Have you ever been playing Pikmin and actually wanted to farm the adorable little plants complete with tilling land and ensuring they get enough water? Well, do I have a game for you. Farmagia (pronounced Far-mag-ia instead of Far-mage-ia in the biggest missed opportunity of the year) does exactly this combination of things, allowing you to cultivate your own personal army of part-plant, part-animal creatures to fight for you against other, equally adorable critters.
Set in the world of Felicidad, Farmagia follows one of the titular mages, Ten, as he and his friends grapple with being part of a rebellion to overthrow Glaza, the Magus. This deeply villainous character leads the Oración Seis, a set of regional lords that govern each continent of the world who you will get to know in your travels whether you want to or not. The story follows a typical structure as you travel the continents in your attempts to aid the rebellion, meeting new friends and foes alike and dispatching the majority of the latter. I kept wanting the story to take a turn, break out of the predictable path it was on, and be a little more exciting, but it never truly got there.
The gameplay is split into two sections, with farming and exploring dungeons being your two main activities. Beginning with the farming mechanics, this is one of the more engaging parts of the game as you plant the different Buddies that can be cultivated. Each one takes a specific amount of in-game time, and you must water them each in-game day as they grow on your farm. You can buy and craft items to help with this, such as increasing the yield from your crop or reducing the amount of time needed for it to grow, then leave the land to do its work as you go off to the dungeons. All activities on the farm cost FP (Farming Points) and you restore all your FP by resting overnight.
Where it gets a little deeper is in the difference between the types of Buddies you can cultivate. Battle Buddies, as the name suggests, will come into battle with you (more on this in a moment), but the Research Buddies are far more interesting. Planting Research Buddies will contribute toward your overall research in not only that creature, but also gain you points to use in the research tree. This then unlocks better farming equipment, larger farming space, new types of craftable items and even more powerful Battle Buddies. The problem being that all of this swiftly descends into busy work. Depending on your tolerance for that, the farming can quickly become monotonous and stale.
In the dungeons, the combat is initially very enjoyable, giving the player up to four types of Battle Buddies to use in combat, each of which is attributed to a different face button. Pressing their corresponding button sends them out to attack your current target, building up their gauge to perform a powerful attack called a Unite Blitz. Each enemy you come across will be weak to a particular Battle Buddy, which will increase your damage and also work on breaking their guard. If you do attack enough to break their guard, it will stun them giving you a moment’s reprieve and a great opportunity to do some damage or a Buddy-specific super attack.
On top of this, you can combine all of your Battle Buddies to shield from attacks, with bonuses awarded for guarding just as an attack hits you, such as boosts to your various gauges. If an enemy is attempting to strike with an unblockable attack, which the game highlights with a red flash, you can even use your Unite Blitz just before it hits to perform a Unite Counter. Your Buddies can be killed though, so using these defensive abilities is integral to survival, as is running over to the little tykes if they’re stunned by an enemy. As a final trowel to your toolkit, you can also combine all of your creatures into one colossal creature with a Fusion to perform a devastating attack that behaves like a Final Fantasy summon.
You can shake up the gameplay in a variety of ways, the biggest of which is by changing your loadout of Buddies, of which you can even fine-tune how many of each you will bring into battle with you. You can also change your leader, which grants different skills that can be used in battle such as making it easier to inflict debuffs. Finally, each dungeon allows you to choose your way through to some extent and whether you wish to prioritise items, party buffs, or enemy encounters, so you really need to go out of your way to have two runs of a dungeon that are completely identical.
This sounds very involved, and it is for a time, in the early parts of the game as you gain new types of Buddy and enhance the types you have already. Sadly, most aspects of the gameplay mentioned previously quickly become dull or don’t add much diversity to the game. For example, the dungeons themselves, although technically randomised, aren’t quite randomised enough, leaving each one feeling exactly like the last with maybe a new aesthetic identity to represent a new area i.e. a jungle or a swamp. That’s made worse by them each consistently ending in a remarkably similar-looking open area for their end-of-stage boss encounter.
Speaking of which, even the aesthetics of Farmagia don’t claw it out of the doldrums for me. I’ll concede that the various creatures are adorable, and I will never quite get over seeing the little wolves be pulled from what look like stalks of corn, but the characters play into a particular design philosophy that doesn’t gel with me. In other words, if you like your male characters to look generic as all sin, but your female characters having so much care in their design that they look like they’re from a different game entirely by comparison – you won’t have the same problem as I do here. But I’ll be the first to admit I’m just not a big-breasted anime girl kind of person.
