Farming sim with a fantasy, ancient Chinese setting. A big disaster happens and kills all the elders, leaving a bunch of noobs to rebuild the sect of Taoism (Daoism) they were just about to join with their fantasy spiritual magic. Since it would’ve been out of place for my character to have an American/English name, I gave her the name of a friend I had in college who was a Chinese international student: Linlin Shao. I miss her and I doubt she would’ve minded me borrowing her name for some silly game. Literally every character in the game is Chinese and the protagonist definitely looks Chinese. I guess I could’ve went with “Mulan Hua”, but eh, that seems too obvious. Information • There is no character customization, at first. Eventually, you can change the clothing, hair, and an accessory. • Gameplay includes: farming, wood chopping, fishing, cooking, foraging, mining, crafting, alchemy, combat, and friendship building. • No romance. • Part of crafting includes restoring buildings that were destroyed at the beginning of the game. Some of those buildings become shops or services. • The game is auto-saved at the end of each day when the protagonist goes to sleep, but eventually save points are unlocked for manual saving too. • Fast travelling is unlocked between save points. • Each season has an event mini-game associated with it. They're optional. • My PS5 (DualSense) controller worked fine with the game; however, all instructions are given for keyboard/mouse, so you have to sort of guess what buttons to press on the controller sometimes. Praises • Pretty character portraits and loading screens. Eventually, some nice CGs can be unlocked from having so many banquets. • The surroundings and animations are pretty despite the very “meh” quality of graphics. • Decorating the dwelling is cute and charming. Some of the decorations are particularly nice and have animation. The first one I got was of an ethereal-looking deer running in place. There are rainbow walls and floors that are animated; my favorite. • The fishing mini-game is okay. This is a “praise” because I dislike a lot of fishing games. This one is simple, nothing special, but at least it’s doable and not frustrating. • Cooking is pretty fun. Each individual step is done manually (chopping, mixing, kneading, stir fry, steaming, boiling), but you can also auto-make stuff you’ve already made before, for when you want multiples of a dish. • Watering crops isn’t tedious. F*ck yeah. I usually hate watering crops in games because it’s so unnecessarily tedious, but in this game, you get to use magic to water a bunch of crops at once. • Even though the game starts out slow, things do gradually open up and soon you have plenty to do. You just have to have patience. The quest list gets very long. • Once the save points are unlocked, you can access the warehouse from them, so you don’t have to walk all the way back to your dwelling to retrieve an item. • Once you’ve given a liked or loved item to a character, an icon appears over that item in your inventory when you choose the option to give them a gift, for easy remembering. • Quite a ways into the game, you get a pet fox. So cute! Besides being fed and played with, it can follow the protagonist around. • Combat gets slightly easier once the protagonist can fly. The controls feel smoother than when running around. Complaints • Slow af start. • Cooking tutorial instructions go by automatically too fast. I could only read about half of each set before the next set would come up. Why the hell doesn’t it let the player control when the instructions are dismissed? • When the kitchen is upgraded, deep fryers are added, but it isn’t immediately clear where to get the oil from. For some reason, you get oil from what’s merely labeled “cylinder” when I feel it’d be a lot more obvious if it’d been labeled “oil vat” or something. • No meaningful dialogue options. They’re more like prompts to continue speaking than actual choices. • The combat isn’t to my liking at all. It might play better on keyboard/mouse, but with a controller, it’s kind of awkward. The left stick moves the character, but the right stick controls the character’s direction (not the camera), so they can go pew-pew-pew at the enemies, thus, the direction needs to be precise in order to hit the enemies. My partner has informed me that this is called a “twin-stick shooter.” A popular example of that type of combat is Binding of Isaac. However, this game is much more tame than that. Not nearly as hectic. Unfortunately, combat is necessary to obtain item drops from enemies needed for crafting and construction. Defeating bosses opens up trading routes and progresses the game. • There doesn’t seem to be any way to remove a crop once its seed is placed. In most farming sims, the player can use the hoe or axe to remove crops before they die. Why does it matter? The crops don’t die if you don’t water them in this game. They sit dormant. So, to get rid of a crop you no longer need or perhaps a crop you accidentally planted and never needed, you have to go through its entire life cycle to get rid of it. • It needs to be made way more clear that the urns only absorb energy from growing crops, not fully grown crops. I wasted so much time not understanding what was going on because the game didn’t make that clear in the slightest. I had to find that out in Steam discussions. The energy absorption animation continues when they’re fully grown, so I feel like maybe it shouldn’t be if they aren’t actually absorbing anything. • Lots of achievements are time-consuming chores in order to artificially increase players’ game times. • Occasional translation errors and typos. Sometimes, there will be dialogue that makes absolutely no sense and was clearly missed by whoever did English proofreading. My main issue with the game is that the story is just an excuse for the gameplay to exist. No depth at all. The same for the characters. The only aspect of the story that did motivate me to keep playing was wondering what caused the big catastrophe at the beginning. However, a lot of the gameplay is fun and addicting, so I did manage to get through it. What I did find interesting, and what I wish they would’ve expanded on to make the story more educational or meaningful, is that they’ve taken concepts from Taoism and applied fantasy elements to it. It would’ve actually been cool to learn more about Taoism from the game. But as I said, the story only exists for the gameplay, so any tidbits about Taoism that are there are completely superficial and unelaborated. I technically recommend it because the game wasn’t a total let down and I did have some fun, and if you like the genre and don’t care too much about story, you’ll probably like it even more than I did.
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