Eighty-three, that is the number of hours I have put into Disney Dreamlight Valley since October 25, 2022. That was when I published my initial impressions of the game as an Editorial. In that review, I outlined some of the major flaws with the game, including the bizarre character inclusions, weird bugs and and how the game forces you to progress in Friendship quests before you can freely explore the world. Well, a lot manages to change in a year, and there have been some announcements about Disney Dreamlight Valley, and since I have, for all intents and purposes, finished the main story of the game, I figured now is a good chance to update my review, and talk about the announcements.
And I think the first thing to talk about is stuff that I... didn't get wrong, but are wrong about the original review. Like saying that Belle was in the game and I haven't come across her yet, straight up, she wasn't even in the game, she was added much later and is in the game now, but as of writing, while she was advertised as being in the game, she was not. Also to bring up is the story, as it ended up becoming more... complex is too strong of a word, but it was more than just "tidy up Disney Town", it introduced a darker version of your playable character and... yeah that is about it. The way they let you progress was kind of weird, and I probably should have brought this up when I said that "a lot of the game was gated off", but straight up, when I wrote that review, they did not let you progress until the next major update, like you could access the biomes, but until they released the update you could not really fix those biomes by doing what the game wants you to do. Okay, so a big part of the game I neglected to mention was that you needed to find and restore a bunch of magical orbs and put them back into pillars to fix the world, and when I originally wrote the review, the pillars for Frosted Heights, The Forgotten lands and I think Sunlit Plateau were unavailable to do, and that irritates me to no end. I hate the idea of game companies selling incomplete games and finishing them with updates and DLC. No! Sell a complete game, add to it later, because that is how you should do it. If I worked at a sandwich shop and gave you two slices of bread and told you to come back next year for a piece of lettuce and two tomato slices, you'd boycott my place and get me shut down.
But now the game is complete... I hope, and I've put in plenty more hours, so what is my updated opinion? The game is... mediocre at best. Honestly, a lot of my complaints have not changed, but I've added plenty of new ones since. The first major complaint I have, the biomes just aren't fun to explore. Let's take another mediocre at best Disney game to compare, Disneyland Adventures, that game has you wandering around a simulated Disneyland Park, and you know, it's kind of fun to explore because you have items that you can use to interact with the world, you can find items to use your magic wand on, you can find hidden mickey's around the park to photograph with your camera, find hidden secrets in the park and on the rides. It's a really mediocre game, but it gives you a reason to go looking throughout the park, Dreamlight Valley doesn't. The main reason I keep going around the world is to pick up stuff to sell to Goofy, and that just gets tedious, picking up the same flowers, gems, herbs, it's so boring. Sometimes there's a chest you can open, but that's about it, there aren't really any secrets to explore for until you get a quest that makes you find something that only appears once you activate that quest, come on, maybe I want to catch eels for more reasons than coconut trees.
It also doesn't help that the world map is pathetically small. Small worlds aren't inherently bad, but they need to be packed with content to be worth exploring, but that isn't even the main problem with this game's world. It's packed alright, packed with crap, so much of the biome space is taken up by trees, rocks and other natural objects that you can't really place anything in them, much less another house. "Oh, but you can remove all the things", but I shouldn't have to, there either needs to be less crap in the biomes, or the biomes need to be bigger. I don't want to have to keep removing foliage to place houses.
Another big part of the game is collecting fragments of memories, which are really just screenshots of iconic Disney movie moments, and you get this randomly by doing errands. You'll get pieces of specific memories by catching fish, or digging in the ground, or feeding critters, or mining, and the problem is that they are too random to even really be worth getting. Like, you'll get a piece of memory after making one meal, but then you will get another piece of a different memory after making fifty meals, and you may not even get a memory piece, you may just a small amount of coins instead, which really makes the memories not really worth it. It also doesn't help that to get some of the pieces, you need to feed critters, which is difficult because they each have different ways to getting close to them, different foods they prefer, different favourite foods that will give you better rewards, and different critters will appear of different days at different times, sorry that I can't keep playing this game 24/7 guys, I guess that critter that appears from 6AM to 8AM just isn't worth not having a life over.
But let's get to the meat of all of this, the big announcements. The biggest announcement made in regards to Dreamlight Valley was that it was leaving Early Access, come December it will no longer be an Early Access game, which is kind of confusing to me because, A) This isn't an Indie game, I mean it's backed by a major company, so while the dev team may not be a Triple A studio, the association with Disney definitely restricts from being an Indie game. It also, B) means that this game isn't an original IP that needed Early Access sales to fund the game's development, this is a Disney game, they could easily have pumped a fraction of the money they withhold from Writers and Actors to give this game some more funds. It's also worth noting that this game is, C) not a Steam exclusive, so this game will also recieve money from sales on consoles, which means that the only reason I can see for this game being Early Access is entirely because Disney didn't want to fund it but still reap profits from it, which let's be real is a Disney thing to do. It's probably also why this game isn't going Free-to-Play when it leaves Early Access like it promised.
So with all that said, I must really hate this game right? Honestly, a mediocre at best game is not worthy of being hated, at least not by me. The big problem is, I can see a good game in pieces of this one, a fantastic game even. Interacting with different Disney characters and collecting fragments of memories that are Disney screenshots, I can see a fantastic game being made with that concept, it's just that a fantastic game wasn't made. Sometimes, I wish I could get into game development, as a writer or concept artist, because there are ideas that just seem so obvious that it makes no sense that, instead of a Kingdom Hearts style RPG where we collect memory fragments, it's a life-sim where we run errands and do busy work, and after a while it just kind of feels like a chore to play, and nobody likes chores. I can't say I hate it, but once that better game is made, I'm probably not gonna come back to it.
And really, why isn't Winnie the Pooh in this game yet?
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