fields of mistria is officially out!
as a player since the launch of the early access about a year ago, i've been looking forward to the full release of FOM for a while now. it's surreal to see it finally here, to see all the parts that were progress-capped early in my playthrough or abandoned buildings get addressed, and the game now feeling "whole".
again, long-time player, so i'm going into this 1.0 release and my fresh playthrough with 1.0's features with intimate knowledge of the game. i wanted to dump a few thoughts that i have on the game, the newest features, and any notes i'd provide if i were to recommend this game to someone.
the cow in the room (get it it's like elephant but it's on a farm and
the game is a Cozy™️ farm-life simulator. the common comparison is stardew valley, and it's not a particularly far reach. you farm, you raise animals, socialize with your community, explore a multi-level cave with ore and monsters, etc.. so when playing FOM for the first time, i found myself making mental stardew comparisons all the time. "oh, so this is how combat works, interesting... feels smoother than stardew" or "this feels a bit different from stardew's material collection"
stardew is another game i've invested lots of hours in so i will frequently compare FOM to that. spoilers, but FOM is slowly surpassing my stardew playtime, and my points in this little review will probably help explain why!
of course, FOM doesn't have the gradual update history stardew has. i wasn't following stardew day 1, so i can't 100% confidently compare if stardew 1.0 had the same level of features compared to FOM 1.0. but so far, with how FOM is structured, i'd say it's a more casual/beginner friendly take on the farm game renaissance stardew started with its launch
(i suppose it's worth noting that i have not sunken my teeth in many other farm games. notably, i have yet to give the harvest moon series or its post-divorce successor story of seasons a shot, which is sort of the granddaddy of this genre. so that's especially why stardew will be my main point of reference)
the depths in which you can automate your farm and blow up your daily profits are nowhere near as crazy (and slightly amoral) as stardew. there's no machines to process your crops into something more profitable, and sprinklers are a bit of a late-game item that need constant upkeep in order to function (they only get truly hands-free, again, very late in your progress). as such, your experience will be a bit quainter. maybe you'll prioritize making your fields look more aesthetic and arranged. unlike stardew, you can actually designate which parts of land are plantable with a shovel (which can then be hoed to plant crops; without hoeing, you can use the shovel to create dirt paths, which is fun). using a shovel costs stamina (not to mention the cost of buying it), so expanding your farmland is also a slower process, even as you clear the debris off your farm.
i was somewhat lying when i said there were no machines in this game. you can process your crops into something more profitable: cooking them into meals! this requires extra ingredients like animal products and ingredients from the store/treasure chests. this might seem daunting at first when you don't have cooking levels to make more complicated recipes or the recipes in the first place, but this was how i generated money by the fistfuls by my late game. there's also a perk you can unlock that lets you turn 4 of any crop into a decorative piece of furniture for slight profit. it's beneficial to craft them into these furniture because there's a crafting perk that lets products sell for more, refund materials, or even produce duplicates. i'll get to the cooking/crafting mechanics later.
so all this to say... you won't really be rolling in cash for a while, and i think FOM wants you to accept that and take things slow. i'm a min-maxer in stardew; if i'm not planting for achievement completion, i always make a monoculture of the hottest cash crop of the season and send my harvest into my factory of wine pressers. and since, in the standard farm, all farmland in fair game once you clean up, i planted everything in rigid squares. since FOM... i guess had lesser stakes? and a lot of the promotional material shows a glammed up/organized farm with a bunch of crop types, i tried to emulate that and try planting one of every crop every season, not exhaust every inch of my land with productivity. and i feel like i've enjoyed that lack of pressure for maximum profits throughout the early game.
now, don't get me wrong: things will cost a lot of money. house upgrades and expanding your farm in particular can get pricey, not to mention crops that yield produce every few days being very expensive to buy in bulk when you're starting out. but again, i think, if i could go back and tell my past self one thing about this game before going in (and already predisposed to compare it to stardew), it's to take it slow and try focusing on expressing yourself instead of moneymaking.
so that's overall that's how i feel about the farming aspects. i never really had more than 100k tesserae on me at a time, and that was only thanks to being so late in the game that i ran out of stuff to buy. that sort of profit builds up slowly unless you do the endgame profit-maxer tricks like cooking and crafting.
as for cooking and crafting, that's also kind of a slow-burny aspect you'll have to embrace. you unlock and learn recipes for both as you explore the world and level up. crafting can make practical items like treasure chests, but it's primarily characterized by making furniture. you're given lots of cute recipes for furniture... but i remember getting frustrated at first because my level was too low to craft certain things right away and lacking disposable materials to make them. it's thanks to crafting that you're encouraged to hoard everything you pick up. there's lots and lots of forage in this game, and more often than not, it's likely used for something involving crafting. something you might even want! so, as someone who usually sold everything i found off the ground for scraps of cash back in stardew, this was another new mindset i had to embrace going in. again, less profit-focused and more materials-focused, ya know? that's just how i see it anyway. and cooking, to me, felt insurmountable, since there are lots of ingredients to keep track of/hoard, and you can only make so much at a low level. however, once i found out you can one-to-one process certain items, such as fruit, into a cooked recipe for a better profit (like one apple -> one apple juice), that's how i was able to stack up my cooking level, and it encouraged me to hold onto my apples more. cooking also has the perk of being a shoe-in gift for anyone. all the villagers have a ton of gifts they're favorable of... most of it is meals. and one of the perks you get as you raise your cooking score is the chance to create meals that are universal liked or loved gifts. which further encouraged interacting with that mechanic. it's pretty neat!
speaking of the villagers, now is a good time to transition to another aspect of the game i ended up quite liking. i promise it won't be as rife with stardew comparisons, lol.
interacting with the world
a central mechanic you unlock early on is "essence". basically, the old dragon that rests in the land has his essence scattered around mistria, and any physical action you do: planting/watering crops, breaking rocks, fishing, slaying monsters... you will sometimes get a drop of essence. this essence is a separate currency that allows you to upgrade each of your skills as you level them up. every 15 or so levels in each skill, you unlock a tier with their own set of perks, and how you spend your essence and what skills you focus on is all up to you. you could even do a self-imposed challenge run where you don't acknowledge this at all! late-late in the game, when you've done enough to the point where you have thousands of essence drops and nothing to spend it on, you'll still be able to use them for a variety of things. they can be used to fast-travel from certain areas and be pressed into "essence stones" which power the machinery for your farm like sprinklers and auto-petters (i use "machinery" a little loosely, since these things are powered magically by the essence. FOM has a more fantasy/magical approach to its world which i'm quite fond of). it's pretty satisfying to be hard and work and be rolling in essence drops by the end! and it's further encouragement to interact with the systems of the game.
another thing that i believe successfully encourages interacting with the systems and world are the actual villagers. your new neighbors in mistria have had some discussion during the early access period. some have criticized them for being a bit too nice and cheerful right out the gate, and i totally see where they're coming from. with the exception of two potential datemates who have a more hard-to-get appeal, everyone is more or less jazzed to see a new neighbor arrive in town. this can make the game a bit toothless or overly saccharine. and that type of vibe might not be what people particularly like in a social sim, even one marketed as Cozy.
it reminds one of what's been going on with animal crossing, the other cozy game i've played the shit out of. very famously, the modern titles have scaled back the intensity of villager dialogue drastically. perhaps the vibes of 2001 contributed, but the first animal crossing on the gamecube was downright cruel, with villagers straight up insulting you or bossing you around. the idea behind this intensity was to clearly demonstrate you getting on your new neighbors' good side. at first you, a nobody stranger who just moved in, is treated a bit coldly by the residents of the town who don't know you, and as you interact with the villagers, they warm up and finally start treating you normally. compare that to the newest title, new horizons, where everyone not only has the overall blanket personality trait of Nice (spiced up by the individual personalities, which at least 2 must be recycled if you're town's at-capacity), but tends to repeat the same dialogue all the time.
the thing with new horizons' script is not that it's thin and thus causes the repetitious dialogue. villagers actually have a lot to say! but it's heavily context-dependent and not always correlated to your friendship level (which is not heavily encouraged because those villagers are a bit plain). they'll have something new to say if you catch them shopping or walking through a specific room at the museum. but again, it's context dependent, you have to be at the right place at the right time to see it. most players just talk to their villagers once a day to get it over with, causing them to repeat their canned "good morning!" line over and over.
i think what makes mistria stand out from animal crossing's gradual niceness is that, while everyone is very positive and friendly, they certainly are not repeating dialogue any time soon. sure sure, you will see repeat lines if you don't make progress in the game or friendship levels, but the villagers' dialogue scripts are actually really in-depth. whenever you donate any item in the museum, at least one person will have something to say about it. when you view a heart event when you get closer to someone, all of the NPCs involved in that heart event will have commentary on what happened even after the scene ends. villagers can even talk to each other directly, producing fun character interactions when you look out for it. villagers will also commentate when you unlock more parts on the map, such as opening the secret woods and finding some lore information about one of the characters'. not to spoil too much, but all of the older residents, the ones who aren't dateable and are therefore slightly less prioritized in the script, all have dialogue explaining the context, allowing you to figure out some backstory by interacting with your neighbors.
what i'm saying is, fields of mistria's npcs might seem bland at first, but they don't feel super canned or one-note. not repeating dialogue constantly seriously helps a lot. because npcs have new things to say as you explore the world, donate to the museum, befriend characters & view heart events, you're encouraged to keep engaging with the world and be rewarded with more dialogue and scenes. to dig up stardew again... that game's dialogue has a bit of bite to it, yes. no one's as mean as old-school animal crossing, but some villagers do give you the cold-shoulder at first. not to mention that the rare player dialogue choices can be kind of crazy, from mundane to clearly the correct answer to fully callous. part of stardew's humor i believe is the juxtaposition in these dialogue options that vary wildly in tone and likeability. but stardew struggled with dialogue variety. you could only really talk to a character once per day and their dialogue repeats fast. i believe, between my two Cozy Game Specialties, FOM is sorta in the middle when it comes to dialogue. less blunt than stardew but more varied than both, and if the niceness of npcs is up your ally, you'll get a lot of mileage from these characters. not to mention the art style and character designs are awesome! i seriously love mistria's art direction. that makes a good segue to....
presentation and feel
fields of mistria has a very retro anime feel to it. juniper in particular feels like she's ripped straight out of a sailor moon rogue's gallery. the soundtrack exemplifies this as well. far from a music expert to diagnose specific terms, but the uber synthesized instruments do a lot to enhance the sort of retro and almost nostalgic feel of the game. i quite adore the soundtrack, and as of 1.0 some of the daily themes each season even got rearranged and extended. unfortunately, the official youtube channel has not added songs from updates after the first early access launch, such as those of the deeper mines or those rearranged day themes, and similarly gamerips on piracy sites are not up-to-date. not helped by the fact that the game recently made the individual audio files a hell of a lot less accessible in the game's directory; you used to be able to just scoop the .ogg files. now they're a lot less convenient to access, probably to prevent piracy or to sell the soundtrack at a later date.
and to that i ask........ WHICH LATER DATE? i want the soundtrack. i want it bad. i really do love it and feel like it has a perfect place in my Cozy Writing Playlist. it's a farm game ost after all so come on dude. i was expecting an announcement or a shadow drop of the full ost now that the game is fully out of early access, but i didn't hear any such announcement. i would pirate the soundtrack, i'm not above that, if the gamerip sites i rely on were up to date, but they're not. but more importantly, i'd totally buy the soundtrack because i like it. but it's not available for purchase!! hell, the wiki is outdated too, and that place has all the audio files there.
hopefully something comes up, because this is kinda the thing that feels... i guess the most "incomplete" with FOM's full release. it's kind of a race between which comes first: the gamerip sites being up-to-date so i can pirate it or an official means to buy it and support the team. chop-chop, guys.
as for the general gamefeel, i am quite obsessed. your movement is very speedy, probably thanks to the maps being quite large, and eventually you unlock... essentially an outdoor-only dash button that's quick and easy to use. the combat also feels very fluid, greatly helped by the detail in the sword-swinging animations and some techniques you unlock as you progress your combat levels.
i think some of the combat suffers from the enemies you fight being a tad too gimmicky. there's an enemy that can only be damaged when it's open, and that window occurs when you're not facing it, sorta like the boos from mario. it can be a bit tedious when you wanna get these guys out of your way but have to play along with their gimmick to do so (you can't fish reliably in the mines if there are monsters nearby, which is necessary for museum completion and quests). i also freakin hate these enemies that shoot rocks at you. you can't attack them head-on, they'll tank all the damage. you instead need to beat them by rebounding their projectiles with your sword. it's pretty fun and satisfying when it works, but in close-quarters situations or too many rocks in the way, these guys are annoying to deal with since their projectiles will get destroyed right away. definitely my least favorite enemies from the mines.
last thing of note on feel... the biggest criticism of the game at launch, from what i've seen, is that performance can kind of shit the bed sporadically. i've experienced this throughout early access and in 1.0---apparently there was a sudden engine change at some point which might have fucked with optimization, but it's still.... bad. i have a mediocre laptop, yes, but despite being a sprite-based game, there are moments where the game slows to a crawl and i get scared it's about to crash (which has happened to me before during early access... hopefully these were patched, but i've had a plural amount of times where the game crashed after i went down into the mines and it wasn't fun! those incidents did cause me to drop off the game until the next major update). so, if you're at all interested before or after reading this review, this is the biggest thing you ought to be warned of going in.
i guess i'll throw in a conclusion
overall, i really like fields of mistria. i'm starting a fresh save to see how the game feels and is paced as intended with all 1.0 content implemented, rather than playing the game in fragments per update. so i can't say i can fairly attest if the game feels "complete" without a bit of bias in some direction. i recommend the game, yessir! just be wary of lag. the only thing i want urgently addresses i WHERE IS THE FUCKING SOUNDTRACK PLEEEASE I WANT TO BUY......
that's all, hopefully this helps paint a better picture of the game for ya :)