Farmagia Review (Switch)

When Marvelous revealed Farmagia during the June 2024 Nintendo Direct, we saw a familiar concept wrapped in an intriguing package: an action RPG with farm sim elements, like those so fundamental in two of the publisher's biggest series, Rune Factory and Story of Seasons, but wrapped up in a monster-catching package. Instead of growing fruits of vegetables, you grow crops of monsters. And all of this is given form by Fairy Tail and Edens Zero creator Hiro Mashima's distinctive artwork.

In this new RPG, we follow Ten and his friends who are all Farmagia — magical tamers (or farming mages) that can control and fight with monsters. Finding themselves in the middle of a war, Ten and his friends use the power of monsters – and friendship – to prevail over all obstacles.

The game is split into 2D and 3D sections. The former is common for dialogue between characters and visiting places such as the Magic Shop or Avrion Castle in the main city, Centvelt. 3D environments are reserved for the farm or mazes (dungeons), and this is where you control one of your characters.

On the farm, you grow and raise your monsters to ready them for dungeon exploration. You have a limited number of Stamina points to use on farming per day, but once you run out of them, ending the day and taking a good nap is not enough. Stamina can only be replenished after you complete a maze. By tying so rigidly the farming activity with the action and dungeon crawling, the game never allowed us to completely immerse ourselves in the farming because the rhythm was broken, forcing us to spend at least 15 minutes in a dungeon to be allowed to keep working on our crops.

It doesn't help that the farm happens to be one of the most dull parts of the game. The place lacks life, even when it has a full-grown crop of monsters waiting for us. It is literally a piece of land completely decontextualized from the rest of the game's world which we have to semi-regularly visit to evolve our monsters.

While it takes a swing, and a miss, with the farming, Farmagia really hits the spot with the more traditional fantasy elements of the RPG genre. All the good stuff from famous fantasy stories, like prohibited magic spells to battles against divine forces, are present and correct, too. Doses of lore dumps and main story explanations, whilst always followed by overdramatic expressions such as Law of Recurrence or Harvest Festival, are also served in the right quantity. The writers also know good comic timing, cracking jokes at the right moments to light things up. This may swim far from the dangers that come with experimentation, but it's all very charming, just like our favourite anime shows.

In terms of structure, the story is split into 12 chapters, and each chapter connects the events of the main narrative to one or more characters. It doesn't take long to understand that one of Ten's friends will be at the centre of the chapter and, while the group tries to handle the main crisis related to the war, they will also solve their beloved companion's problem. The story's predictability can make the experience feel less exciting, but by intertwining plot progression with character development, Farmagia creates a fun and cohesive narrative experience, and it's a delightful take on the power-of-friendship formula.

Another aspect that makes this adventure a charming experience is the visuals. The game looks great whether played in handheld or docked mode. The static backgrounds in dialogue sequences are all beautifully coloured, helping us to grasp the fantasy world the protagonists live in. And, along with the character art, these sections look great. Mashima's character designs correspond perfectly to specific anime archetypes. Ten, for example, is the happy-go-lucky leader of the gang who is fired up to help people. On the other hand, Emeru is the edgy boy whose angry look actually hides a soft heart. Importantly, every character design in the game is distinct, just like those in Mashima's mangas.

When it comes to monsters, however, there is less diversity, which is disappointing considering how central they are to the game. Mashima relies on changing colours or adding a couple of new visual flourishes to portray how creatures get stronger. Because of that, you'll end up fighting a huge number of giant seahorses who go from blue to purple and, eventually, start wearing crowns and hats. 3D environments also suffer from this repetition, with dungeons in particular feeling generic.

These short dungeons are where most of Farmagia's action takes place. They're quite roguelike-ish, as each maze has a predetermined layout that gives you the chance to find random upgrades for your monsters. While the latter allows a little bit of experimentation and monster team-building, the former is not the game's strongest aspect, as the maze designs follow a shallow pool of patterns, with a couple of common areas where a few waves of enemies appear.

While you're fighting those enemies, you can't overshadow how superficial the combat and character power progression feels. In Farmagia, monsters are the equivalent of weapons and skills. There are only twelve monsters that we can equip and, besides their colour and some having the capacity to inflict debuffs, it's difficult to understand their strengths and weaknesses in battle. Sure, we can use other monsters but only as a skill for the twelve. We can't have a small army of large dragons following us.

One should not expect a complex fighting system when you do brave that small army of monsters, though. You don't perform flashy combos or test your skills with a specific character. All battles boil down to timing parries to charge the Fusion Buddy – an overpowered summon-like attack you unlock and upgrade by deepening your relationship with Elemental Spirits – and maintaining your monsters' uptime by using United form skills. It's simple, but it works. What impressed us most about combat is that it makes fights where forty to sixty of our monsters shoot projectiles and attack considerably large creatures, such as dragons and chimeras, a smooth experience. We had no performance issues when playing docked or handheld.

In the end, while Farmagia comes with all of the fantasy action RPG genre conventions one might expect, the game absolutely excels at delivering those tropes. This collaboration between the studio and Hiro Mashima produces a fun, heart-warming, good-vs-evil experience that made us feel like we've experienced a fun, light-hearted anime.