkler factory.)

You’ve got a lot to do in a day, so Harvestella manages a lot of the small annoyances with farming for you. You have one storage system that holds everything and auto-sorts. The field doesn’t hold much anyway, and only slowly unlocks. Sprinklers last forever. It was easy to plant anything I received anywhere I wanted and spend only a few in-game hours in the morning farming. There’s plenty of time saved because you never have to refill your watering can or lay down fertilizer (I don’t want to).

Your goat-like animals and chicken-like animals never get sick or get eaten by wolves. Your crops never get eaten by crows or destroyed by weather. Your plot won’t get covered in sticks and stones if you leave it attended for a while. A carrop seed in is a carrop out. 

If you like the verisimilitude of a more technical farming experience, this won’t be for you. But I didn’t miss hiking out to the pond to fill my watering can over and over, because I can’t dig deep enough within myself to build a new pond or sprinklers. After 5:00 PM, it’s all dumdum time for me, and I’m not digging any ponds.

DUNGEON CRAWLING FOR DUMMIES (LIKE ME)

I’m busy. Square Enix is typically incompatible with adult life. Beating one of their games usually requires a lot of intentional grinding. Their difficulty spikes are so extreme and notorious, as a child playing games like Final Fantasy IX, I would grind for hours per day every day to reach level 90 or so before entering the last dungeon, then get too anxious about losing to even enter it (very neurotypical!).

When Harvestella was launched, based on its marketing, I expected a lot more farming and a lot less weapon-wielding. But this is basically an old-school dungeon crawler supported by having a farm dedicated to health-juice-making. I spent way more time fighting monsters and watching cutscenes of my compatriots than I did watering plants.

At first, the dungeon crawling made me a little nervous. Was I going to have to dedicate evenings to grinding it out? Would I give up somewhere along the way and have to watch some YouTube compilation of the ending scenes? If you are lazy in your free time like me, you will be pleased to know the mainline story of this game is very easy to complete, and there is no juicy morsel of lore hiding in a scene that is only available to you if you 100% the game with asinine side tasks. If asinine side tasks are your thing, there are plenty! But you don’t have to. You never really do, but Harvestella doesn’t even really goad you to do it.

I died here and there, but death is forgiving. You don’t lose your stuff, and you don’t lose any progress. You merely have to withstand a brief, unskippable cutscene of the town doctor telling you off.

I never had to consult a guide to set up the ideal party and class configuration to defeat some boss. I just used what I liked. Basically, if you keep enough juice in your bag, you never have to worry about dying in a required battle. All of my deaths in-game were due to failing small platforming challenges (I’m so, so bad at them) or getting wrecked by a big group of non-boss monsters while animation locked in a slow technique.

If you are a masochist who craves that end- or post-game Square Enix challenge, there is plenty of absurd optional content, so you can grind out 99 levels, fully upgraded weapons, and completed class skills. Personally, I put down the game when I started having to grind RNG-generated materials, well after the main story’s end, and I didn’t feel guilty for doing so.

-spoilers ahead-

EVERY CHARACTER IS AN ANIME PROTAGONIST

This game is a few seasons of anime, just playable, and we’ve got all types. We’ve got naïve goody two shoes, we’ve got tsundere nun, we’ve got uncomfortably underdressed doctor, we’ve got long-haired womanizer, we’ve got regretful former murderer, we’ve got not-at-all-regretful current murderer, and much more.

Harvestella is a linear, JRPG with focused storylines. You can’t make meaningful choices with the side characters, but they have actually interesting back stories. 10 characters total each have a 10-part bonding side story, and I loved all 100, watching them basically as soon as they unlocked.

Maybe my favorite thing about this farm sim compared to the genre is it does not shy away from some absolutely messed up narratives. My favorite was about a melodramatic unicorn desperate to reunite with the princess he serves. While hunting for this princess, he finds out not just that his princess is gone, but that she never existed, and he himself is just a lab experiment made by robots because they needed a fake story of a kingdom to control humanity and delusional unicorns are one acceptable way to do it. Then, to make matters worse, he isn’t even the only vat unicorn with the same exact memories of this nonexistent princess. WTF.

You can’t really meaningfully form a romantic relationship with anyone in this game by giving gifts, choosing correct dialogue options, or talking to them every day. This isn’t the game for someone interested in a low-key dating sim (fine by me, as I tend to get the shudders with game romances). But you can choose a life partner of vague definition.

For my life partner, I chose Dianthus, an AI-powered robot and caretaker of humanity whose storyline revolves around not understanding the humans whose evolution she is guiding and generally being neurospicy-coded. Why do people act the way that they do? I have no idea, let’s spend our lives talking about it.

She also gives many Kingdom-Hearts-esque speeches about the content of the human heart. Is it the presence of the human heart that comes first, or the capacity for love? Choosing her as a life partner is basically the closest one can canonically get to marrying a Nobody from Kingdom Hearts II, so you can fulfill your teenage fantasies here.

APOCALYPSE NOW, APOCALYPSE THEN, APOCALYPSE FOREVER

Remarkably, this game manages to be mostly cozy while having the most non-cozy storyline in a farm sim I have ever seen. We are roaming around in a post-apocalyptic scenario, while a mini-apocalypse is happening, and a worse one is also about to happen, in a mobius strip of cyclical, unending, self-reinforcing infinity apocalypse a la the Nier universe? Except at almost any point you can take a break and fish for a few days.

This is not the cute and stylized post-apocalypse of the My Time At series. This is literally being told every human being that exists will die unless you sacrifice half of them. Since it’s ultimately a wholesome game, of course there’s a get-out-of-being-a-genocidal-maniac card, but it is slightly hidden in the true ending path.

Perfect for fans of the dark, but not too dark: the existential anime with well-paced filler episodes, the meaningful choices hedged with the ability to take all the time you need to make them. The end of the world can wait for a few more Lococonuts to grow out of the ground.