Princess Farmer Review

I could harvest veggies all day!

While the bunny you play isn’t named, though I’m guessing it’s supposed to be a self insert of sorts, she is dubbed as Princess Farmer. How? Well, one day while working, she was pulling up veggies from the community garden and found lipstick sticking up from the soil. Strange, but she keeps it as it was a pretty color. Though she does have a strange dream that same night. She meets Mother Gaia who tells her she is now one of her guardians after the lipstick, or the Royal Lipstick of Strength, picked her as the next Princess Farmer. Of course, our main character doesn’t really take it too seriously as it’s just a dream and she isn’t normally able to hold one veggie with ease, let alone five, and be able to see underneath the surface dirt.

Well, it turns out to not be a dream. When she stepped out of her house the next day, possibly dreading having to pick up heavy veggies again, she found herself not in the city but in the lush wilderness. Even the woman that she dreamed of is right there. It turned out the dream was true and the lipstick brought her whole house to Mother Gaia’s Valley to be her Royal Guardian. A Princess Farmer’s duties is to handle the bounties that Earth provides and make sure to give these to animals or people that are in need of them. So you’ll occasionally get animals coming to you for some requests that you’ll have to fill. You’ll also be meeting other characters, some having to be her other Royal Guardians and others that happen to live there. The first people you meet, well other than Mother Gaia, is Garlic who is a very sweet bunny who can understand and talk to animals, Rowan the mysterious shopkeeper who no one knows how they’re able to move the shop, and Coco the farmer Though, you also meet a mysterious bunny stranger that is dedicated to defeating you using his gummi minions.

Talking to the different characters will let you get to know them more over the course of the game. You can actually skip over them if you want, as the game is set on you traveling between points on the ground, but I wouldn’t recommend it on your first playthrough. Anyway, aside from the cute dialogue, Princess Farmer will also give you a couple of dialogue choices that go with a couple of different moods shown by how her face changes as you hover over them. One choice can be a “yah come get me” face or a blushing face. Talking to characters will also raise your friendship level with them, and I do believe your choices do dictate this a bit as the character you blush the most towards will be your “Blushiest Crush” (which sounds so cute).

So it’s time to do your Princess Farmer duties. At the beginning of an episode, you’ll be talking to Mother Gaia to get a rundown on how the day will go and go to the sign post to see the travel plan and start the episode proper. This seems to work as a save system of sorts so you can stop in the middle of an episode and then go to the point you left off, or you can start before than to get a better score. It does seem like the episodes reset at some point though (I know they reset after finishing the last episode). Anyway, you will have exploration screens and puzzle screens. Exploration screens are just like they sound like, this is basically where it simulates you traveling to where you need to go and there are often someone for you to talk to. While puzzle screens are where you’ll be harvesting the veggies.

With your new powers from becoming Princess Farmer, you can harvest veggies way more efficiently. Harvesting is in the form of matching the veggies like a match-3 game, but with a few twists. There are a variety of veggies that you’ll be harvesting and while doing the classic pick and throw into a bag doesn’t work, you have a better way. Matching at least three veggies will cause them to just rise upin a streak of light. To do these matches, Princess Farmer can hold up to five veggies in her hands and depending on the puzzle screen, you’ll be able to see a certain area under the soil. No matter how you match it, it’ll match and you can get match 4 or 5 if you have a wide enough area. Doesn’t sound too hard, but it does rise in difficulty. Each puzzle will have you go for a certain goal, and don’t worry about having to keep track yourself as the handy Wonderbun will do that for you. This can be just getting to a certain score, but it can be harvesting a specific veggie for the animals (which will change as these animals have multiple requests), scoring as much as you can in a couple minutes or in a number of moves, or even disabling say horizontal matches from happening. Sometimes the area may even be split into two, smaller areas for you to work with, have a section blocked, have you avoid matching a specific veggie, have danger or bonus areas, have rocks you have to small with another rock to get them out of the way, or these grumpy blocks. Some veggies will also be the shiny variant which will grab you more points if you match it. As you go further into the game, you’ll encounter more aspects that might help you out or try to hinder you in some way.

Before you start a chapter (apart from Episode 1 which is the tutorial) you get to pick whatever playstyle you want. There are three: action, puzzle, or balanced bunny. No matter which playstyle you pick, you will still have the same rewards so don’t worry too much (though there are achievements for completing the game in all playstyles if you’re an achievement hunter). Action bunny swifts the focus to the action of matching and doing combos without having to think much about it. Puzzle bunny leans more towards the puzzle aspect while taking away the need of going fast and the timers. And of course, balanced bunny is the mix of the two. I mainly played on balanced bunny, but I did try out the other two for a couple puzzle levels and it seems like action bunny will give you the fast paced, timed goals while puzzle bunny will give you the goals asking you to score with a certain pattern or avoiding a veggie without a timer (like score horizontals while avoiding garlic). If you have someone to play with, there is also a co-op mode, as well as a quick play mode that will let you choose between certain levels that you can just jump right in.

Once you achieve the goal, you’ll go to a scoring card and be rated in the form of hearts by Mother Gaia. It depends on how you’re graded based on the goal you were going for, which can be how many matches you did or how long it took you, and you’ll get heart coins as a reward. These heart coins can then be spent at the shop which appears around the end of the episode. The end of the episode will also have Princess Farmer fall asleep and show your current relationships with the characters you met and the gifts you received from those you made friends with.

There are a few things that you can collect throughout the game. You can get a lot of different dyes from a shoppe that appears towards the end of each episode. This won’t only change Princess Farmer’s hair color, but her fur and her clothes as well. So if you find a dye that you really love the look for, you can buy it and equip it for the rest of the game (or until you get another that you like even more). Though, some of them are pretty pricey (though so pretty). You can also get dye as gifts. You will also get new clothing items as gifts as well as sparkles.

Verdict

I really enjoyed my time with Princess Farmer, which isn’t surprising as I did enjoy the demo that I played a year ago. If you like match-3 games and want a twist on it being like harvesting veggies as a bunny who found herself as the next Princess Farmer, this will definitely be for you. The gameplay was quite fun throughout, with the only annoying thing was when you get an AI partner mostly since they can mess up your plans, and the characters and art style make the game even cuter. Even if you just want to play it in one playstyle, Princess Farmer is worth picking up.