Starsand Island Review - More Like StarBLAND Island

Welcome back my weebs and otakus, it's Otakunofuji with another game video. Today I want to talk about Starsand Island. It's basically Animal Crossing or Harvest Moon with hot anime waifus. Sort of. Kind of. Except it really, really isn't. It has all of the personality of a wet paper bag, to be honest, but you do get to make an anime waifu avatar. So that's something.

Starsand Island is a cozy slow life sim similar to Animal Crossing and Harvest Moon or Fantasy Life i. With the main difference here being you can make a hot anime waifu as your character. The game doesn't let you adjust chest size or anything important like that, but it is degen enough to give you a bikini as a default costume, so they knew who their audience was going to be. I will say that you can make some pretty nice looking characters here.

You can build your own custom house and decorate it with stuff. You can talk to a whole island full of robots, I mean people, and do chores for them. And, of course, you can farm, raise animals, go fishing, collect resources by chopping down different types of trees and mining different ores, and then craft stuff with all of those resources. If you like the previously mentioned games, you'll feel right at home here as far as the gameplay goes.

Except Starsand Island has basically zero charm or personality. Despite having dozens of other anime people living their lives on the island, you still feel very isolated. Everything is very sterile and the characters are basically robots. There's no character you're eager to romance or any others that you hate interacting with. It's all super boring. Stardew Valley or Harvest Moon have characters with actual character you grow to care about. And, of course, characters with distinct over the top personalities is basically the whole point of Animal Crossing. 

Even the blandest and most hated Animal Crossing villager would be 10/10 top tier character in Starsand Island. And can you imagine if a nympho semen demon like Ankha showed up with this anime aesthetic. Yowza. Yeah, that reference is basically the whole reason I made this video at all.  

The result of this life sim game having no charm or personality means that the work you do in Starsand Island feels just like that - work. It's one of those games where the endgame is an endless grind for rare materials and without the payoff of fun interactions with the other people in your community, it just isn't satisfying or especially enjoyable at the end of the day. 

Starsand Island can be fun for a while, but when you realize how bland everyone is and how grindy and unsatisfying the gameplay loop ultimately is, its hard not to lose interest after a few hours. The good news is that the game is on Game Pass and it's play anywhere, so give it a try on Xbox or PC.