If Sakuna: Of Rice and Ruin wants you to appreciate one thing, it is this: rice farming is hard.
In winter you have to till the soil, and acquire fertiliser - and if you don’t have the contacts or capital, you’ll have to, er, make some. In spring you have to plant the seeds in your, er, fertilised field, not too far apart or too near. Through the summer you have to adjust the water and temperature as they grow, watch for disease, and fight off pests that love the smell of your faeces in the fields. In autumn, there’s the harvest: the reaping of the grown rice, the drying, the threshing (pulling the grain from the rice), and the hulling (turning from white to brown). Finally, apart from those grains you and yours want to eat, there’s the selling and transporting: the distribution.
SORaR lovingly recreates all of these stages, apart from the last one. If that sounds like it’d make for a dull videogame, it quite possibly does. It’s also the best and most compelling game I played in 2020, which is going to make it a bastard to review and score.
Rei-Jin-G Lu-P
SORaR isn’t quite like anything else I’ve played. Oh, it’s a bit like a lot of games. I could, and will, compare it to Muramasa: the Demon Blade, Ever Oasis, Animal Crossing, even No More Heroes… SORaR, though, is unique from all of them.
The core loop is perhaps most similar to Ever Oasis. To progress the game, you play through 2D platforming-combat levels; but your main character, the titular Sakuna, starts off weak. To become stronger, she can do one of two things: eat food for temporary buffs, or grow rice for permanent ones. The best rice requires the best fertiliser, which needs you to collect nutrients and material (in the 2D levels) to boost your poop. Meanwhile, food that’s not rice can be found by defeating enemies and harvesting plants. As you progress the game, you unlock more paddies, allowing you to grow more rice, allowing you to become stronger more quickly, allowing you to progress more etc. etc.
That’s the core loop. There’s also a daily loop and a yearly loop. Trying to explore them all at once is enough to drive you loopy, so let’s take a step back.
The plot is that harvest goddess Sakuna, a spoiled brat living off her parents’ influence, is exiled from Heaven to Earth (or ‘the Lofty Realm’ and ‘the Lowly Realm’ if you buy into a game that wants you to believe it’s not set in ‘Japan’ but in ‘Yanato’) for being a lazy posh git who slobs round all day and lets people go hungry. Right out the gate, then, SORaR brings us to a world that’s more likeable than Britain. That said, she’s also punished for letting humans into Heaven, so maybe Priti Patel is pulling strings behind the scenes. ‘Yanato’ is a war-torn demon-ridden mess and Sakuna, along with her human ‘friends’, is tasked with sorting out at least one island of it.
Sakuna’s arc isn’t exactly original, but it is sweet. She becomes a genuinely appealing character as the game goes on. Her comrades are pretty engaging too, with their own character motivations. They may not defy many gender stereotypes (the male farmer and smith, the female weaver and cook); but in a game where the Bechdel Test is passed in the opening scene and with a really solid female lead, I at least could look past that.
Scarf Ace
As for the gameplay, it comes in two separate but interlocking components.
I’ll start with the combat, because it’s a much easier sell. Simply, it’s good fun. You wander around levels, negotiating them with the Divine Raiment, a.k.a. Link’s hookshot but it’s a scarf. Maybe you cut down a few shrubs, mine some ore. Then you blunder into a group of ‘demons’ and the real entertainment begins.
I love SORaR’s combat. It reminds me of Muramasa’s in that it’s fast and dynamic, without ever seeming overly complex. At its most basic, you have a weak attack, a strong attack, and the extendo-scarf. You can chain these together into simple combos, which are especially effective when done in mid-air. You don’t have a dodge button, and while you can parry attacks, it’s much more fun to swing behind the foe using your Raiment and stab them in the back. The game counters this by throwing several enemies at you of different types all at once, as well as the odd natural hazard.
As you progress, your foes get tougher, and some (especially the bosses) get a lot tougher quite fast. You start to need those buffs. In return, you craft new weapons and clothing, as well as unlocking special moves. While lots of them are great, none are better than the early skill that’s basically a golf shot. Because enemies almost always come in groups, driving one into several others and watching them domino is effective and satisfying.
The platforming and exploration is decent, maybe better than decent when you throw in grappling with the Raiment. If nothing else it offers breathing space between fights: I’ll come back to pacing later. The downtime is super-important, though, because Sakuna gradually recovers her health while not fighting - but only when her stomach’s full. When it’s empty, and night’s falling, you lose your recovery and any food buffs just as the demons get stronger. Essentially you’re encouraged to go home or get slaughtered. Oh, and most of the food you’ve collected will rot at midnight.
Growing Home
That brings Sakuna, and us, to the second part of the game. Every morning you wake up in front of your principal paddy, ready to grow some rice. Every evening you return home, and are confronted with the same paddy.
Most of the rice-growing is done through one of three ‘mini-game types’: moving slowly through the paddy doing things (hoeing the earth, planting seeds, reaping), quick-time events that aren’t quick that you repeat until the rice is processed (threshing and hulling), and managing the field for irrigation and pests. None of them is, strictly speaking, that interesting. The threshing and hulling, in particular, are ‘bash buttons until done’ in a way that would make early Mario Parties weep.
What’s more, it seems to be intentionally dull in places. Apparently Edelweiss, the two-man studio that developed the game, spent most of its five-year development period researching rice farming to make it as realistic as possible. That means a whole slew of realistic rice diseases. It doesn’t automatically mean ‘fun’.
When the combat’s this good, having to stop it because your goddess is hungry can be annoying. Stopping it to do something intentionally dull should be a game-breaker, and for many people it will be. I thought it might be for me, too. Reviews warned that patience was required to get the most out of SORaR, and patience isn’t something I’m overburdened with. They warned too that much of the rice knowledge is dripped out slowly, or hidden away in scrolls: something I’ve objected to in games of late.
Thing is… I grew to like the farming.
Job’s Worth
I mentioned pacing earlier, and for me, I found that the farming made me appreciate the combat more. Do you know I never finished No More Heroes 2? For all that it was a slicker product than 1, which I liked a great deal, it lost a lot of charm and scuffed up its pacing when it got rid of the kinda dull side-jobs and duff open world. SORaR’s farming feels like No More Heroes’ kinda dull side-jobs and duff open world, and it’s all the better for it.
What’s more, seeing Sakuna get better at it was genuinely great. From her stuttering clueless beginnings, hobbling around her field planting one seed at a time, she levels up each farming skill and becomes noticeably more efficient at it. Suddenly you’re flinging down clouds of seeds, perfectly spaced, at a rate of knots. What was hard becomes just a touch easier. The improvements feel genuinely rewarding: just like real farming, only without the back-breaking pain, stupid hours, and constant poop-smell. In a year where Animal Crossing had us all enjoying a second job because it was cute, why shouldn’t SORaR’s second job have the same impact?
And when the year comes to an end, and your finished harvest breaks onto the screen in a blaze of increasing stats and food to eat and even currency… that’s really satisfying, more so than anything in Animal Crossing.
(I should caveat this, heavily. Those reviews warning about patience made me both seek a walkthrough for the farming, to circumvent the game’s drip-feed of farming hints; and turn the farming difficulty down to ‘Easy’. I did turn it up to ‘Normal’ again later, but I’ll never know how much those affected my enjoyment of the farming. All I can say is that I did enjoy it.)
It’s all wrapped up in the most atmospheric game I played last year. Granted, most of the prettiness is achieved through turning the bloom up to 11. It’s still pretty! The bloom-drenched Japanese paddy fields, chirping with cicadas, are a world away from cold rainy Blighty. The atmosphere is added to by strong voice acting (assuming you’re a sensible person and turn the language to Japanese off the bat), and a great soundtrack I’ll be humming for days. It’s mostly traditional Japanese instruments and electric bass, and that suits me just fine.
Every Morning You Greet Me
With all the prettiness and the accomplished gameplay and the very detailed farming, not to mention the fact that I got a retail copy, I sometimes forgot that this was a two-man development job at heart. Occasionally I’d be reminded of this: there aren’t that many enemy types to fight, although that’s mitigated by how they’re drip-fed throughout the game. More egregious a reminder were the bugs, with scenery not always being completely solid and enemies getting stuck in rocks occasionally. These are rare, though; and anyway, bigger games seem to have their fair share of bugs nowadays. Wouldn’t you say, CD Projekt Red?
What’s more, in trying to make a larger game than perhaps they should have, Edelweiss blunder slightly at the penultimate hurdle. An admittedly strong story beat leads to palette-swapped bosses and resource quests that felt like padding, pushing 25 hours of playtime (still not small!) up to 35. SORaR is hardly alone in this - off the top of my head, Bravely Default and Wind Waker both did similar things - but it was a rare misstep that didn’t feel intentional.
Because most of SORaR’s potential missteps do feel intentional. Sakuna’s journey from spoiled brat to master farmer is hard, requiring diligence and patience, and we’re required to have that too. This is no doubt the reason behind the hidden farming knowledge. If you play it the way Edelweiss intended and don’t cheat, you’ll spend ages failing to grow rice in optimal ways, until the game begrudgingly doles out the hints you need. Even in my cheat case, I struggled to find how to see my way at night, until I stumbled on the button command hidden in the menus.
I’d wager that most people will get fed up with the farming at some point, and for a significant number, the fact that nearly half of the game feels almost intentionally tedious will put them off. I wouldn’t be able to blame them either: I thought I’d be the same.
Now? I love rice farming. Call the psychiatrists, have them define ‘Sakuna Syndrome’.
Scored Earth
Which leaves me trying to score this game
Sakuna: Of Rice and Ruin feels like it’ll have a greater spread of scores than most, from people who love it more than me to people who think it’s all a waste of time and money. Should this be an issue? Shouldn’t I just give it the 9/10 I personally would drop on it? Maybe, but with Sakuna: Of Rice and Ruin, that doesn’t feel enough. My numerical summary needs to reflect that range.
Many would say not to score it then. (Many would say that anyway.) I love numbers though, me. I love scores. What’s more, my day job is to change variable and uncertain numbers into results and communications. If I can do that for my job, I’m damned if I can't do that for something I actually enjoyed.
In a way, it’s the perfect way to sum up Sakuna: Of Rice and Ruin. Scoring the game is hard, just like rice farming. It requires patience, like rice farming. It’s not immediately obvious, like SORaR teaching you rice farming. And in scoring this game, I’m filling in that last piece of the rice-farming puzzle that the game omits - the distribution.