First impressions

Where're the crops?! Searching the world for seed wisps on Nintendo Switch, Steam Ps4, and Xbox. [ Game Guide ] JP release = None. NA release = Mar 2021. EU release = Mar 2021.
Briarwyn
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I guess that as a game producing company, Natsume is not yet perfected and they're learning how to be better at game developing.
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Anna_Lynn
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I'm a bit late to the party, but I've also been playing! I've been playing about 3 hours a day since Friday, and I somehow beat the story already so why not, I'll share my first impressions as well.

Pros:
Spoiler:
Harvest Sprites - D'awww! They're so cute! Honestly what a glow-up! Not only do they look different, but they no longer look like freakish teletubbies, lmao. Even the harvest wisps you occasionally see the portraits for look adorable. And now that I've finished the story, I like the new look of the Goddess too!

Story - Overall, not bad! SoS PoOT comes out in like 2 weeks and I gotta admit, I still don't know what the main story/plot is for that game. Nothing vague about One World's story; it's very clear that each world is dying and the Goddess is not around to help. The quests felt very familiar; reminded me of SoS Trio of Towns, but minus the town-link ranks and going straight to the request part of reviving the towns. I like it! I went into this game 99% blind, and beat it in 1 year, which was better than Light of Hope since I also played that one blind, but completed the story in 2 seasons...(no pun intended)

Moving farm - Neat feature! I just unlocked the Goddess Spring farm, but it's almost too big. It takes too long to run around, so now I'm tempted to move back to Halo Halo or Lebkuchen. Tbh, nothing felt more satisfying than moving to a completely new area after fixing the town. Reminded me of Paper Mario; completing a big side-quest, getting a medallion, celebrating with the town, and moving on to the next "chapter" a.k.a town.

Biomes - Fun idea! Trio of Towns didn't really focus on this, at least imo I don't consider Westown as "desert" and idk what Tsuyukusa would even be classified as. But I like how One World has hill/grassland world, Hawaii world, Egypt world, German volcano world(?) North Pole, and whatever the DLC world is. Too bad the characters are bland and the words are way too big.
Cons:
Spoiler:
Time - Idk if it's the speed of the clock, the size of the worlds, or the running speed of the MC, but there is just. not. enough. TIME. Even with warping, I'm struggling over here! It should not take me 6 hours a day to raise animals, so you know what I did? I got rid of half of them! And speaking of animals...

Animals - Maybe I'm missing something, but the feed costs 100G, yet (most) of the products sell for 100G. So you either forage for grass seeds to craft their food, or make profit simply by cooking the eggs and milk. Also the animations to pet, brush, and harvest are soooo slooooow. I tried ignoring my animals for a week just to see if they're music notes would be fine simply from fodder; they lost like 3 notes of friendship so that was a no-go. I'm honestly tempted to release all but like two animals because they ain't worth it.

Cooking - Dear « Harvest Goddess », I thought 3,000G was insane for a single recipe. Oh how ignorant I was. Some of the most expensive recipes are priced at 75,000G! That's like the same cost of a house upgrade...right?

Animations and size of world - Just...petting animals, running, picking up wisps for free seeds, did I mention petting animals? Even the worlds themselves are too big. Maybe that's my fault for not using a horse. But it's so counterintuitive to have a BIG world, and then have time move just as fast as Mineral Town. The areas themselves; they're not even filled with anything! Like other users mentioned, it's a bunch of windy roads and like 5 buildings! Idk if Lebkuchen even had 5 buildings! :shock:

Fishing - Fishing sucks. I must admit, it's a very fun minigame, but so far the most profitable fish I managed to catch sold for 15G. Pair that with how fast the clock moves in this game. I do not want to spend all morning slowly petting my animals, then harvesting my crops 1-by-1, re-wattering what the sprinklers didn't water, just to finally be able to fish at 4:00 p.m. and catch like 2 sardines and a mosquito fish before midnight.

Types of characters - No offense, but why does there have to be 5 character slots taken up by a bunch of knockoff Russian Snow White miner dwarves? Seriously the first time I saw Malika, they referred to her as a princess or whatever, so I associated Malika as being an Egyptian Snow White, with her 5 Russian dwarf miners. Meanwhile the little boy who works for Braden (forgot his name because he's forgettable) does have a mother, but she's a nameless NPC! I mean, she does have a name, it's "Thoughtful Woman" and looks just like said boy; same hair and eye color. All this time I thought the boy was Braden's brother, but apparently they're not related, because the boy just goes to the "Thoughful Woman's" house every night. Don't EVEN get me started with "Jamil's Mom" that's just pathetic and lazy...like I said, 5 character slots dedicated to recolored miners who could literally be nameless NPC's, plus another 6 harvest sprites...no wonder these worlds feel so empty!!!
Indifferent:
Spoiler:
Hot and cold weather - It's realistic, I'm fine with it. Is it annoying? Yes. But it's a clever feature for the areas, I'll admit. I'm more peeved about recipes being expensive, but otherwise I made it through the dessert just fine on coconut milk. Snow-world kicked my booty at first, so thank « Harvest Goddess » for the cloak you get.

Stamina loss while running - At first this was a big con. Then 5 hours and 3 power berries later I never noticed it ever again. Personally I would rather not have it, but I'm done with the story so it's not even a nuisance anymore.

Finding seeds - I'd be more fine with this feature if time didn't move at the speed of a bullet. Also when I read that you can buy the seeds for crops after you ship enough of the crop, I was excited. Well I lost my excitement when I saw that the seeds I could buy were like 500G per seed. I'd literally be planting at a loss of profit.

Characters - For the characters we do have, they're okay I guess. I blazed through the last two medallions so I honestly can't say much for the villagers of Lebkuchen and snow-world (whatever it's called, I'm terrible with names). You can't deny the fact that certain characters were prioritized more than others, I mean why else would Jamil's mom be called..."Jamil's Mom." All the effort went to the 12 marriage candidates, plus Doc Jr. lmao. But hey, at least the characters have portraits, right? No seriously, I actually love the character design for the portraits! I'm still playing blind so I don't know who the last two DLC candidates are, but of the ten candidates I've seen, Braden's probably at the bottom but I honestly like all the other 9 a lot! The other Natsume farm games got me not liking all candidates except for one, this one got me loving all the candidates except for one, lol.

MC Customization - Green is such a random option for hair color. Idk if you can alter hair and eye color later on; I just thought it was so random to have green hair, but not orange? RIP gingers.
I wonder if in the end, I'll end up liking this game more than Olive Town. I doubt it, but sadly PoOT just keeps looking worse and worse each day. At least with One World, my expectations were already at rock bottom which resulted in me being quite impressed with how the game turned out! :lol: PoOT just makes me sad realizing that I waited 5 years after 3oT on the 3DS for a "meh" game on the switch.
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Getaris
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Post  Posted:

Ok I finally beat the main story
Spoiler:
I really like the newly added flowers around the cities and important places, and also I see some extra trees around! Kinda wish there were a bit more new details out of bounds, like farmed land and stuff, that would be lovely. But the things they did add do liven up the place quite a bit.

The goddess farm is also pretty cool looking.
For reference, it took me about 30 hours, across the span of five entire in-game seasons.
Briarwyn
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Post  Posted:

Is it disappointing that Doc Jr. is not a bachelor, in the game?
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Kross lover/fan
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Briarwyn wrote:Is it disappointing that Doc Jr. is not a bachelor, in the game?
I agree. A lot of people loved Doc so it makes little sense why doc jr isn’t available. Especially since you’re next door neighbors at the start of the game and you grew up together.
Missed opportunity imo.

Just finished two towns at the same time which was cool. The desert and the uh....town before the winter village (all the names of the towns eluded me.)
I was living in the desert working on that one, and unlocked the other one so I decided to do both. Ironically I finished them exactly one day apart from each other. So one more town to go but I’m horribly unprepared :lol:
Mothership
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Bah. Game was lagging badly, then software closed due to an error.
Now I have to
Spoiler:
save the Goddess and sit thru all the following cut scenes where you can't save again
Another thing to put on my don't like list for this game.
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K8sMum
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Mothership wrote:Bah. Game was lagging badly, then software closed due to an error.
Now I have to
Spoiler:
save the Goddess and sit thru all the following cut scenes where you can't save again
Another thing to put on my don't like list for this game.
It is frustrating. I haven't played for a couple days due to that issue.
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Mikodesu
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Post  Posted:

I haven't watched it as of yet, but...in my Youtube recommends, Giant Bomb did a video looking at One World.

Kross lover/fan wrote:
Briarwyn wrote:Is it disappointing that Doc Jr. is not a bachelor, in the game?
I agree. A lot of people loved Doc so it makes little sense why doc jr isn’t available. Especially since you’re next door neighbors at the start of the game and you grew up together.
Missed opportunity imo.
Havta agree too. Why make Doc Jr so young if you're not gonna make him a candidate? I wonder if maybe that was the plan and it had to be scrapped (being that there's one descendant of each gender).
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greensara
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Mothership wrote:Bah. Game was lagging badly, then software closed due to an error.
Now I have to
Spoiler:
save the Goddess and sit thru all the following cut scenes where you can't save again
Another thing to put on my don't like list for this game.
This is actually super ironic. Just a little while ago I was finishing up the story and it was starting to get a little laggy and stuttering again. I was making sure to save in between tasks just in case. The morning I was able to go finish the story I started walking toward the Spring thinking, "Wouldn't it be crazy if it crashes during the ending since it seems to get more laggy around events?" Lo and behold, as soon as I trigger the start of scene, the game freezes up and then crashes, lol! After I fired it back up everything was running normal again and I got the ending. :)

Aside from technical issues and a few quality of life things, I think it turned out to be a pretty decent game. I ended up liking the gameplay, story, and characters better than Skytree Village's, so I think Natsume's headed in the right direction. I liked it well enough I may continue that file to marry and have a kid, and possibly even try to work on mutations on purpose. I didn't love it, (the list of games I actually love is pretty short) but I liked it enough I could potentially play through it again sometime.
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K8sMum
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I played for a couple hours last nite. Then the game started sputtering along, especially at cutscenes where it would freeze for a bit.

Then I got the ' software has closed due to an error' screen. I'm finding it harder and harder wanting to invest time in this game.
PunchyCat
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Post  Posted:

For everyone having issues with the game freezing or crashing, have you tried to power your switch off completely and turn it on fresh to see if that helps? I haven't personally encountered any of these issues yet, but I know powering the switch down can fix these sorts of issues in some other games. I think most people usually just put their switch to sleep, and some people don't know you can turn it off at all, so I figured I would ask just in case it might help someone
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K8sMum
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I hadn't even thought of doing that. I'll try and see if it helps. Thanks for the idea!
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Mikodesu
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:/ I will say trying to reset the Switch before playing stopped crashes in My Time at Portia, which also had some Switch optimization issues... All I've had is stuttering, though when that gets really bad I just stop the character for a few seconds, hoping to stop a crash. (Not that what I'm doing is helping, I have no idea.)


Got my first Equestrian Festival, which was...something. Spoiler tag just in case.
Spoiler:
I think it might be fun once you get to the expert level course but the beginner wasn't even worth reloading to win. :lol: 8 seconds might be too hard to beat. Plus it was hilarious watching Kanoa materialize to console me.

His character is imo this strange mix (in looks and personality) of Ludus and Hinata from Trio, which I didn't want to like at first but he's kind of growing on me. I invited him on the lantern festival event (can't remember if that's the exact name) because he had lower friendship than Braden and apparently he's sticking around?
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greensara
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Post  Posted:

That's true, I had a rough time during my first Portia playthrough because of it glitching too much and/or freezing causing me to need to reset it to get it to function again. It hasn't been as bad the second time, except for the game getting stuck in a kissing loop at night, so I had to redo the whole day again. At least One World lets you save on demand. Resetting or restarting the system isn't a bad idea. I will have to try it the next lag session.
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K8sMum
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I just played for 1 1\2 hours after restarting my Switch. There were a couple tiny lags but cutscenes ran smoothly with no freezes.

Of course, now I feel a bit of an idiot, but it honestly never dawned on me to restart the console. Saving and closing the game is a good option for One World.
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