As a reminder, what I’m looking for while reviewing is in a previous blog post, which you can find here: https://annatheannoying.wordpress.com/2021/12/30/gone-fishing-reviewing/

Rating

I had high hopes for this, but the limited amount of fishing you can actually do means it’s not a very good fishing game. Maybe I’m just salty that my reflexes are too slow for this game.

Actual game overview

Black Clover M: Rise of the Wizard King is a mobile RPG gacha game (developed by Garena?) based on the anime Black Clover, available on the Apple App Store, Google Play, can also be played on the Android emulator BlueStacks. At the time of writing, it is free-to-play, but as with all gacha games, there are lots of in-app purchases. You can play as the various mages from the anime. The gacha aspect comes in with the mages you can play as. You start with Asta and Yuno, and other than Charlotte Roselei (in the global version, at least), all the other mages you get are randomised. Different mages have different rarities, and there are time limited events where the chance to summon particular mages is boosted.

The RPG aspect plays like a very basic JRPG, following the story of the anime (pretty faithfully, imo). Combat is turn-based and very basic, where you can choose one of four spells to use (two of which need to build up charges, and one of which has a cooldown). It has a rock-paper-scissors mechanic to determine which mages are strong or weak against others with Power (red) being strong against Sense (green), which is strong against Technique (blue), which is strong against Power. The weaknesses go in the reverse direction, with Technique being weak against Sense, etc.

I ended up running it in auto-mode 95% of the time, as the game is very-repetitive. I am determined not to spend any money on this game, despite the fact that Detective Charmy has been my phone wallpaper for the past 5 years. I’ve read the horror stories of people who end up spending thousands of dollars on gacha games and I don’t want to be one of them.

Fishing mechanics – 2.5/5

Casting

To cast, head to a fishing pool. You can either walk there manually, or select “Fishing” from your adventure journal, and it’ll walk your character to the pool in the area you are currently in. From there, you can press the “Fish” button to go into the fishing screen. Pressing the cast button, in the bottom-right of the screen, will cast your line.

Hooking + Reeling

After you’ve cast your line, an ellipsis will appear in a bubble above your character and the cast button in the bottom-right will be replaced with a reel button. After a short wait, you’ll hear a sound and two exclamation marks will appear in a red bubble above your character. Press the reel button to reel in your catch. There isn’t really a separate reeling stage.

If you press it too early, you fail and lose a hook.

If you press it too late, you also fail and lose a hook.

The difficulty level of the pool determines how fast you need to react in order to catch the fish.

The fastest I’ve been able to do is 433ms, so I don’t know how I’ll catch anything in the level 4 or 5 pools. I haven’t come across any yet, so I haven’t tested it out. But I’m really wary that I might not be able to fish in the later stages of the game.

Consumables

Each time you fish, you use up a fish hook. There’s also a x6 mode so you can use 6 hooks at a time to save time fishing, but who would want to do that?! If you miss your fish in x6 mode, you only lose one hook, and if you have less than 6 hooks, it’ll use all of your remaining ones.

Fishing hooks regenerate over time, or you can walk around the map searching for hooks. It is a really frustrating experience, as you’re supposed to walk around looking for shiny spots, except you don’t know it’s a shiny spot until you’re basically on top of it.

I haven’t actually tried this feature of WordPress before, so I hope it works – you can drag the slider along to compare the before (when I was next to the shiny spot) and the after (when I was close enough to collect it). There’s barely a step between the two images – that’s how close you need to be before you can see the sparkles!

I ended up walking around randomly trying to find the right spots to explore. And even then, you’re not guaranteed to get a fishing hook, as there are other items you can find.

Travel

Each world is pretty small, so it doesn’t take very long to walk to fishing nodes. And as I mentioned earlier, you can select “Fishing” from the right side of your Adventure Journal, which will make your character automatically walk to the fishing spot in the current world you’re in.

You might read this section and think, “This sounds just like fishing in World of Warcraft. Didn’t you say that was what your ideal fishing game was? Why did it only get 2.5 out of 5?” My answer to that is: the reaction time needed is a lot faster, so it feels more stressful, you’re limited in how many times you can fish per day.

Time-to-Fish – 2/5

It took me 2 hours and 18 minutes to unlock fishing from the opening cutscene (which doubled as a tutorial) to my first cast. I could have done it faster if I had skipped all of the cutscenes, but I started watching the anime from episode 27, so I thought it’d be a fun way to watch all of the parts I missed.

I ended up looking at another guide later, which said you can fish once you’ve unlocked the Adventure Journal, but I found that I could fish before then, after finishing the Saussy Village quests. Basically as soon as I had freedom of movement on the overworld that wasn’t limited by story quests.

Multitaskability – 0/5

Given how fast you need to react, there is pretty much no chance to multi-task while fishing. I mean, you could have something on in the background, but you wouldn’t be paying that much attention to it.

Time management – 0.5/5

Time management isn’t a good description for this category, as it’s not really time you’re managing, but rather fishing hooks. While you could neglect every other part of the game and be perfectly fine, the limited number of fishing hooks means that you can’t just sit back and fish for an hour if you wanted to. You can’t even really stockpile fishing hooks to have a massive fish session, because you are limited to 10 explore actions per region per day. I haven’t unlocked all the regions yet, but running around all of them to find hooks would get really boring really quickly.

Excitement – 1/5

It’s not very exciting. The lack of a “reeling” stage means that there’s nothing really challenging other than the initial tap. All the animations are pretty sure, and the rewards aren’t super exciting – usually just yul (gold) and a fish – all of which are common.

Usefulness – 5/5

You can fish up cooking ingredients, stamina, puzzle pieces (to make skill pages) and tickets for things. All of which are useful for playing the game. In particular, the fish you can get in the first zone can be used for EXP+ food buffs, which is really nice.

Ambience – 5/5

I really like the cute art style and the music in this game. Given how little time you can actually spend fishing, I doubt you’ll get bored of seeing the backgrounds. And if you are that kind of person, there’s always x6 mode!

Summary

As much as I love the anime Black Clover, the fishing in this game is severely limited by the fish hook limitations. 6 fishing attempts per day is not enough! And to make matters worse, the explore mode is currently bugged and I get a server error every time I try to explore (version: global.1.02.109.181968), so I’m just stuck with the 6 attempts per day.

I get that the limited fishing is on purpose, otherwise players would feel compelled to fish a lot in the game, and it would feel more tedious. But as this is a fishing review, not an overall game review, that’s what I’m focusing on.

As a reminder, what I’m looking for while reviewing is in a previous blog post, which you can find here: https://annatheannoying.wordpress.com/2021/12/30/gone-fishing-reviewing/

Note: I’ve tried my best to keep this review relatively spoiler-free, but there are a few vague mentions which are minor spoilers.

Rating

I found fishing in this game to be quite relaxing. It did start to get a bit stale towards the middle of the game, so I don’t think it’s a game you could fish in for hours at a time. I think I’ll have it on my list of games to play when I just want some mindless chill time.

I like how there’s no need to do anything in order to fish, like gather bait or craft rods.

Actual game overview

Spiritfarer is an action platformer game, with some management simulation sprinkled on top, created by Thunder Lotus Games. I got it on sale for A$21.47 (IsThereAnyDeal link), full price on Steam is A$42.95. It’s available on Steam, Xbox One, PS4 and Nintendo Switch. There’s also a demo of the game available on Steam (and possibly the consoles, too).

You play as Stella, a new Spiritfarer whose job it is to ferry spirits to the Everdoor and help them move on. While the spirits are on your boat, they’ll give you quests to complete. You’ll also need to build houses for them and feed them. I’m fairly mediocre at platforming games, and while there were a couple of tricky parts, I was able to finish the game.

The game is fairly light-hearted for the most part, but as you would expect given the subject matter, it has many sombre moments. I cried while playing. Most of the spirits didn’t impact me very much, but there were two that felt like an emotional sucker punch.

I can’t find a version number, but I played the Farewell Edition, which the devs have said is their last content update.

Fishing mechanics – 4/5

Casting

To cast, head over to the Sea Master 2000 at the stern of your ship and press the interact button (E on keyboard, which I’m going to use for the rest of this post). Stella’s Everlight will turn into a fishing rod and she’ll cast her line into the water.

Hooking

When you’ve hooked a fish, the bobber will start bobbing up and down, and you’ll hear a “ting” sound. Press E to hook. If you miss it, the bobber will remain in the water, and you can wait for another fish to bite.

Reeling

You can hold down E to reel the fish in. As you reel, the rod will start to turn red. You need to release E, otherwise the line will snap. Colour is the only indicator of how much tension there is on the line. The rod can be practically folded in half, but as long as it’s not red, you’re safe to keep reeling. I couldn’t see any colour-blind friendly options in the settings, so I hope there aren’t any colour blind people that are affected!

However, just because the rod is red, doesn’t mean you need to stop reeling completely. In fact, if you do so, you won’t be able to catch tuna. When it’s red, you can spam the E button to stop the fish from swimming too far away. That seemed counter-intuitive to me.

Catching a fish requires you to reel until it’s near your ship (roughtly where the fish is in the screenshot below).

If the fish gets too far away (the left side of the screen), the line will snap and you’ll lose it.

Consumables

There are none.

Travel

You can fish anywhere, as long as you’re on your boat. Different areas have different fish that are specific to them, and there are specific tuna fishing locations (that will have one tuna in it. However, even if you hook the tuna, if the line snaps, you can still catch it again).

If you are like me, and have horrible flashbacks of The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker and the seemingly endless sailing involved whenever you see sailing in a game, fear not, as there are bus stops around the map which allow you to quick travel between them. There’s still a decent amount of sailing involved, and I think fishing is one of the activities that’s meant to make it less boring. Plus, if you’re actually interested in playing the game for non-fishing reasons, there’s tons of chores to do on the ship to pass the time.

I forgot when it happens, but you eventually get an option to “safe-travel”, i.e. travel while ignoring the events on the map along the way. I almost always had that option on after about halfway through the game, as it made it more relaxing to just sit down and fish.

Time-to-Fish – 4/5 (technically 5/5)

It took me 2 minutes and 32 seconds from the end of the opening cutscene to being able to fish. You need to get your ship, and that’s pretty much it!

Technically, while you can fish pretty quickly, you’ll mostly catch the same fish and junk items until you find a spirit who will upgrade your fishing equipment. Then you’ll start to get the real stuff. I took 26 minutes and 24 seconds to reach that point.

Multitaskability – 5/5

I was easily able to watch videos and read other websites while fishing. The rod changing colour was pretty easy to see out of the corner of my eye, and the fish biting sound was distinct enough that I didn’t have to watch while waiting for it.

I didn’t hit an inventory limit in the time that I was playing, so as far as I’m aware, there’s no inventory management required.

Time management – 4.5/5 (5/5 if you don’t care about feeding your passengers)

Other than the need to regularly hug / feed your passengers to keep their mood level up, you’re pretty much free to ignore the chores on your ship unless you happen to want whatever resource it provides (e.g. shearing sheep). And even if you don’t feed your passengers, as far as I’m aware, nothing bad really happens. I couldn’t bring myself to let them starve, so I never found out what happens when you don’t feed them.

While you may lose some time to cooking and feeding, it’s pretty quick, so you can go back to fishing after you’re done.

There is a day / night cycle, but that doesn’t affect fishing so much. You can’t travel at night, so you’re stuck fishing wherever you stopped for the day. If you want to keep travelling, you can simply go to bed for the night. The fishing spot is next to your cabin, so it’s not a long wait.

Excitement – 2/5

For the most part, one fish is the same as another. The fish you catch (whether through fishing or from cleaning them off the side of your ship), fall into four categories: fish, cephalopods, shellfish, crustaceans. Some recipes require a specific type of fish, but many require a certain category, or any type of seafood. This makes catching any particular fish not very exciting – unless you’re catching it for the first time.

Tuna fishing is pretty exciting the first time, especially with the frantic music, but once you figure out how it’s done, it loses that excitement.

Usefulness – 5/5

I’m fairly certain that you need to fish in order to ferry all the spirits across, as there’s one spirit with a quest that requires you to get fish. While there are some treasure chests that have fish in them, I’m not sure the fish you need for the quest can be obtained without fishing. However, you don’t need to ferry all of the spirits across in order to finish the game, so you could get away without fishing if you’re not a completionist.

Aside from that, fish are used in cooking, and one spirit’s favourite food has a specific fish as an ingredient. You can also sell fish for glims (the game’s currency). There’s a character in the game who gives you rewards for catching numbers of unique fish, and also for cooking unique dishes (some of which require specific fish).

I felt really called out when I went to redeem my reward for catching every different fish in the game.

With the exception of one spirit, you can feed fish dishes to everyone, so long as you alternate dishes as nobody will eat the same meal twice.

Ambience – 3.5/5

I really like the art style in this game. Since all of your fishing is done from the stern of your ship, your view is pretty much the same for most of the game. The only difference is the weather and time of day. I think there are some really pretty backgrounds in the game, especially at night time. Some people may find it really boring seeing the same thing all the time.

I wasn’t a fan of fishing in the foggy area, as it made it hard to see your bobble.

Summary

A really chill fishing experience. Maybe a bit too chill, as it didn’t feel exciting after a while. Even tuna fishing, once I worked out how to catch one, lost its lustre.

Overall, I liked the mechanic. Other than feeding your guests, there isn’t anything that interrupts your fishing time – and if you don’t feed your guests, all that happens is that they get a negative mood modifier. It’s something you can easily do while watching a TV show.

As a reminder, what I’m looking for while reviewing is in a previous blog post, which you can find here: https://annatheannoying.wordpress.com/2021/12/30/gone-fishing-reviewing/

Rating

I liked the fishing mechanic in this game, but the time / energy management aspect, and the lack of exitement were not for me. Catching the same few fish over and over in each pool got boring pretty quickly.

Actual game overview

My Time at Portia is a Stardew Valley-esque game released by Pathea Games. I wanted to write farming sim, but farming feels like a really low priority. Steam lists it as: indie, RPG, simulation. I got it for free from the Epic Games Store, but it’s currently A$41.95 on Steam and the EGS (IsThereAnyDeal link). It has farming, real-time action combat, crafting, NPC friendship and romance, a story arc, and most importantly, it has fishing.

I’m playing version 2.0.20210813. At the time of writing, I’ve played up to Day 1, Month 3, Year 2 Autumn. I’ve played this game for roughly 60 hours.

Fishing mechanics – 4/5

Casting

You can only fish at certain locations in the game, marked by a pool in the water. Equip the fishing rod, and approach the pool until you see a prompt to press E to begin fishing. If you walk too close to the water, you’ll “fall in” and the game will blank out and move you back. I guess this was their way out of having to animate swimming.

Hooking

The game plays a sound when a fish bites, and a large exclamation mark appears on the screen. You can left-click to hook the fish.

If you’ve unlocked the Fish Encyclopedia skill, so you can see which fish has taken the bait (you can see it in the little circle).

This is what it looks like when your character doesn’t have that skill.

The plus-side to having the Fish Encyclopedia skill is that if you are after a particular fish, you can hold off on hooking. The currently hooked fish will go away, and after a short moment, a new one will hook. This can save you a lot of caterpillars as you can only catch the fish you’re actually after.

Reeling

Once you’ve hooked the fish, the a bubble will appear on top of the fish, with a smaller, red circle inside it which measures the tension. You need to use your mouse to follow the fish with the buble as you left-click to reel. The further away the bubble is from the fish, the more tension you will get as you reel. If the red circle fills the bubble, the line will snap and you’ll lose your fish (and the caterpillar bait). Once the numerical distance tracker goes down to 0, you’ll catch the fish.

Consumables

As mentioned earlier, you need Caterpillars to catch fish. One Caterpillar per hooked fish. You can get them by harvesting plants such as snake berries and herbs. You can also buy them from Sophie’s Ranch for 4 gold each (price varies depending on the market). To maximise your chance to get a Caterpillar when harvesting, max out the Lucky Me skill (ignore the fact that I didn’t take my own advice, by the time I discovered that the Lucky Me skill was related to Caterpillars, I was too lazy to harvest them and was just buying them from Sophie).

I found the need to use Caterpillars to fish a big downside for me. Early-game, when you lacked many stamina boosting / restoring items, you had to waste a lot of stamina gathering Caterpillars, or a lot of gold buying them. Not to mention the time it takes to go around gathering them.

While they do take up an inventory slot, fortunately, they stack in lots of 999.

Travel

Until you complete the Dee Dee Transport quest chain, your only option for going to fishing locations is to walk, unfortunately. Most of the fishing locations aren’t far from your house, and by the time you unlock other areas, you should have the Dee Dee Transport quest done.

Time-to-Fish – 5/5

It took me 15 minutes 48 seconds to go from the opening cutscene to fishing.

First you need to pick up some wood and stone from the ground (you’ll see them sparkle). You’ll need 13 wood and 13 stone.

Go to your worktable and craft the Pickaxe (5 wood, 8 stone) and Simple Axe (8 wood, 5 stone). At this point, you might as well hand in the quest at the commerce guild before crafting the Stone Furnance (the next part of the main story quest).

Use the pickaxe to break the larger stones near your farm until you have 3 copper ore. Gather more wood and stones until you have 13 wood and 10 stone. You can chop down the smaller trees if you can’t find wood on the ground.

Go to the worktable and craft a Stone Stool (10 stone). Start making a Stone Furnace at the assembly station and show it to Presley. Place the furance in your farm and start making 1 copper bar (you’ll need 3 wood worth of fuel as it takes 2.5 hours of in-game time and each piece of wood is 1 hour of fuel). Kick the large trees near the wall of the city (the one with really thick trunks) until you get 2 wild cocoons. If you’re getting rubber fruit, you’re kicking the wrong type of tree.

If you have enough stamina remaining, go around picking up more wood and harvesting the snake berries and herbs (to get caterpillars which you’ll need for fishing). You’ll need 15 wood, 2 wild cocoons and 1 copper bar to create the Beginner’s Fishing Rod.

If you don’t care about min-maxing the story, you can just sleep once you run out of stamina. Otherwise, you can go and talk to the townspeople and explore the world while you wait for your copper bar to finish smelting. Either way, I recommend using any spare wood you have to patch up the holes inside your house, as each hole reduces the amount of stamina you wake up with.

Once your copper bar is done, you can craft your fishing rod at the worktable.

Assuming you managed to pick up some caterpillars earlier, head to a fishing spot, and start fishing! (Fishing spots are marked in purple with the a fish icon in the below map. There’s also a fishing spot where I’m standing (red marker), but you can’t see it because I’m covering it.)

Multitaskability – 1/5

The need to follow the fish with the bubble makes it hard to look at something else while reeling. You can’t really do it out of the corner of your eye while watching Netflix, for instance. You could listen to a podcast, or something that doesn’t require your visual attention.

Also, fish tend to bite quite quickly, so there’s not a lot of time to wait between fish.

I never hit any inventory issues while fishing, as your initial inventory space is quite generous, and each fishing pool tends to only have a few fish + a few junk items, and the fish stack. There was no need to return to town / home and empty my inventory.

Time management – 1/5

While My Time At Portia does allow you to control the game speed and slow down how fast the day progresses, each day is hard-capped at 3AM, where your character will fall asleep, and you’ll wake up back at home on a new day.

Time is artificially paused while fishing. Time won’t advance while the line is out, but once you catch a fish, time will progress at roughly the same amount of time as it took to catch the fish. I think this is to stop your character from falling asleep in the middle of a catch.

You’ll also need to keep your stamina up. Once you unlock cooking, you can cook Fish Porridge or Spicy Fish Soup to restore your stamina. Or other non-fish related foods listed on this page: https://mytimeatportia.fandom.com/wiki/Category:Stamina_consumables

Once you run out of stamina, you can no longer fish. It appears to cost 6 stamina to cast, though the first one in the day seems to cost 12? I’m not sure if it’s a bug or not. Note: it auto-casts after you’ve caught a fish, so you’ll need to spam the ESC key when your character does the catch animation to stop the cast if you don’t want to lose another 6 stamina once you decide to stop fishing.

Excitement – 2/5

The bubble following mechanic does make the process feel exciting. In addition, the possibility of catching an Emperor form or a King form of a particular fish also adds some excitement.

However, each spot has a very small pool of fish you can catch, and none of the fish are particularly special, so there isn’t a lot of excitement.

Usefulness – 5/5

Fish can be used as an ingredient in recipes, sold for Gols (the in-game currency), donated to the town’s aquarium, gifted to characters, or bred in a fish tank.

It’s not a bad way to make money, considering the small stamina investment. Certain characters like or love fish, and most characters are neutral towards fish, so it’s a pretty safe gift to give.

I haven’t really done much with breeding, but it seems breeding expensive fish is another way to make money / friends. You just need two fish of the same rarity, and some dough (made in the blender with 2 flour (made from 1 wheat) + 1 mucus). The UI for it isn’t great though, as it’s hard to tell how much food is in the tank, or even which fish you have inside.

There are also two Fishing Days in Month 1 (12th and 13th day). To enter, you need to go to the competition location (you’ll see it on your map) and sign up at the table once the competition starts. You have 3 minutes (real life time) to catch as many fish as you can at a certain fishing spot. It costs 200 Gols per round to enter, and you compete against 3 other NPCs. Each round takes 3 in-game hours, and you can enter as many rounds as you want during the time period (up to 3 per day if you’re fast enough). Each fish you catch is worth points depending on how rare it is. The winner is the competitor with the most points.

Placing in the top 3 gives you badges which you can exchange for prizes, along with some pretty decent food. None of the prizes are must-haves. Fortunately, you get to keep the fish you catch after the event is over. Unfortunately, you have to provide your own Caterpillars, so come prepared with at least 100 of them. The Fish Encyclopedia skill comes in handy here, as you can save time by skipping the common fish that aren’t worth as many points.

Ambience – 3.5/5

It’s a cute game, with very cartoony graphics. The music is nice and relaxing. I also like that the sound effects aren’t jarring.

The lack of variety in fishing spots makes looking at the same locations get a bit stale. Especialy since one of the spots is in a chemical wasteland.

Summary

The fishing mini-game is fun, though I feel like the lack of variety of fish in a particular pool makes it get stale pretty fast. As a standalone fishing game it feels more like real fishing without having all the complexities of an actual fishing game. However, it’s not what I’m looking for personally, hence my 2/5 fish rating. If you’re looking for a fishing game, I don’t think the price tag justifies it, as there doesn’t feel like A$41.95 worth of fishing to me. If you do want a Stardew Valley-esque game with fishing in it, I think Stardew Valley is better value for money.

I want something that allows me to relax and multi-task if I want to, and this isn’t it. I also don’t like that there are “days”, as I don’t like feeling time-pressured when I’m fishing, and I especially don’t like having to walk to and from my fishing spot once I’m settled in to a session.