"Doraemon: Nobita's Ranch Story" review: Pick chrysanthemums under the east hedge, leisurely see Nanshan

How long has it been since you thought about your childhood.

In August 2019, when you read this review, it may be an ordinary summer day, you turn on your computer or mobile phone as skillfully as usual to watch the news, or sit in the office idly blowing the air conditioner, or on the bus bored looking at the phone, or at home for a short vacation, in any case, you always step on the concrete floor. It's been a long time since I last smelled the fragrance of the earth after the rain.

Chinese people are rooted in the yellow land, decades ago, people's life and the land are inseparable, the older generation yearning for fallen leaves to return to the root, the younger yearning for pastoral scenery, this love for the ground under the foot has a long history, from the modern poet Haizi said "from tomorrow, pay attention to food and vegetables", to the former Song Dynasty poet Fan Chengda "plum golden apricot fat, Wheat flower white cauliflower ", since the birth of life on the land of China, people have been deeply in love with the land at their feet.

In today's highly developed material conditions, more and more people leave the countryside, this distance is not only reflected in the living environment, but also in the spiritual level of some kind of contempt for "rural people", as if each of us loves the rural life, just like we love mother nature. But piles of fetid plastic bags downstairs and piles of garbage buried deep in the sea are silently accusing us of ugly behavior, which is a very complex human psychology, no one can explain clearly.

To be sure, no matter where we are, we will always do everything possible to satisfy our desires, in today's electronic network technology is thriving, video games undoubtedly meet our large needs, in the game you can relive the cold weapons duel in the Middle Ages, participate in the battle group riding a tall horse and the tide of enemies in all directions to cut, but also can imagine the distant future, In the highly developed cyberpunk society of human civilization to experience the new new human way of life, of course, you can return to an xanadu village in the game, every day to farm, feed chickens, cut wood, cook, "chrysanthemum under the east hedge, leisurely see the south mountain."

There are many games similar to simulated rural life, but the best of them is the Japanese game company MMV's works - "Ranch Story" series, from the original series of "Ranch Story" originally landed in SFC in 1997 until the "Ranch Story" soon to land in NS: Farewell to Ore Town, this series of works has never deviated from the core content of allowing modern people to relive pastoral life and establish connections between people.

For some special reasons in our country, the most well-known work is "Ranch Story: The partners of the Ore town", there are many people who call "Ore Town" as the peak of the heart, other recent works are just blindly eat the old and go downhill, but some time ago, the new name of "Ranch Story" makes everyone surprised, but it feels as if it were taken for granted.

All there is no other reason, just because the new farm story will be combined with the object is so powerful - "Doraemon" series of animation, "Doraemon (also known as robotic cat, Tinkerbell)" is A Japanese national animation, since the birth of the early 1970s has given countless children A good childhood fantasy, has a huge popularity in the world, At present, new works continue to be launched in the form of a theater version every year, and it is not the first time that they are adapted into games, but most of them are small games or small game collections, and there are very few excellent works launched in recent years.

As A result, the powerful joint project "Doraemon: Nobita's Ranch Story" caused A huge response when the news was first revealed, and countless Doraemon fans, ranch story fans, or both people waited and imagined what the experience would be like in this work. Finally, in the public attention, "Doraemon: Nobita's Ranch Story has come to the player.

The game opens with Nobita, the main character, and a group of five people waking up in a meadow, and then explaining how they came to this unfamiliar environment by recalling how they got there - Nobita picks up a seed, plants it, and it suddenly grows into a towering tree, and all of a sudden, lightning flashes, thunderstorms, and the party are transported here by a sudden black hole in time. Of course, these instructions are not just large blocks of text, but the use of A simple animation to show it, although the quality of the animation is not vivid, such as Doraemon's eye size is a little unreasonable, but finally the standard does not collapse style, giving players a brief experience of watching the theater version of the movie.

The original painting is very precise

Nobita and A group of people in this village called all things town to live down, five people have found a temporary place to live, Shizuka went to the hospital part-time nurse, Xiaofu went to the restaurant to learn to cook, fat tiger and carpentry master learned carpentry, Doraemon in the mayor's home to seek a sinecure, and our protagonist Nobita is living in the town youth Ranchi shabby ranch, As a young rancher, he began his new life, and the story officially began.

The main game content of this game is inherited from the story of the ranch, players need to take care of the abandoned large vacant pastures into a beautiful garden in their own minds, upgrade tools, expand facilities, herd livestock and interact with villagers constitute a daily play, originally a regular regular as long as there is no mistake will be a big sale and numerous praise of the fans to the work. However, because of many big or small reasons, it is now praised and criticized in the player group, and it is said that it is a good hand and plays poorly.

As far as the plot is concerned, this game is not bad, the bright line is to find a way to go home, the dark line is to sing the family, friendship and family inheritance and many other stories, this game has a lot of feeder plot, it can be said that the villagers of all things town do not have a lack of stories, and you as a player need to gradually get along with them from a stranger who broke into the village. In order to understand more clues about how to go home, which involves a very important system of the ranch story series - favorability.

Everything can be given away

In the past ranch story works, the favorability system is very important, the high favorability can not only receive gifts but also directly determine the player's lifetime event, but this game does not have a marriage system, which corresponds to the plot triggered after the promotion of favorability. Every family in Everything Town has its own members, and when each member's favorability reaches a certain level, it will trigger a side story, which will advance the game story layer by layer, and gradually let the player understand the story of Everything Town residents.

Can be a fly in the water, the sub-plot and play process is not well mixed together, more is a sense of separation, players need to do everything possible to give gifts to "please" NPC, and in the opening stage (that is, the early stage) do not look at any guide can only feel the stones across the river, even if the review guide will appear to obtain resources, This makes the early part of the game boring because it can't trigger the side story, as for the "trick" gameplay developed by players - slowly accumulate goodwill by giving NPC stones or weeds every day, although feasible, but always make people feel almost meaningful, after all, how to think about garbage gifts is not so right.

In addition to the favorable rating system, the early stage of the game is a great deal of attention to the player experience, the player only has a limited initial capital of two thousand yuan and a small number of seeds, after seeing the price of the village store will undoubtedly not let the player question whether this is a black shop, a chicken four thousand yuan, cattle and sheep are tens of thousands, and the early players even if all the initial funds to buy seeds, After more than ten days, the harvest can only barely afford A chicken, so the player can only "earn extra money" in addition to taking care of the crops, and the original work that many players have been joking about is actually "Doraemon: Nobita's Mine Story".

There are very few things players can do in the reclamation stage, among which the most expensive can only be mining. A very suitable setting in this game is that Noxiong can fall asleep at any time and recover his physical strength by wasting time, so getting up - mining - resting - mining - bed - getting up has become the most cost-effective schedule in the reclamation stage. Although the nature of the Ranch Story series games is to let the player relive the joy of farm life, but when the player makes the untimely broken farm equipment, unable to trigger any side effects, who does not want to accumulate funds as soon as possible to open more gameplay?

After the problem of excessively high prices of props appeared, after a long time the official was finally updated, in the recent version of 1.02, a large number of original unreasonable prices were reduced to 1/2 to 1/12 times the original, and the largest price reduction was for advanced fertilizers - from the original 600 to 40. This is almost an outrageous magnitude, the price change of advanced fertilizer clearly illustrates the huge numerical problems in the original version of the game, which is not appropriate for MMV, who has many years of experience in the production of the Ranch Story series games, and in addition to the issues that have been fixed in the patch, there are a large number of issues that are still unresolved.

Upgrading tools has always been one of the things that the ranch story series must do, the resource consumption of the upgrade tools can be said to be the most difficult in the series, the quality of tools in accordance with the order of shabby - copper - iron - silver - gold increases, but each upgrade requires a lot of basic materials, such as clearly upgrading the iron draft into a silver pick. In addition to the necessary silver, there is still a large amount of copper ore needed, and the price of buying ore from the blacksmith is close to sky-high - in the early stage of the need to upgrade tools to clear the land, there is no spare money to buy ore, which makes the player have to bury their head in the mine, because without high-quality tools, it is almost impossible to save money by mass planting crops.

Of course, the game does have a system to reduce the player's liver degree, in this game, the traditional elf system returned, but this is the player can only trigger the system in the middle of the game, after all, this is still through the liking to improve the story to get the elf system mode, and in fact, even if all the elves are collected, only one of the elves to help collect crops has the most effect. The rest is better than nothing. In addition to the elf, one of the biggest selling points of the game - the secret props, also did not give people much surprise.

In the "Doraemon" series of works, those from the four dimensional pocket out of the various secret props have always attracted the most attention of players, this game will be secret props and ranch life combined with the selling point is to attract countless fans, everyone may see the game when they can skillfully call the name of the props can play A role in the game. When the player through dozens of hours of game opening period, finally can access to many of the original secret props, and one of the earliest access is the most useful props, but also belongs to the nowhere to any door.

Any door is one of the most common secret items in the Doraemon series. The huge door frame and pink paint and the portable function that allows you to go anywhere you want once you open the door are sure to impress any teenager. In this game, any door can be opened in A specific place on each minimap and lead to any other map. This teleportation function greatly facilitates the player's running chart, and also does a perfect match to the book, while other secret items may not be so useful.

In addition to the arbitrary door and the automatic sprinkler replacement that can be acquired in the middle - thundercloud, there are also a lot of forcibly set items in the game, such as the blacksmith because he found the invention machine and opened several more tools for sale, the disposable expendable weather card that can be exchanged with precious resources, and the seemingly practical but useless hunting rod because of the conflict with the NPC movement mechanism. In addition to this, there are more mysterious items that only appear in the story, and these secret items that are not well integrated with the gameplay once again make the player feel a sense of separation, making the actual experience of the game greatly decreased.

A great finder that conflicts with the way you play

Due to the defects of actual play, the game is psychologically difficult for the player to have a sense of inclusion. In the early opening of the land, the player's psychology will produce A gap - Doraemon and other small partners eat hot and spicy four people, Nobita can only eat wild fruits in the dark at the bottom of the mine day after day. Although the story of the game is indeed remarkable, the story of each family in all things town is like a huge picture, gradually unfolding to the player in the middle and late stages of the game, but the incoherence between the plot and the gameplay also makes the player uncomfortable again.

For example, Nobita in the first spring trigger plot found a dog trapped in the mountains, but due to the slow growth of the likability system, players may have to spend several days in the game until the summer to rescue the dog, so a strong sense of crisis plot can drag on for half a month, making people powerless to ridicule. In addition to the poor control of the rhythm, in most of the story, our protagonist Nobita is more like an outsider, and does not give the player a sense of engagement that has long been inherited in the Ranch story series.

Of course, this game is not without merit, even its advantages can cover most of its shortcomings, and the most intuitive advantage is the painting style of this game, fresh and delicate 2D drawings make the game picture full of beauty, whether it is sitting alone by the pond on a bright moon night, or walking in the beach beside the blue sea water, or tiptoe trying to catch a noisy summer cicada. Almost every scene can be screenshots, giving people the enjoyment of beauty, and the same excellent detail description of this work.

In this work, each villager's room has different decorations, these decorations show the differences in each villager's profession and personality, similar details are also reflected in the player's footprints when walking through the beach, the moonlight night walking beside the river with the ripples of the reflection, but the producer is so hard for "good looking", but so careless for "fun", can not help but make people wonder whether the wrong talent, Because as a game, only a beautiful shell, of course, far from enough.

Doraemon: Nobita's Ranch Story, as A combination of two well-known ips, does not do A good job of integrating the two ips, and players end up with a game with too much Ranch Story and not enough Doraemon, and there are many flaws. If, in the future, the creators keep updating patches to fix the game's many flaws, then it might be a good game. But as things stand, it really can't live up to the aspirations of many fans - a good game that is not inferior to the quality of the orthodox sequel to the Ranch story and combines with the classic anime series.

But so what, there is A steady stream of fans, people will pay for it without hesitation for their own love of rural life or Doraemon, after all, in the current game market, you can hardly find a recent launch and a new look of the ranch story, as for the excellent spiritual sequel "Stardew Grain" was launched three years ago, People are eager to see a new "Ranch Story style" game, which is why they are so eager to see this game, although the results may not be satisfactory.

Of course, although this is not perfect, or even some of the best, but if you want to return to childhood, close to feel the beauty of nature, but limited by various reasons can not do what you want, then compared to the steel jungle everywhere in the "idyllic community", this "Doraemon: Nobita's Ranch Story can definitely make you get some psychological relaxation, and even become your best choice.

After all, you can't do much better with this niche genre, can you?