I recommend this game, but with a few caveats. I even recommend it at full price because I want more game similar to this... but with other significant changes. Firstly, know that this is a farming sim game with wuxia vibes. If you had hoped for interesting martial arts, high stakes drama, conflicting ideologies, relations or conflicts between multiple sects, and wise masters to learn from then you won't find them here. This game is about farming, fishing, raising bees and silkworms, and building a small village (your sect). In doing that your character learns something about cultivation, but the MAIN thing is farming. Honestly, I don't even know what the Guiyun sect values other than they seem to be 'good guys'. Secondly, know that the game has a tremendous amount of grind. Truly monumental amounts. Even with the Jade Pendant upgraded to level 11 (maybe the max upgrade to level 12 helps...?) it is a ton. By the second spring I had reached my cultivation limit, had a fully upgraded house, had completed every side quest, and had an almost unlimited amount of money. Then I realized that there was a sect journal, and I had neglected one person and so the main story line had been delayed. None of the things I did counted; once you reach the point where you need to breakthrough you simply stop learning. None of the experience you gained applies to the next level, meaning you have to grind it all out again. While this mimics a sort of real life plateau that people come to in periods of training or development, it isn't fun in a game. It took a long time to get to a point where I could breakthrough because countless quests require you to 'wait one day'. It completely breaks the immersion when you end up sleeping for 23 hours, getting a letter, and sleeping for 23 hours. Don't get me wrong, I have had fun in the first 60 hours of gameplay. I like the farming and the fishing and the people and the dungeons. Yet at this point everything feels very artificial. The gaps between breakthroughs are HUGE, the tutors you can hire never seem to get better, and now I have to do another kind of farming in the Blessed Land... I hate the Blessed Land crops. They really feel like an extremely inorganic way of padding the length of the game. You constantly need to dig up crops in order to plant new ones of different types, you have to move these flags around, you have to wait until the next day for any seeds to contribute energy... why? It's all so arbitrary and tedious. I'm already an excellent farmer. I'm already an excellent combatant. I look cool and my house is fully upgraded and I have more money than I can spend. Yet I have to spend AGES growing these crops... In order to grow them efficiently I need more materials, which means going into dungeons, and that is a bore. I have only made it to the Blazing Sands dungeon and, from the looks of it, I have 4 or 5 more to look forward to. Visually they all have a cool look even if most of them are palette swapped versions of each other. The enemies have been different in each locale; despite having lizards everywhere some will bite and others shoot bullets and some have lasers. so there is diversity in how they attack you. Yet you have one main attack, a sort of sword beam, and it is extremely boring. You also do have spells, but I've never felt the need to use any other than the starting spell. It attacks a huge area, pierces enemies, and usually one shots opponents even if they share the same element. There are other elements for spells, but I have never once needed an advantage that way. So lets say you need Mirror Sand for a pot to grow your Blessed Land fruit faster... well, you can do a run in the Blazing Desert and, with certain blessings and luck, you might come away with enough Mirror Sand to make one pot... about ten units. Now you have to do that 8 more times. Then you have to do it for everything else that costs Mirror Sand, like houses and other upgrades. It is EXTREMELY tedious. You can eventually gain movement speed buffs from food and alchemy (you unlock food first, and from what I can tell, food is ALWAYS better for some reason). Once you do, you realize just how SLOW this main character is. Again, this isn't a wuxia game. You cannot train lightness of body, jump higher, or run faster (your character actually never gets better at ANYTHING they do. I guess you can upgrade stats like divinity and stance but throughout the whole game I have never noticed them making a difference in anything. Fishing is still slow. You never attack faster. Your tools and spells and things get better but YOU don't). The only way to gain a movement boost is via consumables most of which run out incredibly quickly. This contributes to just how frustrating the grind can be, at least until you can use blessings to make huge quantities of cabbage soup, then you just need to ensure you have tons of those ingredients. Finally, know that there are no deadlines or tension of any kind. Everything can wait. There are no emergencies, time limits, or stakes at all (...in quests that matter. There are some job board quests that have time limits and quick completion rewards but the quests themselves can be ignored and are eventually very trivial). This is fine for many people, but for me it just renders the whole activity pointless and artificial feeling after a while. There is no skill involved. The only obstacle between you and your goals is time... and I am finally reaching a point where I feel like my time is better spent elsewhere. I do love the characters... I sort of want to know what happened to the sect... but everything is revealed so extremely slowly that it might as well not matter at all. With every story quest I complete someone asks me to do another chore or recruit another person but nothing really develops. At first it felt like I was making progress fixing the sect, but now I'm growing weird magic crops for no reason because my crops aren't magic enough...? I have enjoyed the time I've spent with Immortal Life, and I am a huge fan of wuxia, but this just feels like a job at this point. I leave crops in the field unharvested. I don't check the beehives anymore. I truly don't need to do any of it and don't want to do any of it either. I still recommend the game: it is fun for quite a long time, at least 40 hours playing and a full year of the game. Once you start to master the system, or if you are a power gamer, or if you seek external motivation, or if you are motivated by a developing story then maybe this isn't for you. If you do play it, I cannot recommend enough using the sect journal to be continuously completing the main story so you don't end up wasting your time.
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