Video Game / Coral Island

Coral Island is a Farm Life Sim by Indonesian developer Stairway Games. The game is set on the Southeast Asian-inspired Coral Island.

The game was successfully funded on Kickstarter, where it managed to raise $1.6 million in funding, far more than its $70,000 goal.

The game released in Early Access for PC on October 11th, 2022, and the 1.0 release arrived on November 14th, 2023 bringing the game to PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series Xand S as well as coming out of Early Access for PC. A release on Nintendo Switch is planned for 2024. The Steam version of the game can be found here.

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This game provides examples of:

• 20 Bear Asses: The B.O.S. have a board on their base where you can pick up optional quests that'll give you some merit points and a small cash reward. They all boil down to either this or just killing a set number of enemies in the cavern.
• Ability Required to Proceed: Some obstacles like massive tree stumps or large boulders and logs can only be removed with appropriately upgraded equipment, making some areas inaccessible until you're able to acquire the necessary crafting materials.
• Absentminded Professor: Scott is often late to things he set up himself, such as showing up late to his own museum opening; he quickly panics when he realizes people will expect him to take action (such as when he realizes he has enough pieces now to organize the museum crowdfunding campaign); he often mistakes terrible news for jokes, and while he will explore the cavern to find artifacts, he also freely admits that he's too weak to go past the first level (the only level with no monsters).
• Absurdly Elderly Mother: Sunny and Eleanor appear to be middle aged or even older, yet they have a son of the same age as Valentina, Archie and Zoe. You'd be forgiven for thinking Oliver was their grandson. ^note For contrast: Bree and Kira both appear to be younger than Eleanor, and yet they have fully grown sons (Luke and Kenny respectively), old enough for Oliver to be their son.
• Absurdly Youthful Mother: Bree, even if taking into consideration that she could potentially be younger than her husband, she still does not appear old enough to be Luke's mother.
• Added Alliterative Appeal: The farmer's rival for the Harvest Festival is Bobby from Beluga Bay.
• Adorably Precocious Child: Archie will start acting cagey and secretive around his parents, until Dinda gets him to admit that he found an injured bird and is nursing it back to health in secret since his parents don't want animals in the house.
• Agent Scully: Surya will specifically mention (unprompted) that he doesn't believe in mermaids since he's been diving for years and found no evidence of their existence. This despite the fact that Ling has merfolk technology in her Lab, where Surya also works, or the fact that the farmer will run into said merfolk technology during their first diving attempt.
  • Or perhaps this is a case of a Suspiciously Specific Denial and he knows more than he lets on.
• Alliterative Family: All the known giants' names (except for the Chieftain) start with G: Gong, Groo, Grog, Giu, Gort.
• Ambiguously Brown:
  • Bree, Walter, and their son Luke all have darker skin tones, but they don't appear to have the facial features of any particular racial background. Having moved to town from Pokyo (which is mentioned to be a large metropolis), it's possible they're all of mixed race.
  • Nina, Dippa, and Millie also have darker coloring, but no easily identifiable race.
• Ambiguously Human: Ling. Keen-eyed players can find a photo in Princess Miranjani's room of a mermaid that looks eerily similar to Ling holding the infant princess in her arms. Whether she and Miranjani's missing aunt are the same person is anyone's guess but there are several heavy implications that Ling (or perhaps "Aunt Liang") is more than she lets on. One of her lines of dialogue at the Tree Planting Festival further hints at this possible connection.
  Ling: Being up here makes me miss being in the ocean. Oops, uhhh...
• Amicable Exes: Antonio and Suki are divorced but are still on great terms, and he still visits Starlet Town constantly to maintain a close relationship with their daughter Valentina, even staying at Suki and Alice's Inn when he visits town instead of his cousins' place.
• And Your Reward Is Clothes:
  • Completing a museum collection generally awards a goofy costume related to that collection's theme.
  • Increasing the town rank will, among other things, expand the inventory of the clothing boutique.
• Anti-Frustration Features: The game is specifically tackling common complaints from other farming games that it took inspiration from. A few of note:
  • Crafting doesn't require you to have the items in your inventory or to use a crafting bench of any kind, you can craft from anywhere as long as you have the materials in a chest somewhere, which is quite helpful. If you're in the mine or underwater and in need of food or adventuring items, you can quickly craft some candied nuts or explosives as long as you have the materials back at home.
  • With so many NPCs, it's next to impossible to remember everyone's schedule; thankfully, the map will show you exactly where each NPC is. And to avoid a Pixel Hunt situation, you can open your relationships tab in the menu and at the press of a button they will be centered on the map so you can quickly find them.
  • Speaking of the relationship tab, as long as you have spoken to a character before, their character sheet will show their birthday date, and you can also sort the tab by said date, so you'll be able to quickly check when their birthday is or whose birthday is coming up soon without needing to check the calendar.
  • The relationship tab also keeps track of all the items you've gifted that NPC and whether they liked or disliked the gift for future reference.
  • Teleports can be unlocked after meeting each individual teleport location's requirements. They also work two ways and can be used as many times as needed without the need of consumable items.
  • Your house comes with a wardrobe that you can use to store extra clothes without having to take up valuable chest or inventory space.
  • The house also comes with storage for decor items (accessible from the decorating menu) for the very same reason.
  • It's mentioned early on in conversation, but almost all of the NPCs like flowers and other forageable items, so if someone's birthday is coming up and you don't have one of their "Loved" items, a wildflower will usually do in a pinch.
  • If you arrive at a shop during its normal business hours, even if no one is actually standing at the desk, you can still interact with it and the shop's menu will appear and let you perform any actions relative to that shop even if no one is there; the only difference is that no portrait will be shown on the side of the screen. So if Jack suddenly had an irresistible craving for tacos, you can still get feed for your cows, unlike a certain other infamous NPC that is never at her shop when needed.
  • A small one, but the map will also show each shop's business hours and whether they're currently open or not. By pressing a button, you can get a full schedule of all the shops and which days they're closed or have odd hours (such as Sam's who opens late on Sunday, or the Lab which closes early on Friday), so you don't have to run halfway across town just to find that the shop you wanted is closed.
  • The settings menu gives you the chance to slow down or speed up the passage of time in-game. So if you want a more relaxed experience or you need those processing machines to be done already, you can change it to suit your needs without having to use third party mods.
  • Another setting allows you to change monsters' behavior to non-aggressive: they won't attack you until you attack then first. While it doesn't negate the need for combat (some materials can only be obtained by defeating monsters), it makes exploring the caverns to farm resources much less stressful and combat much easier, since most enemies can be stun-locked even with the starter weapon.
  • While holding an item in your hands, there are different buttons for talking to people and gifting an item (or delivering an item needed for a quest), to avoid accidentally gifting items by talking to an NPC while holding an item.
  • Purchasing the Sturdy Computer upgrade from the Lab will allow for online shopping, so you can purchase seeds and other farming supplies, food, clothes or decorations, no matter the day or hour, or if the appropriate stores are even open (making it a non-issue that Sam's closes his shop on Wednesdays); delivery is almost instantaneous and no convenience or shipping fees are charged.
  • You can still plant seeds during winter and fruit trees will continue to produce fruit. Truth in Television since some plants specifically require cold and/or less hours of daylight to bloom and bear fruit.
  • Minor one, but another common complaint about Stardew Valley is that once you fully upgrade your barn or coop, there's no way to take out feed from the silo, since the auto-feeder replaces the feed hop, and all hay you obtain with your scythe gets added automatically to the silo, so if the silo is already full, the hay is lost. Coral Island makes the autofeed a craftable item, so you can decide when to add it or not add it at all, and the feed hop does not get replaced; you can still take hay out of the hop if you want to, and hay that you find while cutting grass will be added to your inventory, not to the silo until you manually add it yourself.
• Artificial Limbs: Randy's left arm is mechanical, although the story behind that is presently unknown.
• Artistic License: While cleaning the underwater areas, one of the most easily identifiable pieces of trash that you'll find is 5 gallon water jugs (the type you'll see in water coolers at offices and waiting rooms). While it is true that single use plastics are a serious pollution problem, these types of water jugs are one of the few that are specifically not for single use but meant to be traded in for a full one, or some companies have refill stations where you only pay for the refill. Once they're past their usable lifespan, they'll usually be recycled and remolded into new ones. So, unless there's a water company near Coral Island actively throwing these into the water, there's no reason for the hundreds of water jugs you'll find underwater to end up there to begin with.
• Artistic License – Physics: Of the five tiers of tool materials, the lowest one is steel, followed by bronze, silver, gold, and osmium. Bronze, silver, and gold are all far softer and weaker than steel, making them eminently unsuited for use in tools. Osmium is very hard and tough, but also very rare and quite brittle, plus it's the densest naturally occurring element on Earth (twice as dense as lead), which makes it just as questionable for these applications. It also isn't purple. But hey, this is a game with magic, giants, and merfolk, so no one cares.
  • Furthermore, Bronze is a human-made alloy created by mixing copper and tin, it's not a naturally occurring material found in the wild. The development of bronze as a new element in metallurgy is what kick-started and gave its name to the Bronze Age.
• Art Shift:
  • The characters featured on the Show Within a Show episodes that the farmer can watch on their TV feature a more sketchy art style with thicker lines and not as detailed as the rest of the game's 2D art.
  • The miniature portraits on the map are simplified versions of the face of each character, however since they're all head-on and very simplified, they can be somewhat odd, specially for characters that have a distinctive profile. For example, Rafael looks so different from his miniature portrait that he'd be almost unrecognizable if not for his trademark orange shirt and apron.
• Basement-Dweller: Thoroughly averted. Despite most of the bachelors still living with their families, this is never portrayed in a negative light.
  • Kenny still lives with his parents, even though there's an unused bedroom at the ranch (his dad's former bachelor pad) that's also much closer to his workplace and that his dad is looking to rent out for "dirt cheap" according to him.
  • Same with Luke, and notably he runs two profitable businesses.
  • Mark lives with his sister and her family.
  • Noah lives with his mom, granted he's also The Caretaker for her.
  • Pablo and Rafael technically still live at their parents' home, it's their parents who moved out when they retired to travel the world.
  • Scott rents a room at Charles' home, but he mentions that when the town decided to sell off their museum collection, he moved back with his parents for a while until he cooled off.
  • Surya moved in with his aunt and uncle when he arrived at Coral Island, but when he found a new place to live, it was Dinda and Joko who had an Empty Nest moment and refused to let him leave.
  • Theo still lives with his dad and sister and uses his dad's boat.
• Because You Were Nice to Me: When Pufferfish makes public their intentions to forcefully remove Connor from office, Charles immediately shuts down any notion that he might be persuaded to help them. Connor gave Charles a chance to come to Starlet Town to practice medicine when he was fresh out of school and he'll never forget that.
• Behind Every Great Man: Connor might have the title of Mayor, but it is Millie who runs the city government and all related city departments like the museum; Scott (the museum curator) reports directly to her, and she writes the annual reviews of other city employees.
• Bigger on the Inside: Applies to all buildings on the island to various degrees, with some having at least five times more floor space inside than what could feasibly be expected from the outside. The internal layout usually does match the general external appearance of the building, however.
  • After you donate a certain number of items to the museum, they start a crowdfunding campaign to expand its space. Apparently one of the stretch goals was finding out how to defy the laws of physics, because the interior of the museum expands to a ridiculous degree while the building it's in doesn't visibly change at all.
  • The same thing happens when you upgrade your house, barn, or coop. The house even gains an additional floor at level 3, but on the outside it's still the same cozy bungalow that it started out as.
• Birthday Hater: Jack and Kira both refuse to celebrate their birthdays and they won't even appear on the calendar. Their son Kenny, however, doesn't mind and will happily accept birthday gifts.
• Bragging Rights Reward: Reaching rank A unlocks several expensive cosmetic items for purchase, chief among them the Golden Chickin Costume that allows you to look ridiculous with panache for the staggering sum of 1,000,000 coins. By that point you'll likely have enough cash on hand to afford the thing, but that's still far more money than your entire farm will be worth, for something that provides no benefit whatsoever.
• The Caretaker: Noah's main topic of conversation will be his mom or being concerned about her well-being. He cares deeply about her and wants to make sure she's okay at her old age. A stark contrast with Frank and Aaliyah, Noah's two other siblings still living on the island, who are not as involved in their mother's day to day activities.
• Character Customization: Players are free to customize the Farmer's name, appearance, and honorific.
• Carry a Big Stick: Hammers are the Mighty Glacier among the game's weapons, dealing the highest damage per hit at the cost of having the slowest attack rate. Their Charged Attack is a more powerful overhead Ground Pound that can One-Hit Kill many weaker enemies.
• Checkpoint Starvation: The game has no manual save function and autosaves only when you go to bed. Depending on your game speed setting, having to quit out during the day for any reason can easily lose you half an hour of progress or more.
• Chest Monster: In the mines there's a monster that looks like the stone treasure chests that you find lying around, until you get close.
• The Chosen One: The player character is the one selected by the Goddess of Flowers to heal the island's ecosystem. It never really elaborated why the player character was chosen, however, other than because they're the hero of the game.
• Coat, Hat, Mask: The hero of the TV show Masked Detective wears an outfit like this.
• Cool, but Inefficient: The Bath House. Staying inside the water continuously restores your stamina, so if you still have time left in your day, this should (in theory) help you squeeze more out of your day. However, to unlock it you must complete two altar offerings; so at the beginning of the game when you'll be the most in need of extra stamina (since your tools won't be upgraded yet) you can't access it, and by the time you complete two altar offerings you'll most likely have better sources of extra energy that don't require you to use up your time.
• Cooking Mechanics: A expansive and complex cooking system exists, and multiple cooking implements can be purchased, as well as freestyle cooking without a recipe. But while prepared meals are useful for regenerating stamina quickly, the buffs provided by the meals are barely noticeable (generally +10% to some skill gain for a few in-game hours), so eating raw ingredients or scavenged items is usually an easier alternative. To add insult to injury, the meals themselves usually sell for less than the ingredients used to make them, to the point that sometimes a single ingredient is worth more on its own, so it's not even worth it to cook meals to sell.
• Cool Sword: Your starting weapon is called a Blunt Sword, yet it's still a decent-looking steel longsword that does its job well enough. More advanced swords tend to be increasingly elaborate in their design, but their stats are more or less the same, making the choice largely cosmetic. Their Charged Attack is a Cool, but Inefficient Spin Attack.
• Critical Hit: Have a 5% chance of either dealing triple damage to the target or killing it outright. A special ring can be equipped that adds another 5% to your crit chance, effectively doubling it.
• Cycle of Hurting: Monsters in the mines have a stun bar that, once filled, makes them unable to act for a few seconds. Weapons with fast combos like swords can usually fill the bar before the monster can get a hit in, opening them up for a deadly follow-up combo before they can retaliate.
• Dashing Hispanic: Antonio. He's the best dressed of all the characters; very concerned with his self-image and even runs his own chain of boutiques.
• Developer's Foresight: Characters will comment on things that happen around town, but the devs also took into account some unusual situations.
  • If you talk to someone while in your underwear, or while wearing Pufferfish branded clothes they'll comment on it and ask if you're having a moment of rebellion.
  • The kids in particular will be quite excited if you talk to them while holding a weapon and ask you things about it.
• Didn't Think This Through: After they've been pushed against the ropes due to the farmer improving the town's rating, Pufferfish decides to go ahead with a hostile takeover of the town by forcing a recall vote on Mayor Connor and having Karen run for Mayor. It's an inelegant plan but a plan nonetheless. The problem comes in that they need to get a majority of the town to sign to force the recall vote. After the whole town has been trying to get them to leave, why would anyone help them? Much less now that the town ranking has been improved. Their empty promises are so out of touch that it's clear they have no clue on what goes on in town, such as promising Sam a discount on importing goods, when the farmer already supplies Sam with plenty of goods of better quality and exempt of import tax altogether, something Sam himself points out.
• Disneyland Dad: In a rare dialogue, Suki confides in the farmer that she worries Antonio is this to Valentina, letting her do whatever she wants when she stays with him and not enforcing rules or boundaries for her as basic as a bedtime, listening to him gush about how absolutely perfect she is at everything does give some validity to her concerns that she has him wrapped around her little finger.
• Dramatically Missing the Point: Rafael hates going out and having people ignore him or fail to even notice he's there; not helped by him being The Quiet One and Rafael being The Ace. When Rafael tries to talk to Pablo about it, he misunderstands it as Rafael wanting to be popular and tries to fix it by pushing Rafael into more social interactions, outside of what the introverted Rafael is comfortable with. Conflict ensues.
• Dying Town: Starlet Town is in this state when your Player Character arrives, having been demoted from rank A to F over the years until only a picturesque but economically dead shell remained. Restoring the town to its former glory provides the game's Excuse Plot.
• Elemental Motifs: Each of the sections of the cave, and the giant you rescue at the end of each, is themed around one of the classic four elements.
• Empty Nest: Played with. When Surya announces he's finally found an apartment and plans to move out of his uncle and aunt's home they're both extremely distraught, bringing them both to tears. This despite the fact that Surya is not their son but their nephew and he's only been living there for a short period of time. Archie joining in on the crying without knowing why everyone is crying pushes it into parody level.
• Everyone Calls Him "Barkeep": The Giant Chieftain is only called by his title.
• Everyone Is Bi: All 22 romance options in the game can be pursued regardless of the player character's gender.
  • Notably, while most of the romanceable options won't actively pursue the player until they've made romantic advances first, Pablo in particular will flirt with the farmer on their very first interaction with the farmer, regardless of their gender.
• Evil, Inc.: Pufferfish, that wants to muscle in and rob the island of its small town charm. Their MO is to target dying towns and offer the citizens to revitalize the area with oil money in return for drilling rights and turning the settlement into a soulless corporate dystopia.
• Expy:
  • Miranjani is obviously heavily inspired by Ariel, being a mermaid princess who's fascinated by human stuff, and faces friction with her parents because of it.
  • Likewise, the merfolk's oracle sure does remind one of Ursula, and even does the opposite of the main thing Ursula did she eventually gives the player the option of turning into a merfolk when underwater instead of using diving gear.
  • The Band of Smiles is a group of adventurers very similar to the sort of Warriors Guild commonly associated with the The Elder Scrolls franchise. Additionally, they're usually abbreviated as B.O.S., giving them the same acronym as the Brotherhood of Steel, another quasi-military organization from a different Bethesda game series.
  • The shows you watch on TV feature a few direct parodies, such as Gordon Ramsay the judge in "Game of Cones" or Conan O'Brien (who's shown interviewing a clear Expy of Cloud Strife).
• The Faceless: All five of the Giants you meet wear full masks without even a face drawn on them, just eye holes and multicolored swirls for decorations. Furthering this, there are no eyes behind the eyeholes either, just the same slate grey color as their bodies, so it's currently unknown if they even have eyes.
• Fanservice: Most of the characters will spend some time relaxing at the beach or the hot springs, when this happens, both their in-game models and their portrait will switch to a swimsuit, some of which (such as Mark's) are just Speedos, giving the player plenty to look at.
• Fishing Minigame: A major part of the gameplay, and a good source of income in the early game that's great for getting your farming business off the ground quickly. It loses importance later on, but you'll still spend a lot of time with it if you want to unlock everything the Goddess Altar has to offer. There are dozens of fish species to catch, and their availability depends on many factors like the season, the weather, the time of day, and in which body of water you cast your line.
  • The release of 1.0 however, nerfed the ability to quickly upgrade your fishing capabilities by purchasing better rods. Now you'll need to provide Sunny with seaweed extracts in order to upgrade it, which makes it dependant on your progress through the underwater sections of the game, whereas in the past you could just pay your way into the top tier rods.
• Fish People: The ocean around Coral Island is home to an underwater kingdom of merfolk. You'll interact with them quite a bit during the ocean-focused story branch, and some of their characters are meant to be romanced (though as of 1.0 their friendship mechanics remain disabled).
• Foreign Culture Fetish: Charles is Caucasian, but his house, and particularly his bedroom is covered in Japanese decor, down to having a low table and japanese floor chairs and cushions, a shoji screen hiding his (pretty messy) wardrobe area and a Maneki Neko by the door. Not to mention that he wears a Buddhist mala as a bracelet (visible in his character portraits).
• Free-Range Children: The kids are mostly left to their own devices after school and will often walk unaccompanied around town and the surrounding areas. Being part of a small community on an island where everyone knows everybody makes it more believable than other examples of the trope.
  • During a cutscene, Archie and Valentina show up by themselves at the clinic after taking a tumble while playing, without asking for their parents help. Yuri mentions that she will call their parents to let them know what happened.
• Friend to All Living Things: And even a few not technically considered alive. Kenny's bio describes him as having close relationships with all the other Islanders, people, animals, trees, spirits and beyond. You'll often find him gushing about his animals, the wind, the beauty of leaves and everything around him. The only thing he ever mentions to dislike is the cold.
• Friend to Bugs: Eleanor, she is into bug-collecting and most of her loved gifts are bugs.
• Gaia's Vengeance: As you rise through the town ranks, nature itself begins to invade Pufferfish's office in the form of vines burrowing through the walls and floors. At rank A the building looks like a cutesy homage to what's left of Jurassic Park after InGen pulled out of Isla Nublar.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation:
  • If you help the merfolk out enough, you'll be given a sidequest where you turn into one of them while underwater, but the game continues to play the rebreather sound effect although you're no longer wearing one.
  • Your spouse will occasionally invite you to a shared activity like picnic or stargazing when talked to (and they'll complain if you don't take them up on the offer), but there's no actual way to participate in any of it.
• Gameplay Automation: Late-game research unlocks gadgets that allow you to automate almost everything on your farm that normally needs to be done manually, like sowing, fertilizing and watering your crops, or feeding and petting your animals. The only thing you can't automate is selling your products, but this is by far the least time-consuming action of them all. Considering how late you get access to these machines, there's likely not much left to do in the game except farming, meaning automating it almost entirely has the unfortunate side effect of making the game rather boring.
• Gotta Catch 'Em All: The game is lousy with collectibles. 60 fossils, 53 insects, 72 fish, 45 ocean critters, 83 artifacts, as well as 35 gems need to be collected to refill the town's museum exhibits, with all categories spanning all four seasons and multiple subsets with oftentimes obscure spawn conditions.
• Green Aesop:
  • The primary antagonists of the game are a corporation that want to drill the island for oil, while restoring the ecosystem is the player's main goal.
  • An oil spill damaged the ecosystem of the island so badly that they had to sell all their museum artifacts just to pay for the cleanup, and even then the island beaches are still covered with trash and black sludge.
  • The player can clean up the underwater sections of the game as thoroughly as they want, but if they stop doing it for even a couple of days, more trash will continue to gather. The trash will never stop polluting the water.
• Guide Dang It!: The game generally isn't too forthcoming with gameplay hints and tutorials past the bare minimum.
  • Once you hit ten hearts with any townie, you receive a letter that tells you to purchase a diamond ring if you wish to propose. What it doesn't tell you is that in order to do so successfully, you first need to go through that character's entire event chain, the triggers and locations of which are hinted at absolutely nowhere. Without a guide you can spend months in-game running around the neighborhood until you finally arrive at the right time and place for the next event to trigger.
  • What fish and bugs you can catch depends on specific combinations of the location, the season, the time of day, and the weather, but even if all these factors align, whether or not a rare bug for instance actually feels like spawning that day still comes down to random chance, making it extremely frustrating to complete some of the collections. Some fish only spawn during a single week in the entire year, sometimes in locations that aren't marked on the map even with the appropriate Sturdy Computer upgrades installed. Good luck finding out they even exist, let alone be there in time to catch one. That the in-game codex only shows what you've already caught doesn't help matters at all.
  • Artifacts and fossils are acquired from coffers and fossil nodes, respectively. Both item groups have half a dozen different versions, each with its own invisible loot table, so figuring out what coffer or node you need to farm to complete your collection is damn near impossible without a guide. This is compounded by some of the collectibles having drop rates as low as 1%, meaning even if you do have the right spawn item on hand, you might still think you're doing something wrong because what you're looking for just won't show up.
  • There's no way to see how much any given crop or item is worth until you've sold it at least once, and even afterwards you can't see the sale price in the item description outside of a shop menu or your shipping box, making it quite frustrating to manage your inventory without a wiki.
  • One of the achievements requires you to sell a golden animal product, something that can only be produced by a cow or chicken that won its respective contest at the Animal Festival in spring. This is mentioned absolutely nowhere, and these two contests are the only ones out of about two dozen that have an effect beyond the festival that hosts them.
  • There's a fallen log on the waterfall near Ben's mobile home that you can chop down with a sliver upgraded axe. It'll give you just enough hardwood to upgrade your Axe to gold, which you can then use to chop down the logs and stumps around your property, which in turn will give you just enough hardwood to upgrade all your other tools to gold level. If you miss this log or if you use the hardwood to upgrade any tool other than the axe, you'll get stuck until you can buy hardwood from the carpenter (unlocked at town level B), since fallen logs (which provide the hardwood) can only be cut down by a gold level axe, which in turn (as mentioned) requires hardwood for the upgrade.
• Halloween Episode: During the latter half of the fall season, Halloween decorations will start appearing throughout the town, culminating on the 28th during which you can attend the Spooky Day Festival. Interestingly enough, there are Day of the Dead decorations interspersed with the Halloween stuff, such as a mariachi band of skeletons and decorated skulls. Truth in Television since recently both holidays have started merging in some places.
• Hate Sink:
  • Bobby shows up on Fall 1 to inform the farmer of the Harvest Festival competition coming up and to introduce himself as an enemy for the player to rally against, but once the competition is done he doesn't show up again until the next year.
  • Jim is written to be as disagreeable and rude to the farmer as possible, mainly to balance out all the gushing from everyone else in town when they hear a farmer has moved in. During festivals he often has something negative to say or complain about.
• I Just Want to Be Normal: Dialogue with Princess Miranjani indicates she'd like to have an adventurous life free of stifling royal expectations.
• Immigrant Parents:
  • Kenny's parents Kira and Jack moved to Coral Island from overseas. They still have their own quirks and prefer to live as far away from town as possible, Kira will even complain that she gets too many visitors and prefers to be ignored and left alone and mentions that one of the main reasons she grows her own crops is to avoid visiting town. Their son Kenny however was born and raised in Coral Island and doesn't seem to mirror the same quirks of his parents, being much more active in town activities and involved with the other island inhabitants.
  • Pablo mentions that his and Rafael's parents immigrated to Coral Island to give them a better life, and he's grateful for their sacrifice to give everything up for them.
• An Interior Decorator Is You: The player is able to purchase various decorative items for their house, and arrange them however they like.
• Inspiration Nod:
  • The player can wear an item called the "O.G. Farmer Hat", which is the same type of hat worn by Pete, the male player character of the early Story of Seasons titles. It even has his spit-curl hair in the front.
  • The secret shop in the empty cabin is run by a monkey named Concerned Monkey, an obvious reference to ConcernedApe, creator of Stardew Valley.
• Interspecies Romance: It has been confirmed that the player will be able to romance three merfolk (Semeru, leader of the guards, Miranjani, the princess, and Denali from the promotional material), although how that will work is still unrevealed. Finishing the ocean questline turns the Farmer into a merperson themselves (though fully able to act like a normal human on land), so this will probably be a requirement. This is meant to come in an update sometime after release.
• Invisible to Adults: The Giants can only be seen by the protagonist because the Flower Goddess needs her Chosen One to be able to see the supernatural. Otherwise, they can only be seen by kids and animals.
• Jack of All Stats: Swords are the most balanced weapon class available, with their damage, attack rate and range all lying between those of hammers and spears.
• Kaleidoscope Hair: Wakuu's hair changes color every season. Given his rocky relationship with his dad, one can guess he's doing it as a way to rebel against his traditionalist dad.
• Latin Lover: Pablo, he'll even flirt with the farmer the very first time they talk. Antonio his cousin seems to be an aversion. He has the appearance of one but doesn't seem to actively pursue any romantic endeavors, only concerning himself with his business and the well-being of his daughter and ex-wife.
• Latino Is Brown: All 3 Hispanic characters, Pablo, Rafael and Antonio have brown skin. And Valentina, Antonio's daughter has light brown skin due to her mother's very light skin color. Somewhat justified in that all four of them are related.
• Lives in a Van: Ben lives in a van that is parked on the north end of the island, and he turns it into a pop-up shop during the weekend.
• Luckily, My Shield Will Protect Me: Shields count as weapons in this game and provide a native defense bonus at the cost of much lower damage output. Since you can only equip one weapon, wielding a shield and an actual melee weapon in tandem isn't possible.
• Meganekko: Milie. She runs the town library and doesn't take her glasses off even when she's at the beach in her bathing suit.
• Meaningful Name: The head of the Pufferfish office, and the closest thing the game has for a main villain, is named Karen. Which has become slang for an entitled, short-tempered, usually older white woman. Ironically, she's an Affably Evil suit who makes her moves discreetly and underhandedly and not explosive or confrontational as befitting a "Karen".
• Mermanity Ensues: After cleaning up all the coral sites in the ocean, the player character has the opportunity to do a side-quest for Cho Oyu the oracle that lets them turn into a merfolk while underwater, increasing their movement speed and allowing them to dash while underwater.
• No Full Name Given: The island's inhabitants are overwhelming known by their given name only. They do have family names that are occasionally hinted at in dialogue, but these are never used while socializing and don't show up anywhere on their character sheets. It might take you some time to realize some characters are related, such as Antonio being Suki's ex-husband and cousin to Pablo and Rafael; or Mark being Anne's brother.
• No Indoor Voice: Sunny. Compared to the other townsfolk, his dialogue is written in Caps Lock, giving the impression that he is shouting or speaking loudly. A scene showing a parent-teacher conference indicates it's because he's hard of hearing.
• Non-Indicative Name:
  • The Giants aren't really that giant. Except for the chieftain they're all shorter than the player's avatar, and he might only be so because of the large headdress he wears. When they decide to go to town and observe humans, they have to have two of them do the Totem Pole Trench gag to be tall enough to pass for an adult human!
  • The Abandoned Villa. It's neither abandoned (it's Nina's holiday home), nor is it a villa. It's not much larger than the other houses in Starlet Town, and is in fact smaller than Bree and Walter's home in the vineyard (which could actually count as a villa).
• Noodle Incident: How Anne and Paul met. Apparently it involved Barney the racoon getting help from Henry the giraffe, an apple tree and a jar of Tabasco sauce.
• Not Blood, Not Family: Defied by Pablo, he explicitly considers Suki and Alice his cousins, and acknowledges that even though Antonio and Suki are divorced, he still considers and will continue to call them his cousins. ^note Truth in Television, Latin families consider in-laws just as much part of the family, and a divorce (specially an amicable one like that of Antonio and Suki) does not mean the family link has been dissolved, and former in-laws can sometimes stay in close contact or even remain friends, specially when there are kids involved, like Valentina in this case.
• Only Known By Her Nickname: Eva is short for Everest but everyone just calls her "Eva".
• Our Mermaids Are Different: They're fairly standard in terms of appearance, being attractive humans from the waist-up and scaled fish from the waist-down. They're said to work with the Giants and the Goddess of Flowers to keep the balance of the island.
• Parents as People: Most of the characters with children still have jobs, hobbies, personal interests and show care and affection for their partner, not making their children the sole focus of their life.
  • Paul and Anne's home is shown to be quite messy, in fact the messiest of the houses in Starlet Town. It's implied that since they both work outdoors and they have to work together (since Anne is Paul's camerawoman), they simply don't have the time to do housework.
  • If you go snooping around in Joko and Dinda's bedroom, you can find a love letter Joko wrote to her when they were young declaring his love for her and asking her to run away with him.
• The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything: Pufferfish is made up to be an Evil, Inc., who intends to take over the town and turn it into an oil mining operation, but they're never shown to be doing anything actively evil or stopping the player from raising the town ranking or healing the island. They have rows and rows of employees working at computers, but they're not even able to get rid of the vines invading their office. The only actually bad thing they accomplish, completely by accident, is polluting the island waterways with their flyers, much later in the story they do plan a hostile takeover of the town by trying to force a recall vote on the Mayor, but since that recall vote depends on getting the town to agree to it, it's a very stupid idea.
• Press X to Die: The Black Honey made from Titan Arum or Rafflesia flowers is technically edible and the game description even describes it as "delectable", but it has an energy restoration of 0 and health restoration of -300. If the player doesn't notice those numbers before eating it, they might be in for an emergency trip to the clinic.
• Purple Is Powerful: The most powerful tool material, osmium, is an intense shade of purple. The most powerful type of kelp, while not actually made of the material is still referred to as osmium level and is also purple.
• The Quiet One: Rafael, so much so that he's often ignored to the point that people don't even realize he's there. On the opposite side, Pablo is very outspoken and popular with the young adults, and when people focus all their attention on Pablo and none on Rafael conflict ensues.
• Raised by Dudes: Wakuu was raised by Wataru as a single father on his boat with no one his own age to interact with, just Wataru. Wakuu himself wonders if that stunted the development of his socializing skills.
• Random Number God: Outside of the farming and dating aspects, almost everything in the gameplay is governed in large parts by random chance. Anything loot-related has it particularly bad, which can result in a whole lot of forced grinding if, for example, the various coffers you pull from the ocean keep coughing up everything but the final artifact you need to complete your collection.
• Rape, Pillage, and Burn: According to Scott, the original inhabitants of the island were attacked by Pirates who decided to turn the island into their base of operation, oppressing the locals. Eventually the populace fought back and managed to reclaim their island. ^note  This could be a reference to the history of Indonesia (where Stairway Games is located), which has had a long battle against real life pirates on their shores all the way up until The New '10s, particularly in the Strait of Malacca between Sumatra and the Malay Peninsula. Government cooperation between south east Asian countries have thankfully reduced the number of attacks to near-zero in The New '20s.
• Red Oni, Blue Oni: Pablo is an energetic and outgoing young man, popular with all the townspeople, always involved in every social activity and always the first to volunteer. Rafael is quiet, introverted and a homebody who prefers to keep a small circle of friends.
• Refining Resources: An integral part of the gameplay. Ores need to be smelted into metal bars, trash is processed into scrap, glass and compost, and almost all crops and animal products can be turned into various artisan products that are several times more valuable.
• Relationship Values:
  • There are about 70 human(oid) characters on Coral Island, almost all of which have an affinity meter that shows their disposition towards you with a number of hearts. Most max out at eight hearts of friendship, with the remaining two only unlocking once things are getting more serious. You improve your relationships mostly by talking, distributing gifts, and occasionally performing a little Fetch Quest.
  • Farm animals have their own affinity meters that dictate the quality of their products - a happy cow gives better milk than a cranky one. Happy animals are also better at the various minigames during the Animal Festival in summer.
• Remember the New Guy?: Nina shows up at the beginning of Summer with a cutscene letting you know she's moved back into town, however when you talk to her she never introduces herself and behaves as if she's known you for a while, also no one ever mentions or acknowledges her moving in, which can be quite jarring.
• Ridiculously Cute Critter: All of them really, thanks to the game's cutesy art style. If the sight of a happily grinning cow waddling around your pasture can't pull you out of a bad mood, nothing will.
• Romance Sidequest: You can befriend, date and eventually marry any one of the eligible bachelors or bachelorettes on the island, although marriage requires a sufficiently big house first so your spouse can move in with you. You can even have kids regardless of gender distribution.
• Scatterbrained Senior: Takeba, the keeper of the bath house seems to have a less than tight grasp on reality due to his old age. He'll confuse the farmer and later Mark for his son Taro, that he's expecting to come back from "the war" very soon. Wakuu will try to help him and calm him down when he gets agitated, but it is heavily implied that Taro is not coming come.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here:
  • Once the Farmer successfully restores Starlet Town's A rank, Pufferfish realize the town is now too well-off for their strategy to work anymore, so they pull out and shutter their office within days. That said office is pretty much uninhabitable at this point thanks to mysterious vines breaking through the concrete everywhere certainly didn't do them any favors, either.
  • Upon hearing that the city was selling their entire museum collection to pay for the cleaning of the oil spill, Scott packed up his bags and left town and went back to live with his parents.
• Shout-Out:
  • One heart event has the farmer trying to help Scott and Charles get a couch up the stairs, with Scott getting frustrated and repeatedly shouting "Pivot!", a clear reference to the Friends episode "The One With The Cop".
  • One of the hats available for purchase from the Concerned Monkey is called the "Blue Cat Hat" and shaped after Doraemon, even including a propeller on top and a red nose and whiskers.
  • The "Curator Outfit" obtained after completing the museum is based on Blathers from Animal Crossing.
  • The "Seafarer Outfit" is based on SpongeBob SquarePants, down to the square body shape.
  • The "C.I. Jo" artifact is a triple whammy. While the name and the fact that it's a soldier figurine is a clear reference to G.I. Joe, reading the museum description, the farmer will wonder if it comes alive when nobody's looking.
  • The "Pino Scarecrow", a unique scarecrow that you can obtain by trading merit points at the community center, is crearly based on Pinocchio.
• Show Within a Show: There's several in addition to the usual things for these farm/life sim games, like the weather report. Such as Game of Cones, which is basically a family-friendly Hell's Kitchen, even down to its host being a shameless Expy of Gordon Ramsey.
• Sleeping Single: Jack and Kira sleep in separate beds, and he still keeps his bachelor pad at the ranch. It's not explicitly explained why, but could be one of their multiple quirks.
• Socketed Equipment: You can add magical enhancements to your farming tools, depending how many times you've leveled them up, and how many giants you've saved from the mines.
• Solarpunk: Companies are evil and at fault for all the damage around the island. Even the friendly bumbling local Mayor is shown to be an Obstructive Bureaucrat and a hypocrite (berating Sam for putting up scarecrow decorations but happily approving pumpkin decorations all over town). Automation and machines are used, but they're all solar powered, no option is available to use any other form of fuel. Cars and other modes of transportation are non-existent in the island (only Frank has a motorcycle but he's never shown to use it) and trained birds are used to handle deliveries, negating the need for fossil fuels.
• Space Whale Aesop: We must care for the environment and our oceans... Otherwise the flower Goddess won't be able to communicate with us, and the Coral Tree will grow black roots that will infest our beaches, and the merpeople won't allow us into their kingdom.
• Stock Sound Effects: Fans of the Super Mario Bros. franchise will be all too familiar with the "mlem" sound effect that plays when you donate something to the museum.
• Stronger Than They Look: Some characters will lug around boxes almost as big as themselves with no issue. With contents that are not particularly light, Alice and Suki will carry boxes of fish out of the shack during one of Wakuu's heart events and Millie a box full of books almost as big as she is in one of her events.
• Super Not-Drowning Skills: You don't have to worry about running out of air while diving, even if you stay down there practically all day (though your character will automatically surface when it gets too late in the evening). Really comes into play if you decide to become a merperson.
• Techno Wizard: Lily works for a cybersecurity company and has plans for becoming a game developer. Yet her father, a former fisherman and now cook, still sees her career choices as useless and lectures her on finding a "real job".
• Temporary Online Content: There are a few cosmetic items that have been made available for a specific timeframe only:
  • The "Backer Farmer" and "Pandabacker Farmer" outfits are palette swaps of the standard farmer outfit, and only made available to backers of the original Kickstarter.
  • Two sets of DLC were released for a limited time during the Early Access period: the "Ocean Explorer" and "Ocean Guardian". Both included a special outfit and a unique Scarecrow and Chest each (as well as the recipes to make more). Profits made from these 2 DLC were donated to charity.
• Theme Naming: The spotlighted merfolk characters are named, ironically, after mountains.
• Token Wholesome: Zarah, who's covered from head-to-toe at all times of the year, and goes to the beach in a burkini.
• Translator Microbes:
  • The player will encounter strange messages written in an unknown language. Once the player receives the Goddess' blessing they'll be able to read this language with no issue.
  • After encountering the merfolk for the first time, Ling will design and install a translator on the player's diving suit, that translates their language into perfect English.
• Tropical Island Adventure: The player moves to a tropical island where there's lots of people to befriend, a greedy corporation to stop, monster-filled caves to explore, and supernatural beings to enlist.
• Underground Monkey: Almost all monsters have multiple palette-swapped subtypes, one for each of the four elemental mines in the Forest Caverns. They do get a bit stronger as you progress through the mines, but their behavior and attacks stay the same regardless.
• Villain with Good Publicity: Seems to be how Pufferfish operates. They're not eviscerating island communities for profit, they're revitalizing the deteriorating homes of bountiful natural resources, or words to that effect. Certainly, they've already done that to one island in the archipelago alone without incurring much public backlash.
• Virtual Pet: The player can adopt a pet from the town's community center. On top of more mundane options like a cat or rabbit, the player can choose to have a pet monkey or fox.
• Voluntary Shapeshifting: Through a late game quest, the farmer can obtain the ability to transform into a merperson while underwater. Gaining the ability to move much faster and no longer requiring the diving suit.
• Weather Dissonance: Being a tropical island, Coral Island would not have the climatic characteristics necessary for heavy snowfall, and if snow were to fall it wouldn't last long enough in the tropical sun to pile up by the sides of the road or on rooftops. Justified in that it probably wouldn't be that fun to have a farming game with mild seasons and minimal changes in weather from season to season.
• "Well Done, Son" Guy: Wakuu has a strained relationship with his father since he refused to carry on his legacy as a sailor and instead chose to become an astronomer. Listening to his father gush about other young people who did follow their parents footsteps (such as Alice and Suki who took over the Inn from their parents) is one of the few things that can make the usually soft spoken Wakuu actually upset.
• World-Healing Wave: Every time you successfully clear an underwater area of trash and activate the nearby mechanism, it unleashes one of these that clears away the oil spills and black tentacles blocking the path forward, leaving the surrounding coral reefs pristine and Scenery Porn-ographic.
• You Talk Too Much!: Implied of the player character. If you continue talking to the same NPC over and over, some might eventually start answering with "..." and more terse characters like Leah or Chaem will flat out ask you to stop talking or to go find someone else to talk to and leave them alone.

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