Spiritfarer
Released: August 18, 2020
Game Length: 23 Hours
Grade: C
Expectations: One of my favorite reviewers decided to pick this obscure title out of the blue one day and become "emotionally engaged" with what it had to offer. I figured a $30 game with more than 20 hours with colorful and wholesome characters would be a perfect game to try out.
First Impressions: Going into the game was a breath of fresh air. That Charon fellow that took souls on a boat ride is retiring and assigned you of all people to take the job. You can practically do whatever you want since you do not sleep and do not tire-out. You always have a smile on your face as your optimistic attitude takes you across tiny little isles like Legend of Zelda: Windwaker to pick-up passengers of all kinds. The first three you come across personally know you and are very encouraging to your cause. Not long does it take you to learn all the mini-games they have to offer: fishing, weaving, catching lightning, cooking, cutting logs, grabbing jellyfish, building, and growing crops. There is a whole emotional-support system through feeding your pals the food they like, giving them hugs, and hearing about their needs. Soon enough, they will be wanting a house all to themselves on your little boat and three home-decorating improvements. There is little penalty for being negligent in your duties: food never burns, people can starve for days, and crops will still grow without use of your handy watering pail or guitar. You don't freeze when dropping into icy water or die from falling from a ten-story building. A second player can take control of your pet cat Daffodil and assist in almost everything you can do except conversing with others. If you don't have a friend, then the cat is still a lovable companion to which you can pet and watch as it follows you around everywhere.
The Problem: Despite my initial feelings in the first five hours, the game actually turned sour when more activities were required from me. You continuously upgrade your boat larger and with more features that I felt overwhelmed with the number of things I had to do. Not only was I restricted in what I could improve, but I wasn't free to explore the entire ocean anymore. I couldn't even freely explore islands as certain resources and objects stretched too far from my grasp. I needed more passengers to upgrade my abilities, but finding them was a problem in itself. Three on board was bad enough, but try tackling six members at a time. Your ship starts to feel silly when you have 20 buildings stacked on top of each other. I could continue to work after the sun went down if my passengers would stop snoring for one night! Then I realized that you don't actually solve your passenger's problems. You're like a psychiatrist or a care provider that listens to them talk while they slowly die. Some of my passengers were ruthless in their activities while others merely accepted defeat. From the foul language some spouted out to the activities you help them with, I can say that this most certainly is not a children's game.
Depreciating Factor: The more I played the game, the more I realized how the quality of its content began to deteriorate near the final stretches of the map. A couple of passengers didn't change from a shade to their animal form when stepping on the boat as if the entire sequence was left out. You could explore giant buildings without a single thing to do in any of them. The last bit of islands you could explore were actually tiny compared to the rest of the game. Even though there were more people to converse with, it felt like they had even less to say. The passengers themselves barely spoke to you - maybe a paragraph or a single story - as you completed each task. I would have liked for them to have more actual conversations other than the general scripted responses to my actions. Maybe have them speak with each other in the background on occasion?
Lacking Features: I found it interesting that with the large amount of things to do there wasn't a better way to find things. The crops and trees might display what you planted, but they do not show you when they are ready to be pulled. There might be a "fast travel" system through a funny bus seal, but it doesn't show the names of the locations. Actually, the only way to see the names of the islands and what they contain is by being present on your boat when it is running during the day. This means you can't see what secrets still remain while on the island or peruse the spots on the map without "picking a destination" from your cabin. You are able to see what locations you need to go through your quest log, but forget about trying to find where it is without going through every single location on the map... that is if you actually discovered it beforehand and able to visit it. Your mail log gets cluttered with old messages and your recipe book looks like it was designed by your grandma without ordering them alphabetically or by type. So anytime I wanted to look up Grilled Chicken or Loneburg, I had more success looking at the wiki and pulling up a map online.
Item Demands: This sort of brings up my second problem with the game. It has this habit of creating huge quest chains without fully explaining what you have to do to complete them. One day my frog companion suddenly wanted Pork Chops. "I remember some place town in the west," I told myself as I looked for the isle of Furogawa. Then he wanted Grilled Chicken, and I had absolutely no idea how to make it. The only thing I knew was the recipe he gave me: grilled chicken required two things from me - chicken and fat. What constitutes as a "Fat" item? Can you believe its Olive Oil or Sunflower Oil? To get sunflower oil, I needed to grow and crush sunflowers. To build a crusher, I needed to get another passenger to offer me the blueprints. I also needed to buy sunflower seeds and chicken from Nordweiler. To pass the ice blocking that town, I needed to upgrade my ship. This in turn required me to fulfill the needs of yet another passenger. And around and around we go. Does anyone on this boat know where to get "silk fabric" for this one improvement I need to make to this house? I need to buy a Mulberry Seed from Oxbury nestled behind some rocks that - you guessed it - requires a ship upgrade. Oh wait, I need to learn how to build an orchard from another passenger that requires "Nebula Thread." How do I get that? I slowly got to about the 15 Hour marker when I finally just gave-up.
Opinion: I came into the game wanting to hear some wonderful stories from a bunch of passengers as I explored the open sea. I thought that I might be able to resolve their problems overtime as I built wonderful houses for them to stay in and feed them the best cuisine I could produce. What I got instead was a huge, vague crafting grind-fest that would make Stardew Valley look the other way in shame. The art design is nice, but it didn't help save the main problem of how everything was locked behind everything else. I most definitely suggest people to stay away from this game.
12-22-2020