While you sometimes get brief cutscenes and custom animations, many of the more trivial quests feature only a progress bar at the bottom of your screen that tells you what action your character is performing, rather than showing any specific animation. The game only just added differentiation between what is “main quest” and what are less important side quests, meaning that for much of my playthrough, I had no way of knowing what I was getting into, apart from starting to develop a hunch for what characters are generally involved with the more interesting quest lines. I’m happy to see this has been addressed, at least.

The writing quality in these quests is solid, for the most part. Many quests are relatively banale, some are a bit dumb and some are genuinely interesting. Dialogues are always serviceable, often entertaining and sometimes downright hilarious.

From a User Experience perspective (more on that below), the flow of following any quests in the game is hindered by the quest structure: since practically no dialogue exists outside of the Receive Quest / Complete Quest framings, the game often makes you accept quests with objectives like “Keep talking to Character X”. Such quests tend to give you 5 experience points and are necessary simply to continue in the dialogue. This completely breaks natural dialogue flow, and makes the interactions feel incredibly awkward.

The limited structure of dialogues, tasks and cutscenes can also lead to bizarre situations like this one: A quest mechanic involves you eavesdropping on two NPCs. Once a dialogue box reveals that they caught you and are coming after you, you have to

Stroll casually back to the quest giver to finish the eavesdropping quest, which is concluded with a dialogue tag along the lines of “we should get out of here, they’ve seen us.” Click the quest giver again for a new quest where she tells you “We should run.” Click ‘Yes’ to accept a quest with the objective “escape” Click the “Ok” button to start a race type quest Wait for the race starting countdown to run out Finally start your escape by racing through a few checkpoints

Needless to say, this setup ruins any sense of urgency that the dialogue and cutscenes try to build up. And this is one of the more polished quest lines, with dedicated animations and camera angles.

Imperfections of Inputs

A core complaint in my initial review was the awful handling of player character and horse. I am significantly less bothered by this problem by now, which is due to a handful of factors: On the one hand, since I sort of forced myself to play the game again regardless of how I felt about it, I simply got used to it. At the same time, my horse has levelled up and gained various improvements to its stats, which includes not only how fast it runs, but also how quickly it reacts to my inputs.

Another factor that confounds me is that my starter horse was in an awful “mood” from the very start. To get a horse into a good mood, one either has to come online to do horse care chores every single day for weeks, or spend Star Coins on either ongoing stable care, or the veterinarian’s treatment. While a new horse I eventually bought started off in an excellent mood, I do not understand why my initial starter horse did not at least start out with “okay”.

That level ups and regular care bring improvements is to be expected, but the result of this set-up is that your first moments of horse riding, where the game should be making a good impression on you, will be the absolute worst experience of the game in this regard.