I just finished “Sakuna: Of Rice and Ruin” on my Switch. Very charming and memorable game. It feels very much like a quirky experimental game you would find in the PS2 era. Here is the box art
It’s a 2D action game with a pretty good combat system that allows for crazy combos and zipping around on your divine raiments (basically grappling hooks). Exploration is highly encouraged and each area (you select areas from a map screen) has a list of challenges to complete that raise your exploration level to unlock even more areas. However it is also partly a rice farming simulator and that is a very deep part of the game too. Depending on how well you raise your rice, it affects how greatly you will level up. There is lots at play here… How well you tilled the land, water levels, keeping the field weed free, etc.
The story starts off basic enough. Sakuna is a harvest goddess who is spoiled rotten has never done any actual work in her life, and is thrust into a new situation that forces her to adapt and grow. By the middle part of the story it actually gets really good and interesting. Something this game did very well is as the player gets better at the game, you can feel Sakuna getting better as a character too. At the start she is very clumsy and can only plant one seed at a time, slowly tills, etc. By the end you are tilling at Sonic speed and planting 8 seeds at a time.
I also want to highly commend Naomi Ōzora’s performance as Sakuna in the Japanese voice track. She is both hilarious at points but also does an extremely good job at when Sakuna starts becoming a “leader”. When she starts taunting the bosses in their intro cutscenes it actually got me hyped up!
It starts to get kinda brutally difficult near the end (or I wasn’t raising the rice as well as I thought), but there are difficulty options. I am stubborn so I didn’t bother with that.
It took me 35 hours to complete and that’s with all side quests and doing the optional 100 floor dungeon (not as big as you think).
I think this game is a good 8/10
I’ve said it before, but now that Marvelous/Xseed have returned to Xbox recently, this game would be a very good choice for MS to get onto Game Pass (it is on PC/PS4/Switch) because it is a passion project you can feel the soul oozing out of (I’d like to point out this game started out as a 3 man development team. It had about 15 devs or so and the backing of Marvelous near the end of it’s development though)
And shout-out to including a full color instruction booklet with the Switch version. Very cool and you get fun dialogue in it!
Anyway now that I have that game out of the way, it’s time to unwind all the frustration I had with those brutally difficult moments in Sakuna with this game
