My Time at Portia

Genre: Action-RPG / Management Sim

Players: 1

The Nintendo Switch 2 Difference

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Review:

My Time at Portia is an Action-RPG with Management Sim elements that falls in the same realm of “lifestyle RPGs” like Harvest Moon and Stardew Valley, and fans of those games will find this one to have somewhat similar gameplay, although it’s not without some unique qualities of its own.

While this game does have farming, much of this game’s focus is on resource gathering and crafting, with players encouraged to take contracts for various items to build and gather resources from one of various locales around the game’s town. While the mechanics here are different, the game’s primary gameplay loop still hits that sweet spot where you’re gradually building up your home and capabilities to do more tasks so you can build your home and abilities even more. It makes for really compelling gameplay that makes you want to keep pushing on to keep reaching your next big goal.

What’s more, this game manages to give you plenty of variety of stuff to do. In addition to gathering resources, crafting, and farming, you can build up your relationships with townspeople, attend local events, help to build up the town as various tasks come your way, there’s a simple but decent fighting engine for taking on local monsters, and there’s a mining area with deforming terrain. In short, you won’t be at a loss for different things to do in this game, and the game is constantly doing clever things that tie them together, such as making your home decorating directly affect your character’s stats.

The game’s world itself is pretty interesting too. Despite the colorful presentation, this game technically takes place in a post-apocalyptic setting, with the game frequently alluding to some terrible catastrophe that befell humanity and left our knick-knacks as archaeological finds that are both used to unlock new crafting recipes and are a point of contention with the local religious group who sees this as tempting a return to those dark days.

Unfortunately, while the game’s core gameplay and premise are fantastic, multiple other parts of the game really drop the ball. Firstly, this is a really buggy game, and particularly this game’s menus feel all kinds of broken, with the cursor getting caught, stalling, or outright disappearing at times. What’s more, this game is full of frustrating loading times, and even so much as opening a menu to manage your inventory feels like a chore… which is incredible since inventory management is one of the biggest elements of a game like this!

Even beyond the frustrations with the game’s menus, this game is loaded with little issues that mar the experience. There are not one, but two stamina gagues – one to keep you from getting too much work done in a given day, and one to keep you from running at a decent speed for more than a few seconds at a time. Speaking of the day, the game’s day-night cycle is absurdly fast, and you can actually watch the shadows racing across the landscape as the sun speeds over the horizon, which feels really off.

On top of this, it bears mention that this game’s graphics are pretty underwhelming, with simple character models and environments, plenty of pop-in, and a decreased level of detail of things like grass from other versions of the game. In short, unless you really want to play this game on the go, this version of My Time at Portia is clearly the worst version of the game.

It really pains me to see My Time at Portia so crippled by a multitude of problems, because the core gameplay here is so very, very good. I could absolutely see myself falling into this game and spending endless hours working on building up my home and my town… but every time I start to feel like doing so, I find myself struggling with the game’s menus or annoyed by some other terrible design decision, and find my enthusiasm dulled to the point where I decide that maybe I’d be better off trying one of the other games in this format. As for you, if you enjoy games of this nature, My Time at Portia may hold enough interest for you to ignore its flaws, but most will want to look at other games in the genre first.

tl;dr – My Time at Portia is and Action-RPG / Management Sim much like Harvest Moon and Stardew Valley, with more of a focus on gathering resources and crafting than farming (though you can farm as well). There’s plenty of variety and some really great gameplay at the core of this game, but unfortunately the game is plagued with terrible interface problems, loading screens, and numerous other frustrations that sap much of the fun out of the experience. It’s still good, but it should have been so much better.

Grade: B-

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The Nintendo Switch 2 Difference

My Time at Portia

Genre: Action-RPG / Management Sim

Players: 1

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Review:

When I tried to think of third-party Nintendo Switch games that could be massively-improved with a performance boost, My Time at Portia was high on the list. This is a messy, buggy game on Nintendo Switch, with all sorts of loading problems, and I really hoped that Nintendo Switch 2 would address some of those issues.

I can say right from the start that the Nintendo Switch 2 does nothing for this game’s resolution, and there’s a lot of the bugs I mentioned before that are still present here. However, I do believe that the framerate is smoother on Nintendo Switch 2, making the game at least feel more stable, though I did still notice the game briefly freeze for a moment, presumably while loading something.

However, let’s talk loading times, because this is where I was most curious to see an improvement in this game. And I will say that what I discovered greatly impressed me… but also disappointed me some.

Loading up the title screen on Nintendo Switch took 57 seconds. This was shortened to 31 seconds on Nintendo Switch 2. However, the major shocker was when I loaded into a game – an absurd two and a half minutes even on the original Nintendo Switch, but only 56 seconds on Nintendo Switch 2. That’s still a lot, but it’s a major improvement. I also noticed improvements when dealing with shorter loading screens, like going through your house’s door.

The disappointment was that the delay in opening and closing your menu in the game seems to have remained the same – it’s apparently baked-in to the game. Given that this was a major frustration for me, I was really hoping that the Nintendo Switch 2 would do something about it.

Still, even though it doesn’t address my biggest problems with My Time at Portia, just the improved loading times are a huge improvement on their own, and the slightly better framerates are also quite nice. This game still feels clunky and at times poorly put-together, but not quite as much so on Nintendo Switch 2.

tl;dr – My Time at Portia is and Action-RPG / Management Sim much like Harvest Moon and Stardew Valley, with more of a focus on gathering resources and crafting than farming (though you can farm as well). There’s plenty of variety and some really great gameplay at the core of this game, but unfortunately the game is plagued with terrible interface problems, loading screens (still present but much-improved on Nintendo Switch 2), and numerous other frustrations that sap much of the fun out of the experience. It’s still good, but it should have been so much better.

Grade: B-

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