// KOTAKU — GAMING
Fields of Mistria: The Kotaku Review
It’s my second spring in Mistria, and my farm is thriving. I’ve got a gorgeous new calf with pink spots, and a silver-feathered rooster. My orchard is dripping with cherries and lemons, and my fields are overflowing with strawberries. The taciturn local blacksmith is finally starting to warm up to me, but there’s also this very cute girl down the road who loves flowers and who I watched a meteor shower with last summer. I’m getting ready to expand my barn. There’s a dragon living in a statue on the edge of my property and a dragon priestess trapped somewhere deep beneath the town, but I’m not too worried about that.
I’ve done this all before, yes, countless times. In Pelican Town, and in Mineral Town, Forget-Me-Not Valley, Olive Town, Selphia, Littlewood, and several others. But for Mistria, I’ll do it all again and again, season after season, with joy.
Fields of Mistria will be very, very familiar to anyone who’s picked up a farming simulator since farming simulators have existed, perhaps with the exception of the actual Farming Simulator series. You start out in a little cabin on a run-down farm covered in trees and rocks and weeds, and it’s on you to turn the place into a usable operation both for your own survival and the benefit of the nearby town. There are crops to plant, animals to raise, neighbors to befriend, and (if you like) hot singles in your area to smooch and eventually marry.
I’ve been telling everyone for the last two weeks that Fields of Mistria is basically Stardew Valley, but with a 10-percent quality-of-life improvement across the board. It is actually astounding how Stardew Valley-like this game is, even allowing that a lot of this genre is just copying everyone else’s homework with slightly different twists. In a typical day in Mistria, you’ll wake up, pet your cat, let your cows and chickens into the yard to graze, pet each of them, water your crops if it’s not raining, and then spend the rest of the day on a chore of your choice: fishing, mining, woodcutting, giving gifts out to the townsfolk, and so forth. On rainy days, you usually go to the mines, where you hit rocks to find ladders that will take you further and further down while fending off various monsters. You can drop things you find or grow or harvest into a shipping box to make money off them overnight, or you can take certain items to a museum and donate them to expand the collection and receive rewards. Finishing certain “sets” of donated items nets you bigger rewards. Even small details, like the appearance of in-game items like Fiber or the fact that you start out with Turnip Seeds, will feel extremely familiar.
To be clear, I don’t think that’s a bad thing. If Fields of Mistria were just that, I’d have written it off after a few hours. But Fields of Mistria improves on basically every aspect of the genre, immediately and dramatically. Name a feature in Stardew Valley or Harvest Moon, and I’ll tell you what Fields of Mistria does better. Crops? There are far more of them, and you never have to refill your watering can. Ranching? Fields of Mistria lets you breed for all sorts of cool, rare colors, and there are more different animals too. Community Center? Condensed with the museum for better organization, but with more bundles and better rewards. The mines? They’re more story-relevant, and you have a few more combat moves. You can craft from your storage. You can make all sorts of cool furniture. You can swim and dive and dig for treasure. You can change your appearance at any time, and there are loads of cosmetics to collect. There are more quests spanning a much longer period of time. I could go on.
Even its basic premise is an improvement on the fantasy of Stardew Valley: you’re not here to take over your grandfather’s mostly-undiscussed legacy. You’re an Adventurer hired by the town specifically to take over an old farm and help jumpstart the economy after an earthquake devastated it. This backstory does so much good in adding