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Comprehensive Review | After 100+ hours because I wanted to give it a chance to prove itself

TL;DR, this game initially was a neutral rating, but after playing longer, it cemented itself a firm negative rating. The fun peters off very fast, and you find yourself repeating misc tasks without any true purpose. Normally in a sim game, you end up falling in love with some aspect that keeps you going, but there's very little of that here. Moonstone Island feels like a cash grab by capturing the attention of gamers who like elements from different genres, but ultimately fails to deliver by being too ambitious and never thorough with what was incorporated.
I was one of the people who were invested in this game. The game-play shown pre-release had elements mirroring life/farming sim-games, monster taming, etc looked awesome. The snippets leading up to the game's release had a lot of promise because it had a solid foundation for an early build until I found out it was actually the end-product. There are a few positives, but there are too many negatives that I can't recommend this to anyone, especially my own friends, when they could spend the time and money elsewhere.

The Positives

1. Art - is gorgeous. From your character, to the environment, to the townspeople sprites, it looks fantastic.
2. Music - was fairly good. There weren't any specific tracks that made me stop just to appreciate it, but each track fit whatever it was meant to portray for its area.
3. Price - matches the quality of the game. This game is definitely $20 USD worth of quality. If it were priced any higher, there would have been an issue.
4. Combat - The combat is more fleshed out than other aspects. It starts off as a slow paced deck-builder that ramps into combo setups or synergies that makes it fun. The combat is what made me genuinely stick to the game for so long, but it does have an issue that I will go over below.

The Minor Issues

And here is the start of a series of unfortunate downfalls.
1. Combat (again) - Since this IS a deck-builder, I expected more unique cards, but there weren't any. The cards each spirit comes with conforms to their element which is fine, but it does dampen the combat aspect.
2. Spirits - since I already talked about the elements above, let's get into the spirits. They had to give each spirit something unique so the spirits have their own passive traits. Some augment tool use, some give boons during combat. The reason this is a minor issue instead of being a positive is because most of these traits are HOT garbage. Unless you like the design of the spirit, there's no reason to use them because their trait has no value and there's no unique card in their deck.
3. Dungeons - the dungeons you encounter in the game are lackluster after your first three. Most of them just have time consuming puzzles that serve no real purpose while some are a freebie. One jarring thing is that they all have the same interior design. You'll be in the middle of a poison swamp, thundering storm, or volcanic wasteland but then step into ruins with simple green grass. It breaks the immersion.

The Major Issues

1. Upgrade progression - Beginning ore is easy to come across to the point where it loses value. The real ore you need, the moonstone, is ridiculously hard to get and farm. The rule is that there's one moonstone per island and if that island also has a dungeon, there's two, rarely three. You need three ores to make a bar. Simple right? Well unfortunately, you need over 108, possibly 156 (spirit feeders, tool upgrades, extra tent), if you want to make all the quality of life improvements for the MID-GAME, not late-game, the MID-GAME. The progression just doesn't scale well. Sure there's a passive skill upgrade you can get to add a small chance of getting a moonstone from opening any new treasure chest, but it rarely happens that it barely matters. For a frame of reference, I've clocked in over 100 hours, but I've only managed to scrape together ~99 moonstones and I'm in the late-game already. The cherry-on-top is that there's no guaranteed way of farming them. You simply have to hope for the best.
2. Skill trees - Since I mentioned skills, the game has different traits with their corresponding skill trees that augment your gameplay. For example, there's foraging, archaeology, farming, etc. At first, the customization seems really cool, it introduced quality of life changes that helped you with your day, but then there's the lock(?) system. You can only choose certain boons over the other and you are locked out of the other boons permanently. There's NO resetting the upgrades and frankly, it sucks! If you chose perks that helped with early game, they become completely useless late-game and if the perks you chose helped with late-game, you won't get any value from them in early through mid-game. Not to mention, some of the perks are just so circumstantial that it feels like an absolute waste of space. It feels like they were trying to copy how some other famous games like Stardew Valley split skill progression, but failed to make their perks valuable.
3. Controls & UI - are horribly optimized. For a game releasing in the modern time, the controls have no quality of life. For example, when placing fertilizer down to farm, your character has to stop moving and register you putting the fertilizer down, then actually perform the action animation, then register that the plot is now fertilized before you can move onto the next crop. And you have to repeat this for every single plot. You can't just hold the fertilizer and spread it while running like you can do in nearly every other farming game. For inventory management, you can't move stacks of items with a few simple clicks, but instead you either click-and-drag or hold down right click to rapidly deposit items one-by-one. Same concept when you're buying seeds. You have to buy seeds one-by-one.
4. Farming/Community aspects - both are very bare-bones. The farming is pointless as the money you make isn't valuable. Nothing in the game is expensive enough to make you save and most of the crops you use are for buffing stats of your spirits anyways. The community of the main island are not very interesting. You spend so much time exploring that it's hard to remember they exist at times. They also don't have any unique events that let you appreciate their character. Most of your interactions are just a few lines then you just chat/joke/flirt to raise relationship points. It feels incredibly hollow despite the diverse cast of townspeople. Usually sim-games have good community aspects, but I can barely remember their names even after all my hours.
5. Time/Travel speed - the time per day is way too fast. By the time you finish checking on crops then feeding your spirits, you've lost more than half your day. Then it takes a while to travel to another island and you have to speedrun the dungeon or resource gathering. Every day ultimately pressures you into trying to rush and it burns you out once you're in the third season. Burnout over trying to do basic daily tasks is a huge red flag for a game.
All in all, this game is only fun for the first 20 hours, and even then some people are starting to see flaws. That's not a good sign in general. This game could have taken longer to develop and brushed up on the issues I stated and it would have been worth it even if it was priced double what it is now. Instead, this game feels like an early access release for a quick cash grab at a lower price.