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I hope you really enjoy it!
I felt pretty similarly at the three hour mark. I hope you continue to feel that way throughout the rest of your playtime!
I wouldn't take this review as something to base your purchase on. It's not really that substantive, despite the long text. Not that it's wrong. Just not something I'd take into consideration as it is written.
Less than half of the characters made a lasting impression on me. My recommendation would be to add hundreds of new lines of dialogue, of characters talking to each other and sharing things about themselves--both about their backgrounds and showing their personalities through their words and actions. Give them a sense of agency, of "life" so to speak.
Some spoilers here: Gustav feels like a low spoiler example. You find out what he did in life... And that's all he is. You can read between the lines and see why Gustav is a bird, you get to help him get some closure, and you hear his worldview at the end... But, honestly, he never feels conflicted or held back, like he needs much help getting closure, nor does it feel like you form a friendship with him or learn much about him as a person except "long winded art guy." I spent time with him, "got" his character, but never got close to forming a real bond with him. And then he was gone.
Is that intentional? Possibly. Is that interesting and fun? Not in my opinion. Games can be and often are art... But art can be fun, too.
I'm sorry you didn't find my review useful. How would you recommend I improve it without including spoilers?
I've played until to moment when I just skip text because story is not interesting
The story is mainly in the characters dialogue. Other than that, no there doesn't seem to be a story. The Spirits are the story.
I understand this might be disappointing for someone looking for more of an emotional connection, of course. The game does superficially appear cutesy and heartfelt. For whatever reason, though, I don't have the patience to listen to these people's life stories. There's also an odd disconnect within the fictional world. The spirits behave as though they live here - on the islands, in the various towns and buildings. However, the things they reference make it pretty clear they're talking about a modern 21st Century Earth life. I can't quite tell what's a metaphor and what isn't and I hate metaphors in the first place, so playing the game like a management sim is a nice compromise :)
Yeah, that does seem like a pretty big "missed the mark" thing for what I thought the game was going for. I like what the game was aiming for with the demo during that last Steam event, but the sticker price for the game has me hesitant. I'll wait for the eventual sales discount instead of doing the day 1 buy.
And for what it's worth, Nom, I found your review to be fair, well-articulated, and very helpful. Thank you for taking the time to add your two cents.
Agreed! I just wish there were more than 3-4 spirits who could get me invested at all, unlike how the majority of players seem to feel. And, when they introduced a "story" for Stella they didn't deliver IMO, so another disappointment for myself and my coop friend.
It's interesting to see you and DarkHulk both feel pretty similarly about them. I could see how my "disappointed with what I got" feeling could be just plain "bored" for some other people.
Personally I like well-utilized metaphor and artsy stuff like that... But I also agree that the world makes no sense, in immersion breaking, "Why?" ways, rather than interesting ways.
I appreciate that, Jean, thank you! I hope you have more fun than we did; considering the reviews, it seems odds are in your favor. I just wanted to share my feelings for people who happened to research their way to the discussion board and read my wall of text. I'm glad it was useful to you.
Also I didn't enjoy that they don't really interact with each other all that much even though they're traveling together.
Also they have favorite meals and what not, but meal sizes don't matter that much. They only reject food they don't like or if you give them the same food too many times. Wish there was a mess hall or something for spirits to gather and talk.
Also they need to slow down on harvesting / apples / cereals its like --- ALL the time they need something to get done, like how can fruit just grow that fast.
Yeah, I seem to grow less patient the older I get. Don't get me wrong, I'm not immune to caring about fictional characters in a fictional setting. I think something about the presentation of Spiritfarar just doesn't appeal to me, however. The characters just aren't interesting - which is kind of the point. These are ordinary people having lived ordinary lives and carrying over their very ordinary memories. To me, this transitions them from "fictional characters" to "just people telling me their life stories." I just came out of a week-long hospital stay with a rotating cast of patience all retelling their life stories to me, even though I overwhelmingly don't care.
So for me, Spiritfarer reads like a job. I run the ship, I cook the meals, I handle accomodations, I make sure everyone's safe, happy and comfortable. Beyond that, though... Get them off my ship - in the nicest, most respectful way possible, ideally with a fond farewell. I try to keep tabs on who has what problems in their life, but I've already started skimming dialogue, not speaking with them unprompted and not hugging them that day if they refuse the morning hug. There's enough to do around the ship that I have neither the time nor inclination to work around their schedules.
Honestly, I kind of wish the "Has been recently hugged" buff wouldn't last a full 24 hours. This way, I could hug them every day at bell time even if I were a little late the previous day. In general, I wish most of their buffs reset when sleeping, not on strict timers. Wish they'd get hungry when they wake up, get sad when they wake up, lose positive influence when they wake up, etc. Give the game a bit more structire. Although this is probably an example of "playing it wrong." This isn't Factorio or XCOM, I'm not running a business.
It's just that for me, Spiritfarer is such a micromanagey game with so much to do that I barely get time for anything else. Sure, I could cut down on the chores since I have a massive backlog of meals and such, but I end up feeling closer to something like Papers, Please! than the Hayao Miyazaki movie this game is clearly trying to be. I want to care about you, Frog Man, but I don't need to hear that you want pork chops every day when I don't have the means to get you any!
I agree to most of your points. I really enjoyed the first hours of the game, while the last hours feel more like pain.
The game reminds me a bit on "Spirited Away" by Studio Ghibli and that is what I really love in this game. I really like how there is a subplot for most of the characters which is often quite hidden in the dialogues. But there could be so much more. The best moments in the game are when you understand, why Gwen is fearing her old villa, what is the meaning of the dragon, or what happened with Gustav. But this moments are quite rare and there could be much more story about the characters, hidden in metaphors.
Also I agree that the rest of the world is quite boring. Most of the dialogues with NPCs feel like non-sense dialogues in typical J-RPGs. For the "other side", the world looks way too normal. Most NPCs do not really feel like they are ghosts/spirits.
I won't say the game is bad. It's just, it could be much better. Its a really cool idea and a very interesting artistic style. I wished they would invest a bit more in the story and characters.
Yesterday I asked myself two questions: What's the draw of this game? What's the core gameplay loop? Unfortunately, the answers I came up with for these questions are incongruent, which creates a dissonant experience.
The main draw for Spiritfarer (near as I can tell, at least) are the visuals and the personal stories. This game is absolutely beautiful, from the high quality of the animation to the overwhelming cuteness of everything. Unfortunately, "cuteness" and "prettyness" have a shelf life. At this point, I've seen the majority of the game's animations many times over. They were adorable at first, but have now become rote. Spiritfarer would work very well as an animated movie, but as a game (and a clicker game to boot - I'll get to that), it undermines its own visuals. Moreover, the game is actually very sparsely animated, with Stella receiving most of the work and everyone else using simplistic, canned animations and still frames.
Another main draw is the personal stories of the individual passangers - their pain, their psychological hangups, their medical issues, their life stories. Clearly I'm not the target audience for these because I didn't find myself caring for the life stories of what amounts to "just ordinary people." The OP appears to have found issues along the same lines, seeing the characters as one-dimensional "books" rather than three-dimensional characters who interact with each other hand have reactions to their environment. For me, though, it's actually worse. Once I DID try to listen to these people's stories, I found them less "cute" and more "depressing." One lady suffers and eventually dies from cancer. Another lady clearly suffers from Altzheimer's. If you take it seriously, Spiritfarer is less a fantastical adventure and more "end of life care." I have an aging mother of my own. Perhaps that makes me biased but I really don't need to be reminded of this sort of inevitability.
So these are the draws - the animations and the characters. But what's the actual core gameplay loop? The animations and the characters are predominantly scripted, a vineer on top of a set of core gameplay mechanics? Unfortunately, I... Don't think there's much of a game here. At its core, Spiritfarer is a clicker game on the level of Farmville. It DOES have a fairly robust set of platforming mechanics with precious little platforming to actually do. It does have crafting, but resource acquisition predominantly involves simple minigames (catching jellies, catching lightning, catching pillbugs, etc.) or straight-up clicker minigames (sawmill, foundry, loom, etc.)
By and large, Spiritfarer is one giant fetch quest. Quite literally everything comes down to fetching the necessary resources and burning them to progress the story. So-and-so wants an upgrade to their house. Burn this much of this resource to do it. So-and-so wants gems. Burn this much of these resources to do it. So-and-so wants you to build a forge. Burn this much of these resources to get it. It doesn't matter what the narrative justification is, the meta-narrative experience is always the same - minigame to get resources, possibly minigame to process resources, click to spend resources.
Very little design seems to have gone into building a compelling or at the very least comfortable core gameplay loop in Spiritfarer. There is no automation of any kind, meaning increased complexity just means more busywork. Maybe sending spirits to the Everdoor could have automated the crafting building they were associated with? Like "sending" Guen could give me an automated loom? There's no real stat tracking to be found. If I want to know how Spirits feel, I have to track them down on-deck, which for a larger ship is just tedious. Hugs reset every 24 hours, meaning it's impossible to set up a schedule for one's self because hugs and food will constantly lag by a little. There's no system for tagging needed ingredits to track globally, there's no system to search for islands with a particular resource. I could go on, but my point is that Spiritfarer has a collection of very basic clicker game mechanics without an overall cohesive design behind how they fit together.
I find myself looking at this game like I'd look at something like Heliborne or Spintires - it's a great proof of concept on which a compelling game can be built, but not much of one currently exists because only very bare-bones mechanics have been implemented. As a result, moment-to-moment gameplay feels tedious and wasteful, while individual stand-out scripted set-pieces fail to make up for time spent, compelling though they may individually be. All of this compounts on itself, making what should be Howl's Moving Castle feel more like Papers, Please!
I don't know if this holds true for everyone, but I definitely feel I was well outside the game's target audience.