Nastume Mobile Game Announcement

[Farmer Fred]

Posted today - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TnquchMXg0o

[midnighttherabbit]

I'm actually pretty into this so far, I've been wanting a good mobile game with no microtransactions. It's going to come down to price and how it controls for me though because touch screen controls can be rough and buying games on the play store feels so impermanent so I'm not about to spend a ton of money in something that'll be gone in a few years (I bought Seeds of Memories years ago but can't play it because they stopped supporting it on newer devices </3 meanwhile I still have the cartridge of the first HM game I got when I was seven.)

[simside]

This looks really good! I'll probably snag it at launch. I'm not sure I'll love the touch controls, and I'm really hoping this will get a console port at some point (along with Seeds of Memories... it's not too late... ;_;), but I'll at least support it and give it a try.

The blend of marriage candidates is interesting! I like that the unchosen player character is one of them.

[K8sMum]

I'm torn on this. I don't really care for the HM games any more. And I never have games on my phone. I've got a Galaxy Z Flip 5 which I love (I'm a sucker for Samsung). It would be nice to have a game like this on it, but will depend on the price and reviews.

[Mistymay]

I'm waiting until controller support is added or until it comes to the switch. Has anyone played it? What's your opinion on it? Pros and cons?

[JustABeautifulGuy]

Haven't gotten this one yet; I'll probably hold off for a while but I'm hearing good things about it. Mostly related to how improved dialogues are compared to WoA which even Cher talked about in the latest weekly update; I'm glad that the dialogues finally feel more "human-like".

Judging from the footage itself, the game does like fun to play and I'd say it perhaps looks better than WoA graphically? I really like how detailed the environment looks. There still are some rough areas but that one forest with the lily pond and the town itself look very complete and gorgeous. With Natsume slowly fixing up on every aspect that I feel they severely lacked on, I'm starting to become more confident and hopeful for their future titles. Now just one single thing left: a better identity. I really need them to find a better style. The visuals do look nice for both WoA and HSH but they definitely would be much finer with a better art style. I need to research a popular artsy style and stick with it. A lot of Studio Ghilbi inspired games have not much going on but the very specific cel shaded art style always makes up for it and you never feel the visuals are missing anything. Natsume needs just this exactly right now.

Makes me wonder if the reason why this game looks much better has anything to do with its scope. Honestly, I wouldn't mind Natsume sticking with this classic formula before trying the open world one again. A full fledged console game with just one town and surrounding areas would be refreshing enough and they might actually pull it off much better rather than going for a huge scaled open world game with everything such as the cast being sparsely located.

[midnighttherabbit]

Turns out I really needed something casual to play to cope with the stress of moving and finishing my dissertation in the same week ( ) so I ended up buying it. I didn't buy Winds of Anthos because I really didn't like One World or Light of Hope, so I'm surprised that this game is actually really good.

The graphics are really nice, the way light works feels polished and really adds to the 3D semi-isometric vibes - it's also nice to see characters that were in older games in the WoA style. (Jeanne was my favourite character in LoH so it's fun to see her redesign.) Water is also rendered well but sometimes near the beach I get frame rate drops.

The map is pretty big, I know WoA was open world so it's probably smaller than that but I'd say it's probably around the same size as Olive Town, except it's all the same area so it feels bigger. I really like the more traditional style of having a little town and a few people living on the outskirts, it feels very FoMT. Newer farm sims feel like they're always trying to subvert this in some way and I don't know why because it's nice and works well. I'm not very far in so I don't know if it gets upgraded but the field on the farm is pretty small, even for early-game, I feel like I'm getting more requests than I have space to plant crops to fill them.

Farming is fine, it's not revolutionary and seems pretty simple. I actually prefer this and haven't really enjoyed it when games throw in tons of new mechanics to try and make things more exciting (every SoS game lol sorry), there's some crafting but it seems pretty basic. I always found hybrids in Natsume games kind of frustrating because you'd plant crops for a specific reason and sometimes not get them because they decided to become something else, in this game you get the crop AND the mutated crop which I like. You also get a cow pretty early and animal care is pretty much the same as it has been in every Natsume game - I kind of wish they'd shake THIS up a little and include new animals or something.

And the writing is mostly fine. It's pretty standard farm sim writing - I like that the villagers aren't super friendly at first and have to warm up to you. To progress, you have to do fulfil some requests as well as fill up your "happiness" meter, which you get points towards by doing pretty much anything, I actually really like this because it manages to tie talking to villagers into feeling necessary which is sometimes hard to do. The designs of the villagers are sometimes a little iffy though and I'm struggling to tell the difference between all the near-identical old people lol, they all have the same face but different clothes/hair.

Anyway, that was my mini-review for anyone still on the fence. Overall, I'd say it's the best Natsume HM game I've played and so far I'd probably put it above Olive Town as well but it's very simple so people who are into the newer SoS games and prefer complex mechanics might not like it. It's more than I was expecting for a mobile game for sure, I just hope it isn't super short.

[K8sMum]

Have you actually been playing it on your phone? I watched Josh's video but he was playing it on his computer, due to it not working on android at the time. When I asked him about playing on a phone he seemed to think it would be better on a tablet.

That said he was enjoying the game.

[midnighttherabbit]

Have you actually been playing it on your phone? I watched Josh's video but he was playing it on his computer, due to it not working on android at the time. When I asked him about playing on a phone he seemed to think it would be better on a tablet.

That said he was enjoying the game.

I have! I think it really depends on how long you play for / how comfortable you are using your phone for this kind of thing; I haven't used a tablet for a long time so I find them a bit cumbersome at this point. But with the way the controls are set up it's really hard to hold your phone like you would a controller so it could be tough on people's wrists. I've been mostly playing it in short sessions somewhere comfortable so I haven't really been having many issues.

Basically the best way to play WOULD be with a controller, but there isn't controller support for some reason... so hopefully they patch it in at some point.