Farmagia is a unique take on the monster-catching subgenre of JRPGS. It takes the usual trappings a farming game like Harvest Moon or Rune Factory would have, as well as being blended with games that include bombastic amounts of characters you control on screen like Pikmin or The Wonderful 101. In addition, it boasts a “shounen”-like aesthetic similar to something like Digimon.
Farmagia is the result if all these concepts were to be collected and thrown into a blender. It’s game that borrows the success of several other games. Companion monsters that assist the hero’s every word, born from seeds planted in a crop, which help you get more monsters by having an ever-growing retinue of the ones earned.
It’s also a charming waifu simulator to top it all off with the reward of gaining more power, achievable by fulfilling various challenges from one of many different waifus known as “elemental spirits”. Farmagia sets out to be a very ranged and exciting combination of several genres, all spun into a full-on action game waging war with monsters planted from the earth, in hopes of retaking the many regions that were ursurped by an ambitious villain.
Farmagia
Developer: Marvelous
Publisher: XSEED Games, Marvelous USA
Platforms: Windows PC (reviewed), PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch
Release Date: November 7, 2024
Price: $49.99
With so many concepts being mixed together, a unique experience is surely to be found. But sometimes when you mix and blend different things, you may not always end up with peanut butter and jelly. Fortunately, Farmagia is almost as tasty as peanut butter and Jelly.
The raw gameplay and combat system in Farmagia is a very repetative endeavour. Each of the 4 face buttons is mappable to up to four different monsters, which hold a quantity that the player can allocate depending on how many that specific monster is owned. If you own 40 of a certain monster, it is possible to go on a mission with 40 of them.
A lot of customization exists for you in how you can tailor your monster retinue, but the issue is that despite having all these choices, the combat itself feels very messy, and you never truly feel the reward from your decisions. Most battles will often play out where you endlessly spam press buttons until all your monsters are out. When waiting for a more important prompt to appear on screen, it allows for a fusion attack.
The concept of constantly sending monsters to attack is kind of fun at first, but it can get a little tiring having to button mashing to send more monsters out.
In most cases, the best way to do more damage is actually forcing your opponent to hit you with hopes of incurring a perfect guard. Landing perfect guards consistently, battles become easier as successful guards increase your special attack gauges.
Between battles, you will be able to select the many facilities available to help get stronger for the battles ahead. There are consumables to purchase at the shop and the farm itself, where the game begins to feel like any generic farming game having you use the till, water the soil, and drop seeds.
The waifu simulator facility that allows you to gain various passive upgrades by accomplishing their demands, and of course, as all should expect at this point, a mission board.
Farmagia is what some would say a “cozy” game, and by that I would certainly agree. You farm, you adventure, watch story cutscenes, rinse, and repeat. The cycle never changes from start to finish. The process of farming more monsters to try out is fairly rewarding as there are so many to yield.
Each monster is packed with unique traits and abilities to allow way for theorycrafting the best or most fun retinue to engage battles with, but it still manages to feel shallow and fruitless due to the combat never truly feeling fleshed out in any meaningful way.
Despite the gameplay’s shortcomings, the female characters are all quite charming. Apart from that, none of the characters seem to amount to much of anything personality-wise other than the usual tropes expected from a run-of-the-mill anime adventure.
Don’t expect much from the music; nothing really caught my attention in that department, and often times the music was just more noise if anything. I wish I could say more positive things about Farmagia. I had hopes for what they were trying to accomplish.
I almost want to make the claim that there could have been more in the planning of the gameplay’s design, but it just feels weightless, unrewarding, and tiring. There’s excessive button pressing and too many things cluttering the frame.
Farmagia could have benefited if they made it a turn-based RPG or slowed down the speed of what’s going on. Having nearly 100 monsters plus the monsters you face going at the speed of The Wonderful 101‘s gameplay might not be the most palatable thing for younger kids. Farmagia’s mixture of so many ideas was not the issue, just the execution.
Farmagia was reviewed on PC using a code provided by Marvelous Inc. You can find additional information about Niche Gamer’s review/ethics policy here. Farmagia is now available for PC (via Steam), Nintendo Switch, and PlayStation 5.
