You only grow and process crops for the farming part. Some seeds are only found/able to be used during specific seasons, or in specific biomes, or only dropped from late game dungeons. That's cool, but the only things you do with any crops are effectively make healing items. Food items and "drinks" which are effectively the only reliable way to regain health in the main part of the game. You can sell them, but because you need them for food and space is somewhat limited, you end up (likely) keeping most of your crops to either complete the limited cooking quests or to turn into drinks/food. Animals? Sell all their drops or make food/drinks. Outside of like... 6? Instances, you don't use them for any actual quests, or to raise the affinity with your companions. Otherwise it's entirely just to produce food and drinks to regen stamina/health in the various dungeons.
The social aspect (a pretty big chunk of Stardew's lategame) ends up literally just being "Get mail, to to location, click through dialogue, done" repeatedly. There's nothing like needing to give gifts/talk to them daily/whatever that is the Stardew thing. There are also no holidays or festivals or any of that type of stuff. No birthdays, or events aside from Quietus, which is just a day when all your shit dies each season until you beat the main game story completely, and opens an optional dungeon that can only be entered during Quietus until you beat the main game story completely and open it up daily. The Stardew valley side of the game is entirely "farm to make food/juice to run the dungeons"
This takes us to the overwhelming majority of the gameplay - almost classic-mmo style "action" combat. I'll clarify. You basically cannot evade the vast majority of enemy attacks - think MMO auto attack. Stuff stays on you or can hit you at range and they just do it constantly. What they do that you -can- dodge is occasionally they will telegraph with a big ass red circle or something, which you can move out of the way to avoid. But combat mostly devolves around to being able to restore your health and do damage faster than the enemies can kill you. Typically spamming the basic attack while you wait for your 4 abilities (most the game you'll only have 2-3 at most; the 4th ability is typically locked behind making friends with everyone for every class by just doing the mail-chat cycle for them when available) - The classes are kind of cool and would be interesting if your NPCs held aggro or could heal or do anything that would make the auto-damage you take in combat more interesting/dynamic. They do not. Your mage will end up face tanking with two "melee" classes in the group almost nonstop, and you end up chugging drinks and eating food constantly if you aren't playing classes with defensive bonuses, because you can't avoid most of the damage. You can set up to three classes to swap between, but in most cases it's whatever one takes the least amount of overall damage or can do the absolute most damage (there's some pokemon style damage type strength/weaknesses but uh, it's much easier to completely ignore that and just focus on whatever pumps out the most consistent damage that isn't elementally based)
The bosses are actually not terrible, there's a lot more active gameplay/less automatic damage, and they have phases to some and some interesting if predictable mechanics. But that's it. The story also isn't bad as far as JRPGs go. Had a semi-nice "twist" towards the latter 3rd.
Had combat been more engaging than "drinking coconut milk nonstop whenever fighting the big FEAR monsters (100% 1:1 with FOEs from Etrian Odyssey, complete with specific movement styles and aggro radii/etc, and being 10-15 levels higher than the dungeon they show up in)" it would have been better on that aspect. Instead, it's moving around static dungeons with level/gear level (which directly determine your damage/defense with flat + numbers) with not much strategy in general. Some allies (you can have up to two at a time out of the 10? Supporting cast members) have super long cast times, and depending on how fast stuff dies, are uh, worthless.
Anyway, that all sounds kind of cynical/jaded, even though I generally enjoyed the game. It's just extremely shallow in most areas side from the boss fights when compared to Stardew or other farming/combat games like Rune Factory. It's about as Final Fantasy as Phantasy Star is, which means not at all aside from having JRPG style tropes/graphics. And the voice acting only shows up in combat; none of the dialogue is voice acted, which is hilarious for a $60 game. This is a $30 dollar title, and I'd wait for a sale before picking it up unless you just really want to play an ok game that isn't as good as Stardew/other farm games in the farm aspect, or combat in the... most JRPGs aspect.
