Review: Enjoy Peace And Punching In SAKUNA: OF RICE AND RUIN
Combining genres is always a fun experiment for video games, but I never really expected action side-scrolling to be mixed with extensively specific rice growing and harvesting. But, Sakuna: Of Rice and Ruin does a surprisingly good job of making the side-scrolling smooth and difficult while allowing players to take a break and tend to their rice garden in numerous ways.
Let’s first talk about the side-scrolling aspect. This game isn’t Cuphead, MegaMan, or Shovel Knight. You won’t lose sleep on the high-quality level, design, or difficulty of the platforming and battles. But it’s fun and will entertain just about anybody that picks it up. The night and day cycles that are more related to farming does force players to explore for only a certain amount of time, making runs-throughs feel urgent but doable. There are two major complaints with this half of the gameplay; it can get really glitchy sometimes and the lack of variety of enemies and levels. After exploring the fourth location that has the exact same aesthetic and enemies (only having two or three enemy types usually), it can feel fairly repetitive. It isn’t annoying, I just wish that either more variety in enemy or level design or less grinding for materials altogether.
The rice-growing simulator surprised me and became probably my more favorite part of the game. Each season has very different activities and needs. Even in the wintertime, I had to tend to different parts of the garden and work on gathering materials while hunting so that my planting, growing, and harvesting times were a little easier. Each activity while it might’ve been tedious was more therapeutic than monotonous. It was pretty entertaining to have to spend time doing extremely remedial tasks and classic farming techniques like making fertilizer out of my poop, gathering and pulling weeds, and many other things. It’s not extremely difficult, but the more time you put into your rice field the more you get out. This means higher quality rice that tastes better or treating the rice in a way that it will grow better the following year. Being able to make choices that affect the harvest or even the type and growth of rice in years to come became far more engaging. I found myself excited to pull weeds every day, plant my rice, and mix fertilizer with various things found in the wild to create a much more fertile land.
The last thing to address here is the aesthetics and presentation. I was pleasantly surprised by how entertaining and how much personality this game had. The voice acting is super great and always delivering 110%. The story, while it’s exact same thing as Thor, is well told and the player has a love-hate relationship with the annoying yet endearing Sakuna. The art and character design are really cute and sleek, even if some of the character models and animations are a little clunky, there is a lot to like about it.
Sakuna: Of Rice and Ruin ended up being a more engaging and entertaining game and I expected. It still has its faults and has a very specific audience, but for those who enjoy farming or a silly story and some action, this game has a lot to offer.
