Fields of Mistria review

In most farm sims, talking to my neighbors is just another chore. Water the strawberries, pet the cows, chat with the rancher next door, who says "Nothing like a cold glass of milk to start my day!" which is the same thing she said two days ago and will say again two days from now. In Fields of Mistria, my neighbors are the reason I get out of bed in the morning.

But first, the farm sim throat clearing: Is Fields of Mistria like Stardew Valley? Yes. You play as a budding farmer new to a rural town where you'll befriend the residents and sell your stacks of cucumbers to fund revitalization of the floundering community. It's the fate of any farm sim in the past decade to get compared to Stardew, which diehards find reductive (yes I grew up with Harvest Moon too), but we can all admit it's the easiest shared reference.

In Fields of Mistria I clear my overgrown farm of trees and rocks, decorate my property over several years, grow seasonal crops, buy and breed animals, fish, forage, donate one of every item to the local museum, pass out at 2 am outside my house because I just needed to run one more errand, collect ores and fight monsters in a mine outside town, unlock passive skills, deliver resources for quests, give gifts to villagers, cook food, *deep breath* and eventually get married and have a baby with the hot local single of my choice after fulfilling a main quest to repair the town where everyone lives happily ever after.

So yeah, It's like Stardew Valley. Also it's adorably pink and inspired by '90s anime. It nails all those farm simming essentials but the thing that truly transforms it from main character to magical is its unexpectedly great writing.

Farming builds character

I don't go into farm sims looking for good writing. Does anyone? The whole genre leans on character archetypes harder than a Hallmark romcom. Mistria doesn't buck the tradition of cute and corny characters: buff rancher Hayden is boisterous and friendly, travelling salesman Balor is handsome and flirtatious, and young town leader Adeline is eagerly detail-oriented. It trades in the same tropes and yet it's the best-written farm sim I've ever played.

Mistria isn't "well written" like a satire with sharp lines I can point to as superiorly clever. It's just earnestly great in a way you can almost miss if you get distracted by puns and the family-friendly tone. It's like realizing that, wait, Avatar: The Last Airbender was surprisingly insightful despite being a TV-Y7 kids show.

Partly, it's a volume thing. There's just so much dialogue in Fields of Mistria. In other farm sims, you start to hear characters repeating the same lines of daily chatter pretty fast and they'll say "Wow, I love this. Thanks!" whether you're giving them a flower or a chunk of gold. It's the specificity of lines that really sells each character.

In Fields of Mistria, Reina works as a cook at her parents' inn and says she feels nostalgic about how her mom used to make breaded catfish if you give her that meal as a gift. Celine the gardener admires the freshness of gifted hydrangeas. Olric the himbo blacksmith just loves rocks. If you give him a piece of stone he responds with any of eight different lines telling you whether it's grainy sandstone or "nonfoliated metamorphic" quartzite. All that for a single piece of stone. There aren't eight different lines for every gift, but I can feel the care taken in choosing where to create extra layers of detail for each character.

On the surface, young noble Eiland is a history buff with a sweet tooth. The gifts he loves most are all desserts and his personal story revolves around a hunt for Mistrian artifacts. Eiland is also kind of impulsive. He never comes out and says "Gee I guess my problem is I should think things through sometimes," while staring through the screen at me. Early on, though, I watch him take an axe to a treee on my farm first thing in the morning, argue with the museum curator about reopening the mines sooner and, one of my favorite little daily dialogues of his: The one where he bought a whole cake at the Saturday Market and wheedles me into sharing some with him because maybe a whole cake was too much cake.

Classic Eiland. It's cute and cheesy, but layered.

Mistria goes five extra miles with its writing at nearly every opportunity. Every Friday night at the inn I can spectate the banter as my neighbors play multiple campaigns of "Dragons & Drama," start a drawing class, a book club, and a dessert-tasting group, all with oodles of personality from the whole cast. Personal story scenes with marriage candidates are all several minutes' worth of conversation and dialogue choices that reveal details beneath that first layer of trope-y persona. Characters even have their own theme songs like they really are right out of an old JRPG.

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Even as I walk around town doing my normal farm simming chores I can listen in on characters talking to each other, like Balor discussing wagon repairs with March the blacksmith or Adeline teasing her history-buff brother Eiland over the disorder in his office. Mistria is such a fully imagined community of fun individuals who share memories and jokes with each other. I genuinely love stopping to talk with them instead of just skipping past the same old lines.

Fixes for farm freaks

Farm sims have a lot to live up to now that we've got so many to choose from. There's an expectation that they'll meet the rubric by checking off the exhaustive Stardew-plus-Animal-Crossing features list, but also that the best ones can devise new quality of life features to smooth out common wrinkles in the farm simming experience.

Mistria has some of the newly common niceties like a jump button (because walking around all the fences on your farm is a minor annoyance) and a map that shows where every character currently is so you're not turning in circles looking for that one person you need to talk to for a quest. Oh, and you can use shops without their owners present so you aren't stuck unable to buy a barn because Ryis is chilling at the beach with March and Reina.

Other ideas I've not seen before, like the gossip system where Elsie the town socialite can clue you in on items that other villagers like instead of suffering through trial and error (or admitting defeat and just using a wiki). I'm particularly fond of the craftable big bell I can ring to call all the animals on my whole property out of their barns in the morning and send them to bed at night. It's a lifesaver when I'm cutting it close at 1:30 am.

Don't check out

What's more interesting about Mistria is where it resists the convenience of automation. Most farm sims borrow from crafting games here with refining machines: a furnace to turn ore into ingots, a churn making butter from milk, and barrels for beer and wine. You get to toss your produce in, walk away, and come back later to grab your artisan products and pitch them in your shipping bin at premium prices. You become a glorified conveyor belt, carrying seeds to the ground and produce to machines on a farm that sort of runs itself because you've got an optimized sprinkler layout to boot.

Mistria requires, and even incentivizes, me to do everything by hand. Watering crops and feeding animals gives me essence, an experience-like resource I spend on buying passive perks like randomly getting free seeds when watering my crops or higher chances to hook treasure chests instead of trash when fishing. There are no wine barrels at all so the best use of fruits is making jams or desserts in my kitchen. Refining dairy products and ores takes time out of my day (until I unlock perks to reduce that time) which I've initially got to do at the mill and blacksmith in town.

There is a magic spell to call a rain storm to water my crops but I can't abuse it too many days in a row without waiting to regenerate mana. Late in the game there are a few automation tools like sprinklers and a machine to pet your animals, but they're quite late game so I'm never taught to really rely on them. In fact, if I let the machines work for me I've got to expend essence to power them instead of earning it as I would by just using my watering can. At best, the automation tools let me displace my effort from elsewhere but never replace it entirely.

Mistria doesn't want me to set up a farming empire and then mentally check out as I ship 500 bottles of wine without ever leaving my property like a reclusive billionaire. There are plenty of players posting immaculately designed farms on social media with optimally laid-out greenhouses. I've been envious of many already. Even those players, though, are encouraged to invest care in checking on their cows and picking berries by hand.

Mistria's pastel colors and Game Boy Advance-era "blurp blurp" sound effects grabbed me by the nostalgia and squeezed. There's sparkles and frills, sky high waistlines, muscle-y guys in sleeveless shirts and pink-haired girls wearing capes. It's like I'm 11 years old, sitting in the third row of a minivan next to a sketchbook full of Fruits Basket doodles while I mash the A button through "just one more" Final Fantasy Tactics Advance battle before my mom parks at the grocery store. Except now I'm a grownup and I can play just one more day at 1 am and suffer the consequences at my desk in the morning.

Fields of Mistria is the first farm sim in a lot of years that's made me want to spend time in town visiting with its cast even after I've gotten rich off shipping berries to the capitol. It's a fresh lease on farm sims in a shojo manga fever dream.