Farmagia - Switch Review

Renee oflynn -

It’s difficult to describe Farmagia. Its combat is a mix of Pikmin and Monster Hunter while the story and characters are straight out of a JRPG. To add more substance to the game, there is a Viva Piñata-esque farming element as well as a romance one that’s lifted straight from Harvest Moon and Stardew Valley. With all these decent mechanics, Farmagia could end up as a decent game or as a masterpiece if in the right hands. Unfortunately, it’s very much the former option settling directly in the “Okay” territory.

The Good

The aforementioned farming mechanics are probably one of the things I enjoyed about Farmagia the most. Players use buddies during combat, which are monsters that the player grows from seeds themselves. Players plant the buddies, water them and wait for them to mature so they can harvest them. Only certain battle buddies can be taken on the field though, so most of the farming will be for research buddies. Research buddies are a way to unlock more farmland, make new unite buddies and evolve stronger versions of current battle buddies. Unfortunately, the research buddies aren’t really used, so they are sold for Magia, the game’s currency. They do give items to help unlock more advanced research, so it’s very helpful.  

Farmagia’s story features a refreshing origin. It takes place in a realm that is neither heaven nor the human realm, instead taking place in the underworld. The underworld isn’t like hell or anything like that; it’s just another plane of existence where humanlike creatures called denizens live. They are indistinguishable from humans and the ones that can control monsters are called Farmagia. The world is made up of five islands which are giant monsters and the denizens are protected by a barrier that is controlled by the elementals, who live on each of the islands. Being monsters, the islands can move and talented Farmagia called Oracion Seis can move them. By extension, I found the characters quite endearing, which makes the predictability of the story extra appalling.  

Farmagia is very much designed to be played in short bursts, which I quite liked. Too many games take up too much time and it felt like Farmagia respected my time better in that regard.

TL;DR

  • Farming is fun! 
  • The location and characters are interesting
  • Short burst play style

The Bad

The combat. Oh boy, where do I even start? Combat in Farmagia is bloated and doesn’t seem to actually know what it wants to do. So, I’m going to split this up into three sections. Firstly, players have battle buddies which are monsters that attack on the players orders. This isn’t turn-based though; it’s real time and similar to Pikmin. Players have access to four different types of Battle Buddies: melee, range, support and formation. Three of those things are obvious, one of them isn’t. Melee and range attack the enemies, support applies status effects, and formation is supposed to “heal” buddies from knockout. Knockout is a weird thing that the game doesn’t even tell you about much. When Buddies are attacked, their damage is transferred to the Farmagia, aka the player. However, Buddies, and enemies, have a separate bar that represents their stamina and when it reaches 0, the buddy is knocked out. For enemies, they stop attacking and take more damage. When a buddy is knocked out, the player needs to run over them to revive them. Formation is supposed to help with that, but you can’t target the KO’d buddy to send the formation buddy to revive them.  

The next issue with combat is the bloat involved. Players have access to 40 buddies with four different types. The A, B, X, Y buttons correspond with the different types, so players can send them out to attack. As buddies can’t defend themselves, the Farmagia has to guard to prevent the buddies from being hurt. This is called a guard. If timed correctly, it becomes a perfect guard. By holding down the ZR button, the buddies can perform a Unite Blitz. Each type of buddy has their own Unite monster and with research, players can access stronger Unite forms. Aside from Unite Blitz, if it’s timed correctly, players can use a Unite Counter, which cancels the enemies' attacks. If players do the Unite Blitz correctly, the monster will become downed and the player can commence an attack with all the Battle buddies at once. Hang on, we’re almost down. The last mechanic is the Fusion ability. Farmagia can have all the buddies unite into one giant monster to unleash a special attack. Just to make things more complicated, enemies are often weak against a certain type of battle buddy, which just adds another layer to what is already an overly complex system. 

This is all compounded by Farmagia’s lack of clarity in the mechanics, especially since it’s taken Monster Hunter’s need to watch the enemy for attacks. The game explains that a perfect guard will work for anything but red attacks. However, when I was playing it, I found that I could sometimes perfect guard red attacks and other times I couldn’t. It left me to wonder what exactly was a “red” attack. The game doesn’t really explain it, just saying you use it against red attacks and then throwing the player into a boss battle to practice. This inconsistency was a massive problem with the Unite Counter mechanic, which was integral for beating bosses. Unite counter is supposed to be the one thing that cancels out the red attacks. Half the time, they didn’t work. What were the activation conditions? Did I need to only use the Unite Blitz of the buddy that was weak to them? I had no idea because the game never explained it. It was hard enough to do this stuff during boss battles, but it became incredibly difficult when there were multiple enemies in an arena, which is how the game is played most of the time.  

My last complaint is absolutely a minor one, but it annoyed me nonetheless. The characters are constantly forced to go to bed. The characters do one maze and then they’re sent to bed. It becomes a cycle of farm, story, maze, bed, repeat. What a day.

TL;DR

  • Combat is bloated 
  • Tutorial on mechanics is insufficient  
  • Doesn’t understand its own mechanics 
  • You need to rest. This is war.

Final Score: 6/10

While there are a lot of negatives, they’re all tied to only one aspect of Farmagia; the rest is quite enjoyable. Due to the complexity and fuzziness of the mechanics, players may find themselves bashing their heads against a brick wall, but at least the fun characters and farming make up for its shortfalls. The thing is, even if they fixed the combat and made it tighter, I think it would only ever become a good game, not a great or amazing one.

Thank you for checking out our Farmagia Switch review, thank you to Marvelous Games (via Decibel PR) for providing the review code and thank you to our Patreon Backers for their ongoing support: