Stardew Valley review

Meh

by Ghostbird

TL;DR: Bad QoL, white as hell, middling dialogue/NPC interactions, unplayable without a gazillion mods.

I want to preface this with the fact I've never been a fan of the sim genre, so keep that in mind. I actually find the farming gameplay fairly fun. But my overall experience has been meh. A lot of my issues come down to QOL, dialogue, and the general non-farming elements of this game. It feels like it's trying to do too much and ultimately gives a "jack of all trades, master of none" experience. Every feature except for the standard farming feels mediocre. 

Dialogue/Interaction: Dialogue is painfully dull and only becomes kind of interesting when you become a LOT closer with the townsfolk. This is fine I suppose except you're also supposed to *marry* someone, effectively making sdv a dating sim as well. Except, because of this lack of personality from npcs, none of them really "hook" you or are likeable/interesting enough to keep you pursing them. When you first meet them they're all just kind of meandering around and kind of just say hi to you or are just plain rude. One of them is straight up misogynistic (like around the second and fourth time you talk to him) and the other straight up tells you you're ugly (like the second time you talk to her). Again, I don't mind if npcs dislike you. But why would I try to even befriend someone who tells me I'm ugly or is misogynistic? And the male npcs have vastly different ways of speaking and beginning dialogue while the female ones really don't except for Haley and the older women. This immediately makes the male npcs more unique and fleshed out than the women ones. Decay system sucks, which is where if you skip talking with a character for a day or two, their friendship decreases and you have to work to build it back up. There were days where I didn't feel like walking across the map and just wanted to farm in near my house, but no, I HAD to walk to talk to a character so I wouldn't lose progress. All this really turned me off the marriage system and I wouldn't have tried to do if a marriage partner didn't help you around your farm. I get that all of this this is probably to emulate real life dating, which is a long process of searching and getting to know multiple people until you find "the one," but in a video game with a lot of walking, npcs, and bedtimes, this doesn't translate well. Other annoyances with the npc system is that apparently there are cutscenes you can trigger, but you have to be at specific places at specific times, but you're never told when or where and there are a few you can PERMAMENTLY miss. These cutscenes help flesh out the world and characters but you probably won't see them unless you have the wiki open 24/7. Also with most npcs when you give them gifts they literally just say the same thing, this isn't bad but for example if you give Sebastion the exact same thing and he loves it, he will always only say, "I love this, how did you know?" it just makes the dialogue feel that much cheaper/less immersive, and would have been nice if he said something like "I love this, thanks for getting me this again." This isn't hard to code at all and feels like an oversight. When you enter a cutscene, which usually involves entering an area, your character moves around automatically. This is fine of course but when the cutscene ends you're transported immediately back to the entrance of the area, signifying that cutscenes are more like just separate videos that the player watches and not experiences that actually happen in the world/with the characters. Again, not a big deal, but it's multiple, small things like this that build up and break the immersion/vibes. There's also a lot of cute and interesting things in buildings, but you can't interact or do anything with most of them, to the point I don't even understand why they're there. It'd be interesting if you could go into a store, go to a shelf, and actually buy stuff off of it but you can't.  

Saving: You can't save without ending your day. It makes the game feel tedious and stressful in early/mid game where you have you really be efficient with your time and make the most out of your day. No clue why it was designed like this. This combined with the fact that most events are one-day only, basically makes the game feel like mini-fomo. This also relates to...  

Time: Places closing early REALLY annoyed me at the very beginning of the game, basically forcing me to manage my money and time extremely well just so I could buy the beginner materials. You also literally can't stay awake past 2 am, and this would be fine except I chose the wilderness farm, which spawns monsters at night around your base (except it's not that much), and bc of the 2 am thing I never got to fight that many monsters so I don't even understand the point of the wilderness farm. Monsters also apparently don't really give you any necessary upgrades/materials while mining/chopping/foraging, etc. do (or the monsters drop them but at EXTREMELY low rates). So you *have* to spend your time doing those things while combat is something you put on the backburner, or is tied to mining. And since the wilderness farm doesn't have a mine close by, this effectively makes it completely worthless.   

The wikia problem: You basically need to always have the wiki up while playing, especially to know where to find mats and npcs (they should make it where their location gets tagged on the map once you get enough hearts). You can download qol mods, but my belief is that you shouldn't HAVE to. While I like mods, you shouldn't HAVE to get them just to have basic things like "where I can I find this material so I can progress? Where is this npc since I need to literally talk to them everyday?"  

Permanent things: There's rare fish you can NEVER catch again, so if you accidentally sell/trash them you're screwed. You also get a fairy later on, but its color is random and you can't change it. And [i]every other fairy you get will also be the same color.  

Combat: Not very deep but is fairly fun. 

Music: Very bland.  

Diversity: I want to preface this by saying that when I heard people talk about SDV having a diversity problem, I thought they were overreacting. I don't really care if a dating sim just has white people. But when I actually started playing, I realized they were right. Aside from the people, the game's vibes, setting, and culture are just blindingly white; and there's a lot of subtle microaggressions. The white NPCS usually wouldn't be a problem but it's feels bad this time because they all already feel very samey. Only 2 main POC npcs and only one of them is dateable (and she's half-white). Later on there are a few other POC, but you can't date them and they fall into the "strange exotic merchant" trope. The desert trader says "your coin has no value where I can from," really trying to highlight how they come from such an "exotic+mysterious" place (despite literally just being a North African person). There's also some drama with the local shopkeeper and the big Joja corp. Shopkeeper tells the corp guy that he doesn't want his "products imported from who knows where." Yeah, I don't want any products from those nasty other countries like slimy tofu or curry, just my homegrown american potatoes!!! 

Also no nonbinary option. 

Tbf, none of this is really that bad, but it really bogs down the setting and almost makes it feel like racist small town full of crotchety old people. All this combined with the fact that many of the white npcs are initially rude to you, hit a little too close to home for me, a non-white person who grew up in a white suburban town and had to deal with always feeling like the outsider, hearing similar negative comments, and being told to get over it because they're still "nice people." So yeah, small problems build up and the gameplay isn't fun enough to make me overlook them. Will probably only play with friends.