Farmagia Review – Review – Nintendo World Report

Farmagia is a game that seems designed to be appealing to a lot of people, at least on paper. It combines farming with a JRPG, includes roguelike elements and crafting, and features art by one of Japan’s most popular manga creators. There’s a lot to be excited about with Farmagia; however, can all of the disparate elements of Farmagia come together for a satisfying harvest?

Farmagia is set in an underworld called Felicidad, with both people and monsters living together. Each island in this world is run by a separate ruler, but the story kicks off once one of the local rulers takes advantage of a power vacuum and attempts to take over the entire underworld. The protagonist, Ten, is a Farmagia, a person who can command monsters. Together with other Farmagia friends, he works to protect his home.

The story is pleasantly convoluted in the way a lot of shonen anime can be, which is fitting given the art from Hiro Mashima, who created the popular Fairy Tail series, among others. I struggled a bit to write that previous paragraph because there are a large number of strange names and titles that get thrown at you quickly. However, once you get down to the story, it is fun, if not particularly unique. The characters are written well but tend to fall into stock anime archetypes, and while there are a handful of twists and turns I personally found them to be mostly predictable. That said, the whole thing felt like watching a show on Toonami back in the day, and it’s not really a surprise that a TV anime series recently started airing based off the game.

Much like the story, there are also a lot of gameplay elements thrown at you quickly. Each day you can grow and harvest monsters on your farm, and then use items on a ranch to raise their stats. Then once you have your monsters all ready, you can explore a dungeon, which is usually a roguelike maze where you fight other monsters, collect items, and collect in-dungeon perks that can increase your stats. You usually end up fighting a boss to continue the story, return home to town, wake up on the next day, rinse and repeat. Then you get even more story elements, a system where you increase your bonds with elemental spirits (naturally, in the form of beautiful anime women), crafting, etc. There’s a lot to keep track of here, which can feel overwhelming.

My biggest issue with all of these systems, though, isn’t that there are too many, but that there are so many and they almost all feel underdeveloped. It really feels like throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks, but too many elements don’t work and the ones that do work feel few and far between. Farming is surprisingly basic, for a game developed by Marvelous (who have made the Story of Seasons and Rune Factory games), with just preparing soil, planting seeds (which you get from the dungeons) and watering, while waiting the set number of days to grow. Rather than giving a sense of achievement or progression, like most farming games, this just ends up feeling like a lot of busy work. Monsters largely feel interchangeable, too, so it never feels like taking particularly good care in farming actually improves anything; it just gives you more monsters. Also, for being a game with a focus on monster collecting, I never felt any real drive to collect more monsters beyond stats going up, and I never felt any sort of connection to the creatures like you might in another game. This could be because you are using large numbers of each monster (you are usually controlling 40-60 at a time) but I felt more excited getting access to a new type of Pikmin than I did for the new monsters in this.

The same thing applies to the actual combat and exploration. The dungeon maps are all pretty basic, and while there is a roguelike system of picking upgrades it never made the game feel at all different. The strategy of fighting usually has the same loop: use different monsters until you find out what the enemy is weak to, use some charged attacks and work up to using stronger abilities, while using a few different options to block the enemy’s attacks. Every battle ended up feeling the same, with some differences to the enemy attack patterns, but even with that there’s really only two ways of blocking.

There’s a lot about Farmagia that I liked. I like a lot of these elements that are put together; the character design is great; some of the writing is funny and charming. It also ran very well on Switch, which is impressive given how many monsters could be on screen at one time. I enjoyed a lot of the writing with the elemental spirits, for example, and I think this is an incredibly solid concept. Ultimately, for having so many mechanics, all of them ended up feeling half-baked. Farmagia in a lot of ways feels like a first draft, and I’d love to see these mechanics pared down and refined in a future game. Farmagia needed a little bit longer to grow, and I hope another game can pay attention to this in the future.