CedarForrester

One of my favourite and more replayed games of all time - I have so many hours in this game. The gameplay is fun and can get quite challenging if you like min-maxing it. There is a lot of different things you can be spending your time on: farming, decorating, animal rearing, fishing, processing wine/jams, cooking, foraging, chopping trees, mining, slaying monsters, finding artifacts, filling the museum, completing bundles, befriending villagers, completing quests/requests, exploring/unlocking new areas. There are so many interesting villagers to befiend and learn their backstories, with their own little cutscenes for important heart events. You can also choose one to romance, marry, move in together and even choose to have children. There is also a plethora of other interesting cute characters such as the forest bear, Juminos and friendly monsters. There are a lot of areas to explore, with fully designed houses for every character, and different biome regions such as the forests, rivers, mountains, caves and later on the dessert and island. You can better explore this by progressively unlocking shortcuts and faster transport methods such as horseriding, the bus and willy's boat. There are different seasonal events with minigames and rewards to obtains, such as; the nightmarket with its deep sea fishing, the **** fair with its fairground minigames and the halloween'esc event with its spooky maze. Some of these even have different variations as the years progress. The game also keeps getting new updates that add even more content. In addition it has a thriving mod community that adds infinately more content and replayability to the game - **** Valley Expanded and Ridgeside being some of the biggest mods that add lots of new areas and villagers to the world that feel natural additions to the base game. The developer also keeps an eye on the popular quality of life mods that the players like and has added a lot of them to the base game already!

This game is abysmal, especially for a new generation console. To put it simply it is ugly to look at and boring to play. The map is very small and empty. It's only set in one city, with no distinctively unique areas to explore. Like how did we go from maps with distinct, diverse biome and numerous towns to this! It feels more like a basic brick wall maze due to the flat blurry textured buildings on non-explorable buildings. One of the most lazy map i've seen to date. The city also feels incredibly dead. There are barely any dynamic decorations such as driving cars to make it feel like people actually live and work there. The NPCs are static and still have no voice acting - they just stand around like statues. As for the pokemon it is once again just re-used assets with minimal animations or distinct behavior to actually make the pokemon feel like real living creatures. Also they pre-launch payed dlc designed to milk even more money out of you, which locks content that should of just been in the game behind a paywall. You are also kinda forced into their pvp mechanic with some of the mega evolutions being locked behind pvp completion. The only think I feel I continously enjoy in modern pokemon games is their character designs and music/sound design. Honestly games from 20 years ago look and play better than this game. Even older Pokémon games are better than this! Not to mention the ridiculous price tag for the amount of content you actually get!

This game is adorable! The only complaints i have about it are the somewhat all over the place controls and sometime the translations (the game is originally korean I believe) are a little strange or mess up the sentence structure. The game has adorable characters, in depth villager stories, village cats you can befriend, customisable broomsticks, house decorating, crafting/using/selling potions, diverse map locations to explore, interesting wildlife to interact with and catelogue, is good for people that like collecting/completionis, relaxing music, good story progression and an interesting mystery to solve! Overall I put it up there with games like ****!