Video Game Review: Kitaria Fables

Developer: Twin Hearts

Publisher: PQube Limited

Genre: Farming Sim/Action RPG

PlayStation 4/5

Kitaria Fables is a Farming Simulator RPG where you play a cat soldier who takes up caring for their late grandfather’s farm after being assigned to protect the nearby town from monsters that have recently gone from being passive to aggressive. Though simple compared to many of its genre peers, it still provides some amusement during its relatively short duration.

For better or for worse, Kitaria Fables sets itself apart from other farming sims by virtue of where its focus lies; where others place a heavy emphasis on the farming and social aspects while the action is sparse (if it’s there at all), Kitaria is more concerned with the main plotline, the combat and the crafting. Most of the time I played it for was spent grinding materials from monsters, with only occasional trips back to my farm to water my crops or plant new ones. Speaking to NPCs, meanwhile, is largely fruitless. The characters are shallow presences with very little to say and very little interaction to be had outside of giving quests which is a definite disappointment. It’s not an enormous flaw by itself but it is still worth noting so that potential players will know what not to expect from this game.

So if the farming and socializing aren’t the main draws of the game, how do the other parts measure up? The story is nothing particularly special – though the characters directly involved in the plot aren’t as shallow as the other NPCs, they aren’t especially deep either and I doubt I’ll still be thinking about them in a week. However, the combat and crafting are Kitaria Fables’ saving grace, which is fortunate because it’s what most of my playtime was spent on. Most everything you can make in the game requires a large amount of materials, so I found myself repeatedly reloading screens to spawn more monsters and slay them for their drops, which was fun in a mindless kind of way. The animations in combat are surprisingly smooth and aesthetically pleasing, particularly the way the player character runs when they have their big old kitty claymore drawn. The impactfulness of hits is also satisfying, even when it’s the player taking them, which always goes a long way towards my enjoyment of hacking and/or slashing.

All that said, there are still some gameplay elements that are heavily flawed. There’s a lock on function that is frustrating to use because you have to be already facing the enemy you’re locked on to for an attack command to input properly, the margin of error for which is almost laughably small. Fortunately the game is easy enough to play without ever using the lock-on, and frankly I would have forgotten about it entirely had I not made a note about how annoying it was to try to use early on. The number of slots for tool and item selection in the hotbar is also far too small, with only four spaces for items and four spaces for spells, neither of which is sufficient for either category. Having to fully go into the menu to switch between equipped items almost any time you wish to do so gets annoying fast. The game’s general pacing is also very slow, frequently having to wait several days to be able to complete an objective and progress a quest, something which is not helped by crafting only being possible at merchants which are unavailable during the night (with the exception of one whose appearance is sporadic at best and who is used to upgrade inventory capacity.) Finally, and this isn’t so much a gameplay complaint as it is a general grievance, the main menu music that plays upon booting the game up is extremely loud, far more so even than anything else in the game – basically every time I started playing again I would be startled and have to rush to turn down my TV volume.

Kitaria Fables can be fun at times, particularly if you’re like me in that you’re the type to put on a podcast while you mindlessly grind in a game, but its lack of remarkable features or lasting appeal makes it harder to recommend than other games like it. If you’re absolutely starving for a new farming sim, you could do worse than this, but you could also probably do better.