Topic: Harvest Moon: The Winds of Anthos

The world still look awfully empty to me. Even a pretty open world just feels sad to me if it's empty. It won't be a day one buy from me as I need to see more.

I'm getting Fae Farm so hopefully that will scratch my farming itch for a bit.

Woo that artstyle is harsh. I'm still rooting for Natsume if nothing else than to make Marvelous sweat, but that artstyle is not winning me over.

Well the game is out and I’ve have had the chance to play it a bit and- don’t take it wrong, with me being me- it’s actually very good.

It’s a giant leap from One World in terms of quality, and the gameplay loop once you get out of the tutorial is very effective.

Fishing and mining in particular go from mindless activities to actual mini games of sorts: they require your attention and decent amounts of skill.

There’s hiccups on the switch (it seems related to the game loading in nearby towns and objects), with it being a big open world, but compared to their previous Switch games, loading times are a lot better and gameplay is more smooth.

Graphically, dare I say, it’s above Scarlet and Violet in terms of environment detail, but with less creatures going around.

@Eel
Also, the outfits you wear have a huge effect for your stamina depletion.
Wearing winter outfits in Summer is a wrong idea.
This Harvest Moon so far looks the best compared with previous Harvest Moon games.

I found myself exploring a rather large, and suspiciously empty, plateau in a corner of the map. Getting there was a trek, but it was worth it to get a specific type of flower seed that spawns there.

I was thinking, “huh the view is nice, it’s the type of place that would have a Lynel in breath of the wild, too bad there’s not much to do here”.

I later viewed the screenshots for the upcoming DLC on the eShop, one of the packs adds a new town with its own story. And then it clicked.

That corner of the map is pretty-looking, but pretty-empty too: because it’s for the DLC town.

@Eel
I wonder if there will new bachelors as DLC since 5 candidates are not enough for me.

@Anti-Matter the dlc will add a town. the town includes one bachelor and one bachelorette

@Eel
So is this the DLC I can buy for $13 ?

Man...
$13 for 1 bachelor candidate that I might consider him.

@Anti-Matter I got the dlc bundle yesterday. The other dlc packs don’t seem too interesting, but it wasn’t that much more expensive compared to purchasing the town alone.

Been playing this, only a few hours in though. So far so good. Looking forward to delving deeper into it... its a bit "Breath of the Harvest" with its open world, obviously not as detailed though. Hoping that NintendoLife review it soon.

I finally played through the main story, took me about 30 hours. It was fun, still a bit stiff in terms of character emotion and movement (they still rely a bit too much in telling instead of showing, and cutscenes suffer because of that), but tons better than the previous few games from Natsume that’s for sure.

Several of the late-game requests did that cheeky thing where you must wait in-game days in order to continue with the story, but to be frank, I was so busy just exploring and collecting stuff around the map that I did not need, or even considered, skipping days on purpose. I suppose that means the gameplay loop is effective.

Then again, I did pace myself and spread those 30 hours over the last few months. So perhaps that helped prevent burnout.

Of course there’s still a lot left to do, with the usual open ended post game and dlc story (that I had completely forgotten I purchased until it started after the credits). Besides the dlc, I plan to return to the villages to increase their rank, so I can upgrade my tools. Perhaps after that I’ll continue with the marriage plot and all that.

I was playing this quite a bit as my nightly go-to, but then got distracted and havent returned in a couple of months. I'll have to pick it up again, as I really have quite enjoyed the first 15 hours or so.

@OneBradley13 as a tip, I recommend taming a tiger. Not sure if other big cats have the same skill, but the tiger was super helpful for me in the late parts of the story.

The in the “Shallow Playground” area next to Lilikala is easy to tame because it’s super close to the goddess statue.

Thanks for the tip! Might get stuck back in tonight, I just finished Super Mario RPG and need another comfort game from the backlog to replace it. About time I picked it up again! And taming a tiger just sounds awesome lol. Looking to it