Forestia ~Farm Life in the Country~ (also known as Little Lilicia, Forestia ~Life on a Small Town Farm~, and Forestia ~Chiisana Machi no Bokujou Life~) is an indie farming simulator game with some dating simulator gameplay. Similar to titles like Story of Seasons and Stardew Valley, it includes a mix of growing crops, taking care of animals, raising relationship levels with certain characters, and other activities. Unlike those titles, this is an eroge with adult content connected to the heroines that your character can date and later marry.
Before delving further into this review, it is worth noting that it is based on version 1.0.6, the English version available on DLSite at the time of this review. While it may not be clear from the version number, Forestia ~Farm Life in the Country~ is completable, but essentially in an ‘Early Access’ state at this time. The Japanese version has more features implemented, and an update to the English version to bring it up to par is expected at some point, but not in the near future. Little Lilicia is the title which has been coined for the Steam release.
Welcome to Kokotan
Forestia ~Farm Life in the Country~ opens with your nameable protagonist arriving in Kokotan to take up residence in the small town. The mayor’s daughter, Misty, shows him to the house connected to a farm which has fallen into disrepair and talks about how it’s great to have a new farmer arrive in town. This leads to some immediate confusion, so he finds himself slightly pressured into quickly learning how to grow crops, raise animals, and run a successful farm. Luckily, the locals are all a friendly bunch and willing to show him the ropes, whether out of kindness, love for animals, or other motivations like the lazy catgirl who wants to get out of her own work.
Soon after arriving, the protagonist finds himself summoned by a goddess that only he can see. She explains that she’s lost her power, but the more you develop the farm, the more power she’ll recover. But at the moment, all she can do is give people a little nudge, and maybe provide some special items here and there.
In terms of a main plot, there isn’t much going on beyond the premise. Even the goddess subplot never really goes anywhere. The story is instead told primarily through character events, which are limited to the seven romanceable heroines and the occasional other piece of NPC dialogue.
Friendship and Love
Like many similar titles, relationships can be raised by speaking to certain characters at least once per day and offering them gifts that they love or like, with penalties for those that they dislike. Raising relationships is limited only to the heroines and is primarily used as a gate to unlocking character events.
One area where Forestia ~Farm Life in the Country~ stands out above much of the competition is the extent of how enjoyable the romanceable characters and the interactions with them are. I certainly have my favorites (Retrie and Notey), but each one of them is delightful to spend time with in their own way.
Misty could perhaps be seen as the default option and the easiest to win over, as she loves the first crop, Turnips. She’s kind, always eager to help, and very innocent with a hint of shyness. Her only real fault is that she’s known for jumping to conclusions, which is how the protagonist ended up as a farmer. She’s fairly obvious about her interest in the protagonist.
Notey, or as she introduces herself, ‘The Great Notey’ is a self-proclaimed genius artist and architect. She’s excitable and loves dragging the protagonist around to see new things, all too willing to pull him into her random whims, like getting up close to something dangerous to sketch it. She’s rather eccentric and often brings out the protagonist’s exasperated side.
Yoshino is one of the more mature heroines. She runs the local hot springs inn and specializes in cooking. Despite her maturity, the fact that she takes care of three young kids along with running her business and her being a workaholic, her personality comes across as rather laid back. Anyone who loves wolf ears and big tails will be happy to pursue her for that reason, alongside her charming personality.
Laurier is a nun who works at the local church, and who makes potions and runs the clinic. She cares deeply about her work and the people of Kokotan, and has a hard time relying on other people.
Retrie helps her family raise animals on the ranch. She’s a doggirl and fittingly is very excitable and quick to love. You’ll find her jumping all over the protagonist and happy whenever they run into each other or whenever she runs into her other friends in town. She’s quite youthful in her innocence.
Zanna is a stoic apprentice blacksmith with elven ears. She doesn’t speak much and has problems dealing with people. We see her open up slightly over time, and her passion for her work becomes apparent.
Lushang is a lazy catgirl and a self-described free spirit. While she’s supposed to be fishing, she often ends up sleeping or lazing about most of the time instead. She’s kind of a tease too, at least when she interacts with the protagonist.
There are also a variety of other characters, some of whom may appear in the heroine’s events on occasion. Many of the heroines have families, colleagues, and so on. For example, it often shows things like how close Retrie is to her family in events, and she sometimes shares dialogue outside of events with Misty and the kids who Yoshino looks after. Having these sorts of relationships shown between the characters helps to create the feeling of a small, close-knit community.
You may note that some of the characters sound familiar if you’ve played titles like Story of Seasons and Rune Factory before, like the guide character who loves Turnips, a somewhat stoic elven blacksmith, an oddball artist, and so on. Forestia ~Farm Life in the Country~ puts its own spin on these ideas and generally does particularly well with the humor, showing how lovable the heroines are.
It pushes the romance further than many similar games. Not just in having adult scenes, but you can invite heroines on dates where they spend the day with you. Everyone’s dialogue changes to show that you’re together, and you can trigger special date events. This was something I really enjoyed about the game, as I often feel like the romance in these types of games takes too much of a backseat. Some of the romance-related events are particularly sweet, and create that lovey-dovey atmosphere.
One aspect that was a letdown is that after you get married, this ‘relationship upgrade’ doesn’t really get acknowledged, and nothing really changes from when you officially become ‘lovers’ with the character. Perhaps this will come in future updates.
H Events
As mentioned, Forestia ~Farm Life in the Country~ is an eroge and advertises a total of 43 H-scenes. On top of these, there are a good number of moments that fall more into the ‘ecchi anime’ category, with the protagonist (and Misty) being surprisingly clumsy, resulting in quite a few falls where characters land on each other and end up with their hands in inappropriate places. There’s also the odd instance of clothes being pulled down, and no one seems to mind too much when the protagonist accidentally walks into the women’s side of the baths or a room where someone is changing.
Some of the earlier adult scenes happen before getting into a relationship, and tend to be more casual encounters where a heroine might be innocently trying to help the protagonist, or one of the less innocent heroines might be thanking him for something, or one of several surprisingly common events where characters are accidentally affected by medicines, foods, and so on that increase their libido. These start very early on in the game.
The full H-scenes after becoming lovers and the earlier ones all tend to be fairly short and relatively vanilla. They have some wonderful CG art, if without backgrounds. Most of the art budget seems to have gone toward these scenes, with very few pieces of CG-style art outside of adult or ecchi moments.
One place I do feel that it suffers is from the lack of voicing. This is the case completely throughout the game, and there has been some talk about a voice DLC, but as it stands, events and H-scenes are only backed by music.
Fun with Farming
While I feel the heroines and romance are where Forestia ~Farm Life in the Country~ stands out, the gameplay is an important aspect too. To set expectations, it’s made in RPG Maker MZ, and while it’s one of the better RPG Maker games I’ve played, there are places where it seems like it could’ve been better in a custom-built system. It’s not quite as expansive as many other titles, perhaps due to its nature as a smaller indie game.
The farming is relatively straightforward and basic, with the ability to till the fields, plant seeds, and water them each day until it’s harvest time. New seeds are unlocked through a quest system, and later on, sprinklers become available. Animals also use a basic system of feeding them each day, brushing them, talking to them, and receiving the results depending on their affection level. You can also forage for other food. This is a reasonable source of money at first and later a decent source of ingredients for crafting meals, but by the end, it felt like there wasn’t much point to watering the plants each morning. I had a couple of sprinklers unlocked, but I’d reached the credits not long after that.
Fishing is a somewhat mindless act, with a simple ‘cast the line and pull it in with the right timing’ system. New fishing rods become available as quests are completed. The balance feels quite off, as you can become rich by fishing much faster than any other method I’ve found. It’s also useful for ingredients.
Mining involves smashing rocks and gems in a 100-floor mine to explore, with mostly small floors, each with hidden stairs downward in a random place. It’s useful for getting materials to upgrade tools and some quest-related items. Getting to the bottom isn’t much of a challenge after unlocking potion crafting. Even before then, crafting the right food makes it not too much of a challenge to dive quite deep. Unfortunately, reaching the bottom of the mine was a little anticlimactic with nothing to find.
Overall, the balance feels somewhat off for several of these aspects, and some of the items don’t appear to be particularly worth getting. Some I couldn’t even find a use for, while others were incredibly difficult to get while not being appropriately helpful. I should also note that the game is currently somewhat short, if fast-paced, in part due to the game balance. I’d gotten married and hit the credits by day 45, despite some events being locked behind a ‘wait X amount of days since the previous event’ system.
One aspect I did like was that each of these had related skills, which are upgraded through use and provide various small benefits. Increasing the stamina this way felt particularly good in how it affected progression.
Localization and Little Issues
Sadly, the localization isn’t the best at times, including some glaringly obvious issues.
Perhaps the most obvious is that some of the skills don’t have the correct descriptions. These aren’t just cases of mistakes in translation; sometimes you’ll get the complete wrong description for a skill, such as one which might talk about about tilling soil when describing the animal-raising-related skill (itself oddly called the ‘Dairy’ skill). You can also find basic grammatical mistakes around tense and incorrect wording, such as ‘warehouse’ being used to describe a container. The odd untranslated part slipped through, and some formatting errors exist, leading to tags showing as dialogue in-game. That said, most of the dialogue reads fine for the most part.
The localization was done by the ‘DLSite Translation Team’ without any mention of who specifically from DLSite worked on it in the credits, but it does seem like there hasn’t been much in the way of QA on this title when it comes to the localization.
I came across other little bugs too, such as key items disappearing until I went to the container, stored them via that menu, then pulled them out again. On loading a prior save, my crops had already been watered, so there may be some issues around that.
Among more minor issues, moving around was one at times. Lining up the character correctly to water crops or smash a rock took some getting used to. There’s no automatic lining up, and being slightly off results in a misaligned action. Menus for cooking were also a pain to navigate, with a menu for each tool and needing to come out and reopen each time. Other little user interface problems existed as well.
While this might not be expected so much in a farming simulator game, as an adult game focused on unlocking heroine events, it was surprising that there’s no way to access other heroine ‘routes’ without loading a prior save. In fairness, a New Game+ feature which helps to alleviate this somewhat is apparently coming at some point in the future.
Controller support would’ve been nice too.
Verdict
Forestia ~Farm Life in the Country~ (Little Lilicia) reaches far beyond most similar titles in one area, which is the romance and interactions with the heroines, who are particularly lovable. This alone makes it worth playing. The farming simulator gameplay does have its issues, and the localization could certainly use some improvement, but it’s all serviceable, and there is fun to be found in the progression of the gameplay.
I hope to see more improvements around the basics as the game is built upon rather than just adding more content. But even as it stands, it’s a good time as long as you’re looking more to the romance side and adult content than the farming.
FORESTIA ~FARM LIFE IN THE COUNTRY~ IS (TENTATIVELY) RECOMMENDED
Purchase: DLSite
If you are looking for another lax adult sim game, you might want to check out Natsu no Sagashimono ~What We Found That Summer~. We have also covered a wide variety of visual novels both original to English and localized from Japanese, both adult and all-ages, which you can check out here.
The writer played Forestia ~Farm Life in the Country~ on PC.
A gamer since the days of Amstrad and DOS and someone who has dabbled in a variety of professions. He enjoys a wide variety of genres, but has been focusing on visual novels and virtual reality in recent years. Head Editor of NookGaming. Follow him and the website on @NookSite.
