Farm simmers already know what day it is: It’s Fields of Mistria 1.0 day. The magical girl-inspired, ’90s anime flashback farm sim has been in early access for two years (to the day) and has just launched its full release version with the conclusion of its main story and, way more importantly, matrimony.
To the dismay of some of my fellow PCG editors and the delight of others, I’ve been totally incapable of shutting up about Mistria. Farm sims are nominally about planting crops and making cash but what keeps me and all the other life simming freaks coming back is always going to be great artwork and crushable characters. Mistria is drowning in both with its Game Boy Advance-inspired colorful sprites and characters who clawed their way out of my old Shojo Beat mags.
It’s an old anime tropes fest on its face (red-headed tsundere boy, arrogant villainess, flirtatious rogue, and blonde protagonist are all here) but Mistria does such an incredible job of layering genuine character insights underneath all of them with a shocking amount of contextual dialogue. Farm sims just don’t typically write this much, and I respect the heck out of Mistria for it.
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Today’s a great day to start your first farm in Mistrira, but for those of us who’d been vibrating in anticipation—you don’t have to start from scratch at all. The new main story quests and final romance and marriage scenes all naturally fall after the progress you’ve made so far. Even the new Steam achievements are awarded retroactively.
I’ll be writing a scored review of Fields of Mistria just as soon as I have a chance to complete the story and finally choose my spouse, which is the real final boss in this game where I’m dating 10 of the 12 marriage candidates and have only gotten more indecisive. You can wait on the formality of a percentage, but I’ve made my opinion known that I think this is one of the best games like Stardew Valley a few different times over the past two years so you can see where my head’s at pretty clearly.
You can grab Fields of Mistria on Steam now (no console releases yet, sorry) for $12.59 (£10.61) which, if I can effusively praise it one more time, is a heck of a lot of farm sim for about half the price most other farm sims go for these days.