People have already commented exhaustively on how the overworld sprites of characters, including romances, look like children with itty bitty stunted feet. I wasn't playing this game for romances, I was playing for critters and farming, so i ignored those (valid) complaints. But the farming and critter catching is clunky, unbalanced, and such a slog to try dealing with.

Contemporary games of this genre have instituted various QOL features such as not making your mandatory items to interact with the world take up inventory space, automatically cycling to the needed tool when you're approaching items, etc. (Fae farm, disappointing as it was in plot aspects, at least jumped those hurdles, for instance.) This game doesn't. It forces you to keep mandatory tools in inventory and sort through them, while a -very- short day clock is ticking by. And not only is it ticking by, but you've got a stupidly small energy bar to deal with and large chunks of that energy being depleted just to break a single boulder or chop one tree (and inching away with every swing of your bug net, with its small catch rates.) And if you don't make it to bed on time, you're subjected to not just a small knock to your energy the next day or a couple bucks for a rescue team returning you to bed- but a complete lack of energy regained. Some of the highest downloaded mods for games of this genre are ones to extend day length, and/or allow people to play overnight, or keeping the day cycle untouched but removing energy bar limits so there's only one restraint to player actions, because they're sick of these sorts of mechanics. They're not original, and they've lost all their novelty. A huge section of player bases just want to play the game and interact with things, and not have that experience dragged out by artifical barriers slowing them down. Yet this game not only continues them, but doubles down on how punitive and annoying they feel.

What's more, the upgrades for tools are -extremely- expensive given how tiny the margins for profits on your crops are and how many things you need to unlock beforehand to get to the point where a single upgrade is feasible. Expenses include a barn; which, even with years of genre knowledge to make optimal choices, I couldn't unlock until I already had a small pile of prize eggs in my magic storage box. You're going to want back up critters to enter the mining worlds. Also, the adventurer guild entrance fee to unlock those worlds.

And even once you have the barn up, there's various hurdles to jump through for hatching decent eggs; with the "most useful" thing for hatching being an item, a decoration recipe, in the very early festival that you likely won't have the ability or meta knowledge to buy. And if you miss buying that, your barn is going to be stuck in a low rating for ages, because other decorations that come along soon after are -only- outdoors decorations, and the barn temperature control items are also insanely expensive and not having them further tank your hatching- making it so that any eggs you hatch will be functionally duds. Given how expensive many of those eggs are, either via festival money winnings or grinding in the mining worlds that you have to pay to enter and fight dozens upon dozens of their parent blobs over several days for a chance to get a single one thanks to the low drop rates- it would be a waste of those precious eggs to hatch them in poor barn circumstances. Trying to battle with these crippled blobs is a nightmare. Especially given the severe spike in power that wild blobs have in new levels; as well as how sharply villagers' blobs level up after a fight or two. A major problem because you need to try fighting the villagers on a semi regular basis because they appear to be the exclusive sources of a significant portion of the various foods your blobs will be craving.

Trying to get items to enhance the blobs is also expensive. Never mind the food items to feed them when their cravings hit- why are cheap to make sports toys so inflated in price?? Seeds can cost a sensible 25 to buy, but a tennis ball is 3000?! 3000 for a tennis ball?! Seriously?! Prices like this make no internal sense for the world, they exist solely to punish the player as money sinks.

Then once you shell out the money for the items to play, the mini games to play are janky- most notably not registering key presses properly and those delays not even being consistent in how long it takes for them to register so you could adjust your presses accordingly to what you know the delay will be. So, good luck leveling up your critters. And also, your critters are subjected to not just limits on their fighting energy/power, but also out of fight energy limits to do their advertised farming/building type functions. So if you were expecting this to be like pokemon with unlimited use of TMs/HMs when outside of battle-joke is on you.

I honestly can't think of another game in this genre that I've played that was so badly balanced in so many areas of gameplay. I had such high hopes for the range of critters to collect and ways to help you interact with the world, but this is just torture. This game does not reward your efforts, and it certainly doesn't respect your time.