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And where does that make sense? Either the game ends at day 112 or it doesn't. It can't be both at once.
If a game has an ending then it ends the game completely. There is no turning back. And if ppl claim, you have to finish the story till day 112 and it still continues, what is the point of the countdown?
And that also shows that action adventure and farming sim don't mix well. An Action Adventure / RPG / Creature Collector doesn't need a day count and countdown. That's rather counter productive. That's some feature to limit the action time for a (farming-) simulation, so that ppl play "time efficient".
Harvest Moon on SNES had a limit of 2,5 years and then it ended. The last day was / is final! Either you were time efficient and productive and earned lots of lots of crops and breeded babies or you didn't. But in the end... those factors defined, whether you did a good job. You couldn't trick in terms of the time frame.
This here feels half-baken: it is lesser competitive than the original Harvest Moon! You can bore in your nose for 112 days and still continue the game. Tell me, where this makes sense?!
If I want action and adventure and that with... monsters like...
Pokemon
Digimon
Dragon Quest Monsters
Azure Dreams
Jade Cocoon
Revelations: Demon Slayer
The Shin Megami Tensei series
Gotcha Force (none-turn based)
Ni No Kuni
Monster Rancher
& all that modern pokemon-clones (cause ppl funnily only remember Pokemon)
& so on
...why would I want to play Moon Island? The other games are at least straight in their approach. I don't see what this here is.
It is honestly not quite clear to me where you see the problem. The vast majority of games (that aren't strictly focused on telling one particular story) let you play on after you finished the story, so that you can continue to do side quests, social interactions, collect anything you didn't already get, explore parts of the world you haven't seen yet, or just enjoy spending time in a wholesome, well-crafted world that you like being in. This fits well with the relaxing, positive, non-punishing approach that games in the "cozy sim" genre usually take.
You're talking about "competition" as if it were a good thing. And for you it might be. But the vast majority of the people who play "cozy sim" games, are not looking for competition. They look for entertainment, relaxation, fun, and a mild level of challenge at best. Moonstone Island fits these requirements pretty well, and a lot of people (including myself) are having a great time with it.
But yeah, if you're looking for "competition", then this is not a game for you, it was designed for a different audience. At this point I would usually recommend other games that may provide the experience you want, but the strange thing is - despite having played several dozens of "cozy sim" games over the years, I don't know of a single one that completely stops after a fixed time limit. That appears to be a feature that was dropped from the entire genre for good reason.
Yeah well, what is Moon Island then? cozy, JRPG-ish Farming Sim or some weirdo-action adventure / -RPG / -whatsoever?
If I want to play Counterstrike then I don't have to grow ammo-plants to prepare before starting into action, either. This here is simply no pure farming sim. Games like...
Harvest Moon
Story of Seasons
Animal Crossing
and maybe Stardew Valley (80:20)
...are those... pure "cozy", JRPG-ish farming sims. Rune Factory is another example for a game which doesn't make a clean cut between genres and therefore is kinda cheesy / banana.
If Moon Island is such a "cozy" game... why does it have a time-limit for its storyline? You don't explain, why it has that time limit. If the game has no purpose at all, cause you can continue forever... why are the story-parts bonded with day and time?
Other games simply let you discover the open world and let you encounter events. That makes more sense! It makes more sense, cause it doesn't stress you with a time limit.
And especially... this is extraordinarily funny, cause you state by yourself that it's a "fake time limit", cause you can play beyond day 112.
Means: you're stressing the people in advance. They shall hurry, till they find out, it was all a waste of time. That's... how it looks to me.
And... you're mis-analyzing it. I said...
means:
the game doesn't trick around with the time frame. What does a Farming Sim mean, when you can't fail?
In addition:
If it doesn't have any failing conditions at all, why didn't the developer choose...
"I AM CREATING A PURE & COZY FARMING SIM, NOW!!"? Why instead mixing in combat and creature collecting and card battling and all those features into this game along with a time-limit? A fake one, while the player doesn't know? And then... "yeah yeah, it's stilllllllllllll cozy. You just don't get it!" Hm?
If I recall, in some HM titles there are time limits for certain things as well. such as events or marriage candidates. Some of them also "ended" after the year three, and just like Moonstone Island you could continue in sandbox after the "end."
But games largely stopped shoehorning themselves into clear, separate categories decades ago. Many first-person shooters have adopted character progression systems from RPGs, platformers have adopted procedural generation from the Roguelike genre, the currently most successful genre (immersive sims) usually combines action, combat, puzzles, a progression system, and storytelling, which belonged to at least 3 completely different genres back in the 80s - and so on. Trying to fit modern games into a single category is not very useful, in my opinion, and only creates false expectations. So I'm not sure why you're asking that question in the first place, it doesn't seem to make sense in the categorical way you posited it.
No one claimed it were. Nor are any of the other games that you listed, by the way, as they all include elements beyond farming.
Well, that seems to be the root of the problem here. Apparently, you _want_ your games to stick to strictly defined genre boundaries, otherwise they feel "cheesy" to you.
This doesn't make much sense though. Apart from the fact that the reality of game development has clearly gone into a very different direction for decades, I'm actually very happy that such a strict system, which would unnecessarily limit the creativity of developers, limit the variety of new games we'd see, and limit the new experiences that players could get out of these games, does not exist. You're obviously free to want a more restrictive paradigm of game development, of course, but personally I'm very happy about the huge variety of imaginative, genre-crossing experiences that the contemporary gaming market is offering. :)
It's a story about a young adult who wants to become an alchemist, and (adhering to the culture they grew up in) goes on a one-year trip to get field experience. After that year, they become a real alchemist and there's a celebration scene, but they are of course free to embark on further adventures (or continue the ones you didn't yet finish). I don't see why you need further explanation than that, but perhaps this perceived need is the problem here. I also don't see why you think that an open-ended game "has no purpose at all" - the purpose of most games is to entertain and to give the player a good time, which open-ended games can achieve just as well as finite ones.
Look, you obviously haven't played the game. The game does not compel you to hurry in any way. If you want to talk about a game's design, it might be a good idea to, you know, play it for a bit? ;)
The game does follow a story that stretches across one year. Some players get this information from outside sources and then worry whether the game simply stops after that year, which is something that the vast majority of players wouldn't want. But that's easily solved by telling them that they can of course play on after the main story has ended. Obviously, a player that simply plays the game and doesn't read potentially misleading external sources, would never feel compelled to hurry in the first place.
I would suggest to either play the game so that you actually know what you're talking about, or decide that this game is not for you and move on. What you're currently trying to do here - judging a game on the basis of your _assumptions_ of what it might be doing -, seems inherently futile to me. But you're of course free to waste your time in any way you want. ;)
It means that a game simulates the experience of farming, but doesn't have a fail state. I don't see what about that would be difficult to understand - unless you somehow declare permanent unrecoverable fail states as a requirement for games that simulate farming. But that would be rather nonsensical, as the two concepts have no inherent logical connection in the first place, and lots of games simulate farming without having such fail states.
I'm sorry. It seems to me that you're kind of stuck in a terribly outdated definition of "genre" that, in reality, got deprecated decades ago. With expectations that are so far from the current reality of game design, and are also very far from the variety that the majority of the gaming audience appreciates, I'd imagine that you very frequently get disappointed by games, and also have trouble getting others to understand your outlier perspective. That's not a position I'd enjoy being in. Regardless, I do hope you find the games you're looking for. :)