Review: Farmagia Is Far From a Bountiful Harvest

Farmagia is an ambitious game. It’s a dungeon crawler. It’s a creature collector. It’s a farming game. However, getting a combination like this right is a fine balance, and I’m not sure Marvelous achieves it.

The game is set in Felicidad, part of the underworld, where mages known as Farmagia use the power of monsters to fight. The world consists of five continents, each ruled by a member of an elite general squad known as the Oracion Seis. However, following the death of the supreme leader, one of these generals, Glaza, has risen to the throne and begun to implement a dictatorship. The other generals followed his plans, except Nares, who resisted. Her nation, Avrion, is now considered a nation of traitors and a civil war has broken out. You play as Ten, one of the Farmagia training under Nares in Avrion. During his training, war reaches his doorstep, and this kickstarts a journey to each continent with friends to defeat the other members of the Oracion Seis.

This is mostly achieved by dungeon crawling and fighting off the monsters in locations known as Mazes. You take a squad of monsters, known as Battle Buddies, who fight on your behalf. This might sound a little bit like Pokemon, but a more accurate description would be something that sits between Pikmin and The Wonderful 101.

You have four squads of Battle Buddy available to you – close range attackers, long range attackers, support units that cause buffs and debuffs, and formation types that aid with healing and protection. Each of these is represented by a monster type, and each of the face buttons on a controller sends them out to fight. You throw these monsters at enemies to gradually chip away at their health, although sometimes they can be fused together to form shields or larger attacks.

There’s a potentially interesting combat system on show here, but the two comparisons I made above highlight the serious shortcomings with Farmagia’s combat system. Pikmin is known for its strategic planning, where you have to manage your lil guys in a way that allows them to gather resources while not getting eaten in the process. The Wonderful 101 uses its large cast to generate new abilities that can be combined in creative ways, a style Platinum have perfected at this point.

Farmagia, by contrast, has painfully limited combat. Most monsters have a weakness that’s clearly advertised with a picture of one of your team next to their health bar. While other monster types will do minimal damage, smaller monsters are obliterated by their weaknesses. Bigger enemies pose an actual threat, but the strategy for all of them boils down to pressing guard when the attack flash shows up, spamming whichever monster they’re weak to and then hitting a powerful Legion Attack when their stamina runs out, then repeating the process until they’re down.

This repetitive combat strategy isn’t helped by how tedious the Mazes are to traverse. They’re all on the same map, regardless of the continent or type of floor. You gain random abilities from Fairy Dens, none of which feel like they have any meaningful impact on combat. Every floor is just a gauntlet of enemies you beat in order to open the exit and move on.

But this isn’t all Farmagia has to offer, as there are also farming elements and the ability to train and care for your Buddies. However, these elements suffer similar problems to the dungeon crawling.

Let’s start with training. This is done by feeding your squads a specific type of food to boost individual stats, although feeding them too much in one go will reduce the effectiveness with each consecutive increase. However, you can only increase five stats before you have to wait for the game to provide you with the next food item at a specific point in the story. It’s so basic and locked to progression that it could have been replaced with natural stat increases from winning battles instead.

Farming isn’t much better. Take the most basic farming mechanics from the genre, and that’s what Farmagia offers. You till the ground, plant some seeds and water them. Occasionally you need to clear out some weeds or debris. However, unlike other farming games where crops feel useful and essential to progress, Farmagia’s crops are strange. They’re all monsters that have to be grown like plants, although the vast majority do next to nothing.

Sure, the Buddies you take into battles can be grown, but most of the seeds you obtain from dungeons are Research Buddies. The purpose of growing these is to earn research points for upgrades, or growing three of them to unlock a special unite attack in battle. However, larger monsters, despite taking up more space and requiring more days to grow, earn the exact same number of points as the tiny ones, and the new battle forms for growing a trio are little more than cosmetic changes. There are some stat alterations, but these are miniscule percentage adjustments instead of anything game changing. Plus, once you’ve grown three of a kind, there’s no reason to keep growing more of that monster type.

All three elements suffer the same problem: they are all undercooked. In trying to combine all these different gameplay styles, none of them individually got the development time they needed to be interesting or varied enough for the long term. Sometimes this can work if there’s enough a symbiotic relationship between the three, but they all feel distant from each other. Combat lacks strategy and variety. Farming lacks purpose. The ranch could have been a post-battle stat screen. It all falls flat.

That said, the story and characters were enjoyable. The central story is a little cliched and many of its twists are predictable, but the character writing is strong enough to make it work. Ten and his friends have genuine rapport with each other, and there’s plenty of humor to make them all likeable. It has the vibe of a good shonen anime, something that won’t necessarily win awards for its writing but will keep you entertained all the same.

I also enjoyed the Elemental Spirits side quests, which was again driven by how good the character writing is. During the story, you have to befriend and form a pact with the Elemental Spirits of the land to aid you in your quest. Mechanically, it’s just collecting items, defeating monsters or farming specific crops, but narratively, it’s enjoyable. Each Spirit has a unique personality, one that you learn more about as your bond grows stronger. The first continent’s Spirit is a motherly type who loves giving head pats, while another is a party girl that just wants to attend a grand feast. All of them are fun to spend time with.

Sadly, the charm of the writing doesn’t prevent Farmagia from feeling mediocre overall. It’s repetitive, disjointed and half-formed. If you want a game that better combines adventuring and farming, Marvelous already have an excellent alternative in the form of Rune Factory.

Farmagia is out now for Nintendo Switch, PC and PS5.