Fields of Mistria review: A boring, soulless Stardew reskin
Fields of Mistria review: A boring, soulless Stardew reskin
BEFORE DOWNVOTING ME, PLEASE READ: This is my opinion, you can disagree with it all you want, but it would be really nice to at least respect what I have to say just the same as I respect that people really enjoy this game
I played this game before I started Stardew Valley, I have never played either of them, the look and feel of Stardew did not really appeal to me. So I decided to try this game. Instantly love the anime style characters and graphics of the game, love the color palette, love the world design. It's beautiful. So that was what really drew me in...
They made the game way too easy so it's not even remotely challenging at all. There is so much unnecessary silly hand holding in this game. I wasn't expecting something sweaty and hardcore but seriously, anytime you plant a crop and harvest it for the first time you get the recipe for it in the mail. Like what? We can't even just go to a place and just browse for recipes normally, it's just given to you automatically in the mail for no reason.
Lots of things in this game are like this, as well. No effort put into getting anything, everything's just handed to you given to you or spoon-fed to you. This makes it very boring because you don't get to just wander around and explore and find stuff at vendors or look online or elsewhere to try and figure out how to do something. Even certain major things like crafting or blacksmithing... You can just do it right out the gate with no training, and no need to wait any time at all for the blacksmith to craft it.
There are too many similarities to Stardew, making it feel copy pasted. Again I played this game first, but I knew that Stardew was out there before this game was. So after playing this game and pretty much doing everything that there was to do, I decided to try Stardew Valley since that game is mostly complete and finished, this game is early access and will change... I was shocked to find out that they pretty much copied huge aspects of Stardew and didn't even try to do anything differently.
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The mine system and the elevators, they literally carbon copied Stardew Valley verbatim. You go into the mine and break rocks and then a ladder appears, then you unlock the mine level every five levels. They didn't even try to do anything different just copied it.
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The museum. Wow like... They just copied it exactly wtf? There's literally nothing different.
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Some characters are too similar to Stardew. Abigail, the purple-haired girl in Stardew is the most popular to romance. Who is the most popular one in this game? Juniper, another purple-haired lady. Celia, blonde lady, very similar to Haley. I could go on for about 5 minutes about this but I won't. Just look, too many similarities
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Seasons. Why are they the exact same? They didn't even try to do anything differently.
There's virtually no passion at all put into Fields of Mistria
Concerned ape, developer of Stardew, has a whole beautiful backstory about how he came to develop one of the most popular indie games in the world. It wasn't his first game that he developed, and it was extremely difficult, challenging, a very long-winded effort for him to develop the entire game, and get it to be state that it is in today. A true passion project and the more you hear about it and see the changes made to the game over time, the more you can understand how freaking passionate he was about the game.... This is nowhere to be found in Fields of Mistria! There is no intricate story of how the game was a labor of love, or how hard they worked to bring the game to life. All you can find when looking at their website is that it's developed by a huge team of people, and a huge amount of marketing hype, game streaming videos where they showcase the game. There's nothing inspiring, or beautiful, or gripping about the development of the game. It's just a generic indie game that looks really cool. To me, this was really disappointing. It just feels like there's some mid-sized gaming company behind this, and that's the end of it.
There's virtually nothing to find or discover on your own
Due to the insane amount of hand holding and early access status, and the fact that they just basically copied all the main parts of Stardew Valley, there's virtually nothing to find or discover on your own.
In Stardew, there are huge amount of things that I was able to discover on my own just wandering around or purely by chance, which made the game so much more exciting and enjoyable. For example, there was randomly this thing called Green rain, it's raining green, no explanation for it but people in town are like scared of it and huddled up in the local tavern, and Moss grows all over trees and stuff like that. Pretty awesome. There's also a spa that you are not introduced to You can just basically stumble onto it on your own and it restores all your energy.
Fields of Mistria has literally nothing right now that you can find or stumble onto by chance. Even stuff like a destroyed bridge, you get a quest and hand holding, you don't even repair it yourself.
Community team is non-existent
I barely hear of any updates from the community team. All I have seen over the past several months are marketing hype videos, streaming, updates but not on a platform most people use. People don't use x or Twitter or whatever the hell it is. So it's hard to follow the game's updates. They have an entire team of people listen on the website, but can't be bothered to actually connect with the community and actively work with them like Concerned Ape who makes Stardew does. I asked if it were possible for them to post updates on a platform that people actually use. Reddit? Meta's threads? Facebook? I mean they have a discord but it's a community discord, and they have nothing to do with it, they hardly ever react or reach out to anyone there. There's just no community presents at all other than trying to grab people's attention and get them to try the game. That to me sounds like a cash grab. Like, they don't really care about the people who have purchased it and are holding on for future updates, they just want to get as many people to get it as possible
Summary
I give Fields of Mistria a 4/10. It's lovely looking, but why would I want to play a low effort copy and paste of another game that came first?
TLDR:
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Graphics: Attractive anime-style visuals and color palette
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Lacks any challenge, overly simplistic. Constant handholding removes any sense of choice.
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Copy-Pasted Stardew Mechanics: Mining, museum, seasons, and characters feel blatantly lifted from Stardew Valley with almost no originality.
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Passionless Development: Feels like a corporate indie product with no genuine vision or passion behind it.
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Weak Community Engagement: Dev team’s communication is poor and scattered across low-traffic platforms, hinting at more interest in marketing than in actual player connection.
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Limited Discovery: Exploration is nonexistent; everything is handed to the player, stifling any real sense of adventure.
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Overall: Fields of Mistria is a 4/10. visually decent but ultimately a hollow, uninspired Stardew Valley clone. Nothing to justify its cost
Everyone can have their own opinion, but I also encourage everyone to form their own opinion.
In my book the game‘s a fantastic 7/10 cozy game. I don‘t think the game‘s passionless at all. Every Friday evening I‘m in the bar checking what the townfolk is up to and the content is already enough for me to be satisfied for the ten-ish bucks I‘ve paid, the promise of future content is just the cherry on top.
I wouldn‘t recommend this over SDV to someone who hasn‘t played SDV yet, but for someone who‘s done with it, I‘d recommend giving Mistria a shot. Not every game has to be a 200 hours timesink for me, and an hour in Mistria before bed is really just cute, fun, and relaxing - a great cozy game.
Not to belittle Stardew, a game I adore, but Stardew is itself very much cribbed, as a desperately needed spiritual successor to the Harvest Moon/Rune Factory games. I don’t intend on checking out fields of mistria so I’ll just take your word on the rest.
If you are looking for Stardew-likes, I have been enjoying Coral Island. Full disclosure, I think it's bullshit they they market it as version "1.1" when it is so very clearly not finished, but honestly after 400+ hours in Stardew I've been enjoying it despite its very present jank.
If Stardew is a 10/10 for me, I'd give Coral Island a 6.5/10 and mind you that's on a real 0-10 scale, not the 5-10 scale usually used lol.
See Coral Island is so cute and unique that I personally felt it was just perfect. It wasn't so closely resembling SDV that I felt like I was playing a bootleg version haha
Yes, I love its characters and some of the ways it diverged from Stardew. But it has a lot of undeniable jank and is objectively unfinished. Mind you that hasn't stopped me from approaching 100 hours in it, but I would feel dishonest not mentioning it.
First of all this is a lot of text and I appreciate all the effort you have taken to express your opinion.
There are some points I would like to comment on even if I have not played the game myself. Firstly there is the Aspect of effort. While I can see how beeing on your own or exploring can be a rewarding experience, it creates the tense setting where the developer needs to assess exactly how much effort a player will put into the game. And personally I feels a game like this is mainly cozy and should not put up barriers in front of the player.
Secondly I don't blame devs for not beeing active on social media with the community. Especially when your game is rather small this task can be really mentally exhausting and we all know how easily people get toxic on the Internet. Not everyone wants to put themselves out there, maybe they dislike the attention. They became a developer and not a social media manager after all.
Secondly I don't blame devs for not beeing active on social media with the community. Especially when your game is rather small this task can be really mentally exhausting and we all know how easily people get toxic on the Internet.
I took fault with that as well.
I am a developer who makes games on the side. I mostly do gamejams and release games on itch.io. It's a pretty positive community.
But I did get one comment (only one) that some troll told me to stick to my day job. Like I am? I do this to create art and fun, and make bank working a boring software job. I put all my passion into making this game in a short gamejam window.
I know some fans love reading about "the struggle". They see the developer eating ramen and crunching 160 hours as passion. To me, that's abuse. Because survivors bias, there are people with 100x the passion but their game doesn't sell.
Everyone who puts out a game is doing it for different reasons. You have no idea if the dev team was crunching late hours while their child was dying from cancer. Or if they were coding this on their golden yacht using AI bots. To judge them because they don't share that as not having passion?
It's a toxic metric and would strongly recommend removing it.
First of all this is a lot of text and I appreciate all the effort you have taken to express your opinion.
Apologies, still new to the posting style here on Lemmy. It cut off the TLDR which I have added back in
There are some points I would like to comment on even if I have not played the game myself
I don't get it. How can you provide your commentary on something you have never experienced? Like, I get what you're saying and respect to your opinions but like... You kind of have to try it and live through it for a little while to really get it.
Secondly I don't blame devs for not beeing active on social media with the community. Especially when your game is rather small
If you look at their actual team website, they have a huge team. I think there's no excuse for them to have no community presence, considering that concerned ape is just one person, he's just one dude developing the entire thing himself and he has been very vocal and very active. Their website shows that they have at least 10 members on their team, and they barely interact with the community. It just feels like a cash grab when you take that into account. Sorry if that sounds harsh but it is what it is
My comment about the lenght was not a critisism. I appreciate details about your opinion.
I wanted to comment under your post because some of your points don't feel specific to the game and I think my opinion might offer you a different view. Also this is a social platform and I just like to interact with people who take the time to express their opinions.
I still disagree with you point about community managers. Just because Concerned Ape is a stellar developer who likes to interact with poeple doesn't mean everyone need to do it his way. There are so many devs who got swarmed by toxicity, not wanting to potentially deal with that is perfectly valid.
Upvoted because It seems like somebody doesn't understand the concept of an opinion and downvoted you for it. Thanks for the review.
People just don't like what they hear. I wanted to like the game, I really did. But I just can't
Impressions from watching someone play it: it looks like a clone of Stardew Valley. The music isn't terrible but I wouldn't say it's good. Some mechanics from Stardew Valley that weren't easy enough were changed, like fishing. I'm not sure that's bad for everyone, it can just be a casual game to relax.
it can just be a casual game to relax.
Fair point. I didn't find it relaxing, it just felt like a gutted version of Stardew that treats me like I'm not smart enough to figure anything out. Everything has an unskivable tutorial like blacksmithing and cooking. You can't buy any of your own basic recipes. It just sends them to you automatically in the mail, which is extremely annoying because it undermines player choice. That's what was kinda annoying to me. Maybe if it was more like old-school RuneScape it would be more relaxing ? That game has no recipes, you just level up and know the recipe by default.