izigame.me

This is a very beautiful game that was clearly made with a lot of love and care, but ultimately I cannot recommend it because it fails in its main purpose which is to entertain. Many times while playing Stardew Valley I wondered what it would be like to play with a larger map to forage, more NPCs to meet, more land to develop and more things to do; the answer is, not something very fun.
The game has many different mechanics and things to do as well as an expansive map, which initially sparked my interest and kept me hooked for many hours straight while I finished the prologue, however by the time the world opens up I found myself wondering what was the point to all of them. You can craft potions to cure ailments and give status effects, but these don't ever seem to come into play, some NPCs mention needing this or that because they're feeling this or that way, and you can give them what you might think will help them, but there's no reaction to it, or none that is communicated to the player, each NPCs has three likes and three dislikes, which affect the relationship gain when you gift them, but you can similarly just gift them whatever you have an excess of and the relationship will grow anyway, slower, sure, but the days pass so fast and you have so many excess items just from foraging and farming that you can max relations in short time, you also don't need the items to make money, and the game discourages you from doing this because you can only sell a handful of items at each shop each day as they have a limited budget, and you don't even need to anyway since you get much more money from NPC quests, which are all fecth quests essentially.
There's many different mini-games for each crafting kind, for example I got two see two different vesions of smithing, one for a bucket and one for a sword, two different ones for potion-making, and many for cooking, this is neat... in the beginning then it just kinda becomes a chore, luckily you can craft in bulk as well and you can have a little fun maxing out ingredient quality and doing well in the crafting to get higher level items, but we come back to the thing I mentioned in the last paragraph: for what? A single high-level item is all you can sell at any store and you wont need the money, you basically need to craft to fulfill more fetch quests, and to level up your skills, which give you the ability to... get more items every time you craft something. It's an endless loop of fetching, crafting, delivering, for no other reason that to see some previously destroyed buildings not be destroyed anymore, and more NPCs moving in, which you can then complete more fetching quests for.
There's supposed to be a mechanic where you pass from generation to generation, but I didn't get to see it since apparently to marry someone you first have to cook a pie and then get some item, and then do a bunch of other things I didn't pay attention to since I was already running around completing other five fetch quests at the same time, and my character is only 20 years old at this point while she'll die at 50, minus a dozen years I can give up in exchange of some bonuses that I never saw mattered for anything.
In all this game gives you too many things to do with very little reward for each of them, so you end up foregoing doing any of them and wondering what's next, do you continue the main story and possibly end the game with your first character and never seeing the heir mechanic? Do you spend hours maxing out everything for no apparent reason? Do you spend the time decorating your farm? (there's a handful of utility buildings but you'll have no reason to use them really for all I said before). And it's a ll shame because the writing is very good and the story seems quite interesting, particularly after it takes a dark turn during the prologue. I think this game should have focused on just two or at most three things, whether it was fleshing out the NPCs and relationship mechanics, crafting, exploration and combat, developing the farm, developing the town or the story, and while it is true that all of these are connected in gameplay mechanics, instead of complementing each other, they suffer for it.