Trash and scrap are excellent crafting resources... we should produce more of it so we can turn it into pretty lawn decorations and storage solutions!
The exploitation of natural resources by corporations for profit is bad and should be stopped. The exploitation of mineral resources for an individual's economical gain is a completely acceptable and commendable activity.
Good Bad Bugs: It is possible to get stupidly rich by exploiting the Prize Wheel minigame at New Years. Spinning the wheel twice but not using your third and final spin will reset the spin counter, meaning you can easily rake in money and prizes until you either run out of inventory space or you get bored.
LGBT Fanbase: Perhaps unsurprisingly. There is the devs openly stating how important LGBT representation and pride are to their game, such as the rainbow pride flag on the town hall. There is how all of the bachelors and bachelorettes are romanceable by characters of any gender, with a wide variety of body types, personalities, and life circumstances to cater to almost every preference, such as the single mother Suki who has visible stretchmarks due to her pregnancy. There's also the potential gender neutrality of the player avatar, with an explicit non-binary honorific with "Mx." and how there are no explicit "gendered" options such as your character being explicitly defined as "Male" or "Female", only body types and hairstyles and facial customization available to everyone. Also one of marriage candidates, Raj, and one of the other towns folk, Dippa, are Non-binary themselves, with the former leaning far into traditionally masculine presentation, something on the rare side in fiction.
Obvious Beta: The 1.0 release version of the game is still missing a lot of features. A few of note:
While there are pet houses, pets cannot leave your home and don't receive gifts (despite the menu showing they could). All they can do is roam around your house. Following the January 24th 2024 hotfix, they can follow you outside but still cannot be given gifts.
Merpeople can be talked to but you cannot gain friendship with them, nor can they be romanced (despite the fact that 3 of them were announced to be dateable).
There are several puzzles under the sea having no apparent solution implemented.
The dig site and the Savannah are new areas unlocked by fulfilling temple bundles, but despite how sprawling the area is, there is nothing to do at the dig site other than mine for fossils in a tiny area, and the Savannah is not implemented in game at all. The in-game map doesn't even feature either of these areas.
Marriage and children are present but extremely bare-bones past the point of "yes, I do (want one)".
The Recycling Center is smack dab in the middle of the island, but there's nothing to do there yet. Some characters will mention taking their recycling there, but you can't interact with it.
Barring some very few exceptions, the various festival minigames are insanely difficult and frustrating for a game that normally doesn't expect the player to do anything challenging. Most suffer from janky controls and unfair mechanics, and the AI competitors go in with highscores that require literally perfect runs to beat, allowing not a single mistake. Yes, the minigames are optional, and yes, they can be repeated as often as you want/need to, but this gets tedious and annoying quickly, and the entire systems just poses a jarring contrast to the rest of the game.
Combat takes a ridiculously long time to level up. Unless you've actively avoided another activity, you'll always level up combat last since you'll have to farm experience for weeks to max it out. How absurdly grindy is it? The Ombuto and Advanced Slime monster types, give out the highest experience points per kill: 12 points. The final level of combat requires 4,640 experience points. That's almost 400 monsters you'll need to kill just to get from level 9 to 10.
Spiritual Successor: To the Harvest Moon series but especially to Stardew Valley that they inspired. With the hero of both being someone who moved away from the big city and took a new job running a farm to get a new start, and a soulless megacorporation trying to exploit the rustic environment where they live for profit. Mixed with other aspects like mines that include monster combat, an empty museum the player needs to refill, and making offerings to a friendly supernatural being that reward the players with items or unlocking new areas when the set's complete. Some aspects are expanded, like the mermaid society that got vague mentions in Stardew Valley being an entire area with its own set of NPCs in Coral Island, or being able to marry and have a family with a divorcee who already has a child.
They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: In a contest ran by the developer, Mark was voted as the most popular dateable NPC. However his heart cutscenes are not about him, but mainly about a stray dog he found and has run away. The only moment of characterization in his chain of cutscenes is when he confides that he feels guilt because his Drill Sergeant Nasty behavior accidentally lead to the death of a rookie in the past, but this is immediately dropped in favor of more scenes about the missing dog.
