The concept, art, and music are stellar. However, using a controller is "supported" and the keyboard and mouse controls are painful. There is no romance and characters don't seem to have much to say. There is no livestock. And by Summer, the grind was really starting to ramp up in what felt like early game. The UI is just awkward, and when combined with the terrible controls, it's just not good.

Don't buy this game, not even on sale. The 3D models are terrible, the animations are stiff, movement is off and unnatural, the pace of everything is glacial, the combat is simplistic and doesn't feel good at all, and the side quests are horrible. I'm not nitpicking: every aspect of this game except for the music (which is stellar, but has too few tracks) is either bad or feels completely unfinished.

Harvestella advertises itself as being the vein of Rune Factory, but that's not true at all. Yes, you do have a farm, but the game is very much a lackluster, budget RPG with a farm stapled on. Farming isn't fun or engaging, and it takes ages for anything to open up. Story progression is essentially like a dungeon crawler, but again, progression is slow and everything about the combat and class system is bad. You need to do side quests for money and resources, but these are honestly the worst quests I've seen in all my years playing RPGs. Every single quest is sad or melodramatic with awful characters you can't say no to or push back against once you've started a quest.

There isn't much voice acting, either. There are some quips outside of battle and sometimes in battle, but nothing besides. And what is there is, again, not good. Character creation at the start of the game is funky: there are hardly any choices, and every character model is androgynous. You can pick from three slightly masculine gender less models, or three slightly feminine ones. The non-typical body shapes sort of make sense as you can choose a non-binary gender at the start of the game, but the models don't look good regardless and there frankly aren't choices that represent either traditional gender, so nobody is being served in the character creation process (which is gross because you're going to be spending hours and hours looking at your chosen character).

Harvestella is the worst RPG I've ever played.

If you are a fan of the Ys games, just go ahead and buy this or play it if you've already bought it. The gameplay is satisfying, the characters offer diversity of play style, and the dungeons are mostly OK. You might need to a guide from time to time, but it wasn't super frustrating or anything.

If you are new to the Ys series and have never played on, check out VIII, IX, or X for a more modern experience and come back to earlier titles like this one if you find yourself wanting more.

This is a decent Ys game. If you are new to the franchise and don't mind slightly dated graphics, I'd go for Ys VIII or Ys IX instead because this one doesn't quite measure up to the same standards. If you are new or are just curious based on what you see on the store page, try the demo: you can play through 3 complete chapters of the game without limitations, and it starts from the beginning so you won't be lost.

Destiny is a hard game to get into, but if you can tough it out or get a friend to help, it's tons of fun. There is plenty of content for free (including PvP and PvE stuff) and expansions go on sale regularly.

I'm a fan of both Persona and SMT as franchises. After playing this for about 3 hours, I just wasn't having any fun. Even though it retains all the core SMT features you'd expect, the setting was awful and the battles just didn't flow well in my opinion.

As a classic Contra fan, I found the levels to be too difficult, too frustrating, and a little too long. The cool unlockables need quite a lot of points, too.

I've been a fan of the Atelier series for over 12 years now, and I feel this is the worst one to date. To me, the open world feels soulless and is entirely too large. Exploration doesn't feel rewarding. To enable players to explore more freely, this game features level scaling, which I didn't care for at all.

I finished the first two Ryza games, but I just can't finish this one.

The backtracking, character switching, and health mechanics are insane. You cannot fast travel between save points, and you go back to the literal beginning of the dungeon every time you die. Health replenishment is nearly non-existent. Worse, each of the three characters is needed to clear different obstacles in the world, and you can only change characters at save points (and no, they don't have different health bars either). You constantly go through a cycle of reaching a new room, discovering you need a different character, and then trying not to die while you go back to a save point and then back again to clear the obstacle.

I really want to like this game, but it is incredibly frustrating to play. What were they thinking?! Apparently there is an item that lets you change characters whenever, but it's a long way into the game...provided you can stand it long enough to acquire the item.

I grew up playing Contra, and I've always loved 3D action games. This game has no redeeming qualities whatsoever. The best part about it is that if you do make the mistake of buying it, it's so bad you'll know long before the refund window is up that you don't want to play it.