Ova Magica is an indie title that blends classic farm-life simulation gameplay with monster-raising and battling mechanics. Following a very successful Kickstarter campaign and a rather lengthy period in Early Access, the game has finally launched its 1.0 version on PC, with a console release scheduled to follow shortly after.
Was Ova Magica worth the wait? Does it live up to its inspirations like Story of Seasons and Pokémon? I took on the role of Clover Town’s farmer and unofficial problem-solver-in-chief to find out.
New Life in Clover Town
Ova Magica opens with your customizable protagonist arriving in Clover Town, where you are greeted by the mayor and two of the local bachelorettes. You are inheriting the family farm while your mother goes overseas for work. Unfortunately, to call the farm “run-down” would be an understatement. There isn’t even a building left to sleep in, forcing you to camp out in a tent at first.
Along with showing you what remains of the farm and around town, the idea of Blobs and Blob Trainers is explained. It’s Clover Town tradition that everyone has a Blob, one of the diverse local creatures that are entwined closely with the culture of the town. In addition to raising them, the townspeople have them do battle, both casually around town and competitively by taking part in the Blob League, where they aim to reach the heights of being crowned the Clover Cup champion.
Fortunately, Clover Town is a very welcoming place. Most of its residents are very friendly, and you soon find yourself inundated with free tools, other helpful gifts, and offers to teach you. There are a few characters who are a little more snobby or standoffish, but everyone is a good person deep down. Festivals are very frequent and often a lot of fun. The sheer amount of unique festivals with associated minigames (of very variable quality, admittedly) to participate in throughout the year is impressive.
Still, not everything is perfect. Many of the townspeople have their own issues to work through, and the town itself has been losing residents to the big city. This is where the new farmer comes in by befriending everyone, helping them to solve their issues, and revitalizing the sleepy little town by working with the locals to build and staff new stores and facilities.
The bachelors and bachelorettes in Clover Town, in tandem with several of the minor characters and the story events, are probably the aspects that I enjoyed the most about the game. They’re likable, many of the events are interesting, touching, or funny, and the world created is quite charming. As well as the enjoyable Heart Events (short story scenes between the characters that act as milestones for relationship level increases), I liked that friendship eventually rewards you with skills, recipes, CGs, and more. Sadly, romance is very lacking, with no associated Heart Events other than the wedding, and nothing along the lines of children. Instead, romance just consists of a handful of conversations with a few lines each, followed by the wedding and some additional dialogue after your partner moves in. On the plus side, you can romance any of the romanceable characters, regardless of gender. That all said, while romance isn’t exactly great, at least all the friendship events that come before and the community events are worth praising.
Getting to know the community is a large part of Ova Magica, and more or less plays out similarly to other titles in the farming life sim genre, albeit with a few key differences. You still need to speak to people each day and raise relationship levels to unlock Heart Events, but gift giving to raise points even further isn’t a concept here. Instead, you can use a variety of other methods to supplement your relationship points, such as battling with Blobs. For a deeper look at how these systems work, you can check out our article: Ova Magica Relationship Guide – Friendship, Romance, and Marriage Explained.
Blobs and Climbing the League
The progression of Ova Magica is primarily based around two aspects: building up relationships with the residents and climbing the Blob League. In fact, credits roll when you win the Clover Cup.
Each Blob starts as an egg, which you can either receive through events, as a prize, following a battle, or by breeding two existing Blobs together. They come in three different elements, with a rock-paper-scissors style of strengths and weaknesses. You can carry three on a team, with others kept in a barn (typically used for specific ones which produce goods, taking the place of animals like cows or sheep), and even more in storage.
Blobs are the key part of Ova Magica. They accompany you everywhere, require that you seek out specific foods to increase their power, and they serve as your partners when battling both wild creatures and rival Blob Trainers. Beyond combat use in turn-based battles, they work as vital tools to more efficiently water your crops (replacing sprinklers) and clear obstacles to unlock new paths. The focus on getting new blobs for specific abilities or improving your current party for battle is a crucial one, and they link into almost every aspect of gameplay in some way. Even some of the Heart Events include Blob battles, and the local festivals make it clear they’re important to the lore as well as the gameplay.
Sadly, I didn’t feel as if the battles themselves worked particularly well. Considering that they’re so frequent, it was a little frustrating that they were so simple, acting more as a stat check and a check on how many health items I could gather than anything else. Blobs can learn a variety of moves with status effects and so on, but I found that almost any battle I took part in was over in two moves or less. Boss battles, on the other hand, were huge difficulty spikes and dragged out for an incredibly long time. The lack of balance in battles didn’t feel enjoyable. It was also a pity that the Blob League was entirely 1v1 battles, when 3v3 battles are featured in wild battles and would’ve made for a more interesting fight. Apart from the player character though, each Clover Town resident only has one partner Blob.
However, while I didn’t think the battles were exactly great, I do have to praise the Blob breeding system. The sheer variety of Blobs is impressive and breeding two together creates a mix between the two, taking features from each. You can create tons of unique Blobs, at least visually. You can also breed to try and get a particular skillset or pass down special out-of-battle abilities. Mutations that grant immunity to certain status effects are sometimes granted too, becoming more common as generations move on, giving an incentive to keep breeding the perfect Blob for battle.
What About The Farming?
You may have noticed that farming hasn’t been mentioned much. That’s because, despite nominally being a ‘farming life sim’, farming is one of the weaker points of Ova Magica. It’s just too basic.
Farming involves the typical loop of tilling the ground, planting seeds, and then watering them each day. Fertilizer is available to speed things up. You can either sell the crops or use them as food or for cooking. There just isn’t much more to it than that as far as I’ve seen. If rare events happen like special crops growing after planting, then I have not come across them even post-game. There’s no levelling up seeds for better crops like some other games as far as I can see, a mechanic which appears in several competing titles.
The only efficiency upgrades come from increasing personal stamina through Blob League progression, unlocking skills that lower tool stamina consumption through relationship progression, and eventually utilizing Blobs. In the early game, manual watering consumes a massive chunk of your energy. Later on, you can recruit a specific Blob to act as a portable sprinkler while on your team, eventually unlocking an outpost for it to stay put and function like a traditional sprinkler. You can also theoretically increase the range of the sprinkler Blob, which would be helpful as eggs for them are difficult to collect, but this appeared to be bugged during my playthrough, as it didn’t work for me.
Farming in Ova Magica is useful for slowly increasing your funds, but it just feels like there isn’t much of interest. Without meaningful upgrades to your efficiency or the money earned per crop, expanding your farm simply means choosing to spend more time planting and watering, without offering any real sense of progression.
Other Issues and Slow Progression
One of my key frustrations with Ova Magica is how everything links together, or rather how it sometimes fails to in an enjoyable way.
The first example of this goes directly against the store page description, which boasts, “Will you find love, or become the greatest blob trainer? Your story is yours to shape!” In the game itself, you actually have to become the “greatest Blob trainer” just to “find love”, and take steps toward love to become the “greatest Blob trainer.”
Progression in the Blob League is locked behind relationships with every single character, so you must have everyone at a certain relationship level to progress. This feels rather inflexible, as it means it’s not possible to avoid certain less-liked characters (I can’t say I’m a fan of Carnelian and his smug attitude for example). The final steps of romance themselves are also locked behind the Blob League. So you have to befriend every single bachelor and bachelorette of Clover Town and complete the Blob League to proceed.
Linking in with the above is perhaps one of the biggest frustrations with Ova Magica: it’s just too slow. Earning money, improving relationships, and other progression tasks typically mean just doing the same thing over and over. This isn’t exactly unusual for the genre, which I enjoy many titles from, but it feels like it’s taken to an extreme here, leading to a somewhat tedious gameplay loop.
Tedious tasks are unfortunately quite common. You can use items for minigames with your blobs each day to improve their energy stat, but they’re rather basic and quite boring. Visiting the Blob World for rewards is a repeated pattern of a small set of rooms with resources, basic puzzles, and so on, with battles along the way and it needs to be done a lot to get certain resources. Progression in the Blob League involves doing an incredibly easy 1v1 battle, once per day, five times in a row. Other general tasks like chopping down trees and mining stone for progression milestones take quite a lot of time and repetition too.
There’s also one big issue that makes the town feel far less alive too: NPC schedules are fixed regardless of the situation. You’ll find the other farmers tilling the soil from dawn without moving an inch, and young children are still looking at the ice cream stand at midnight. The sickly bachelorette who is barely let outside due to her health will sit in her garden all day, even if it’s pouring down with rain. Many competing titles take factors like the weather into consideration or have NPCs move about depending on the time of day. Not doing this stands out and breaks the immersion of the world.
There are also plenty of other little issues, like certain aspects of the systems being less than obvious to figure out, mechanics being awkward, or even things like NPCs running back and forward over the same few meters when they’re supposed to be running all over searching for items during a festival.
Cute Art Style
The art style of Ova Magica uses vibrant colors paired with a simple style for its models. While simple, I think it works nicely for the type of game. The designs and style of the character stripes are nice too, with most bachelors and bachelorettes leaning more toward the cute side. Each has a CG to unlock, each of which was great and felt like a worthwhile reward.
Each of the three seasons looks distinct, and the town completely transforms with decorations when it’s time for one of the frequent festivals. It’s nice to see the skyline change as new buildings and attractions are added too.
And while already mentioned, the impressive variety of designs of Blobs is worth mentioning. I quite liked that many of the partner Blobs had little design touches that lined up with their characters too, such Ruby wearing a ribbon like her Blob’s bunny ears’ and Jade and her Blob both wearing a sunflower.
Verdict
Ova Magica has certain aspects that work brilliantly, such as the character writing, the overall world, and the deep Blob breeding system. But it fails in execution of the gameplay systems and balancing, and lacks in certain aspects, such as farming, romance, and to some extent, battling.
Despite a long period in Early Access prior to its eventual 1.0 release, the game still lacks the polish of a fully completed product. And it’s a shame, because there is quite a lot of potential here, and despite quite a few criticisms, I did have fun with it.
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If you enjoy simulation games, consider also checking out our review of Magical Princess.
Many thanks go to Top Hat Studios for a PC review code for Ova Magica.
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.
