Tales Of Seikyu Review

Sometimes all you want to do is get away from your everyday worries, sit on a farm, and grow vegetables. Maybe sit by a creek and fish while watching the sunset. With the rise of the cozy farm sim genre of games we have a veritable buffet of options now. No longer do we wait for years for news of the next Harvest Moon game (now Story of Seasons), we now have many franchises and games to pick from. Tales of Seikyu is the newest to throw their hat into the genre.

In Tales of Seikyu, you can explore an Eastern mythology inspired land full of a colorful cast of characters as you help to build a town and solve the mystery of your missing parents. You play as a returning fox to the island of Seikyu, a haven for Yokai and other creatures to live peacefully, once founded by the fox clan who have all mysteriously disappeared. You can choose to play as any gender with a character creator that does the job. You won't be making any amazing designs like you see in some other character creators, but there is enough in it to make a character you will enjoy.

One of the most unique things about Tales of Seikyu is that, as a fox, you have the ability to transform into other forms. The first form you will unlock shortly after getting to the island is that of a boar. Not only is this useful in exploration, but this is also how you will tend your farm. There are no major farm tools in this game, instead you rely on your transformations to do many of the mundane tasks; transform into your boar form and you can till the soil. With a total of six forms that you can unlock, this adds a nice variety of traversal and farming options to the game.

This game skews more to the Rune Factory side of cozy sims than the Harvest Moon’s or Stardew Valley side by making combat a core part of the game. With a large dungeon to explore full of monsters to fight and treasure to find, you can spend just as much time here as on your farm. Inside this dungeon is how you will unlock most of your transformations, as well as push that main mystery of where the Fox Clan has disappeared to. However, like many of these games the combat is not that fleshed out. Hitting an enemy feels floaty, if their health didn't go down i would question my effectiveness. You can lock onto an enemy, but with larger enemies this can cause some camera control problems. You have a standard three hit combo, an aerial attack, and a charge attack. There are also several types of weapons, these don’t change the combos you can do just how fast you swing your weapon and the base damage: heavy weapons hit harder but slower. Overall the combat is not horrible, but with how much combat is in the game I was hoping for a better system.

Besides combat there’s also the farming side of the game. As normal, you plant crops and sell them to local merchants to expand your farm. Expanding includes more fields to till and even animals to interact with. The game also has a season system that sees some crops only grow for part of the year. The farm isn’t just a way to make money. All of the items you grow on the farm will help you progress and befriend the citizens of Seikyu. You will also find some areas of the dungeon that need specific items to unlock a door, so neglecting the farm in favor of the dungeon can have downsides.

The denizens of the town are also interesting with plenty of stories to explore. There are a wide variety of characters you will encounter, be it the grizzled otter who runs the fish market, or an ox yokai who runs the forge for the town. All the characters are well written and have some interesting side stories. One of my favorites was befriending the youngest members of the town and playing a game of Humans and Houses with them, a story rpg where you set off on a dangerous adventure to buy a car to drive and get a hamburger. These types of interactions help keep the town fresh and checking in with your friends isn’t just a game mechanic, but something I want to do to see what happens next.

When you get tired of all this fighting and daily upkeep on your farm, you’ll be happy to know that there are plenty of leisure activities on the island. You can fish in any body of water you find with a fun mini game. Later in the game you can help open a Casino and Bar with many games inside. The Casino alone has a very well implemented version of Black Jack that works better than some casino game collections i've played before. Overall there are plenty of distractions for you should you tire of running your farm and just want to relax.

The technical side of this game is also rock solid. I had no crashes and a solid frame rate the entire time I played. Some of the load times can be a bit long when transitioning between areas, but nothing so bad that I thought it was broken. I played on PC using a PS5 DualSense controller and it had full compatibility. I also tested this game on my Steam Deck with no issues.

The world itself is colorful and well designed, it’s large enough that there are places to explore, but not so large that you’ll spend half your time getting from place to place. The art style overall is fairly pleasing, with well designed character art and monsters that stand out from the rest of the world. My only complaint would be that the foliage draw distance is fairly short leading to some noticeable pop-in when running around.

One of my major gripes with this game is in the sound design. The music is serviceable but with only a few tracks in the game you will be hearing the same songs a lot. The rest of the sounds are also just a bit off; the sound of attacking an enemy just doesn't have the weight behind it I wish it did. There are moments in the game where a big reveal happens and the sound effect is so quiet as to not be noticeable. Hopefully with some patches they can fix this but as it stands I want more from this aspect of the game.

Overall I enjoyed my time in Seikyu, whether it was meeting and befriending the towns folk or exploring the dungeon. It is missing some of the quality of life updates other games in the genre have, such as pinning a recipe to your display, or crafting from storage. None of that makes the game bad, it has that “Just one more day” feel. It would be getting later in the day in real life but I would just keep saying I'll only play one more day, that way I can sell my crops. But one more day turns into many and suddenly it’s way too late to be playing this game. While this game doesn't have the polish as some of the bigger games in the genre I still can’t wait to go back and continue my adventure is Seikyu