Coral Island vs. Stardew Valley

Always roll my eyes when I see a gane review and representation is a factor.

"Representation" is ruining a lot of games/storyline in games nowadays because it feels forced and agenda driven. Rarely does it feel natural like it should. There's seems to be this drive at the moment where either devs/consultation firms want to fly an obvious virtue signaling flag or "gamers" want to represented in every game, it's harmful.

Who cares if every folk isn't represented in every game, all we should want is good games and stories. Representation hasn't bebifited games and that's clear to see. Games are an escape from real life, not a political driven/agenda pushing artform

Im playing ot on game pass on cloud on Xbox one

Thankyouu so much

Coral Island is included in this months Humble Monthly. So great pickup for $15 (or somewhere close to that) .. plus you get a handful of other great titles for the deal, including Guardians of the Galaxy.

i more like stardew valley then coral island so far. Coral island is very good but not a masterpiece like stardew. it was pure luck that i run into coral island. i only buyed the game because i cant wait no longer for the 1.6 update on consoles.

Is there an aroace option in Coral Island? I absolutely love in Stardew that you can opt out of marrying anyone, and instead ask Krobus to move in as your platonic life partner

Odd, you didn't compare the music

See I got Stardew Valley on my Switch, I’ve enjoyed it, it’s a fun and enjoy the moment so I wanna get Coral Island on my PS, I do like the style of it, is there seasons on Coral Island, I know it’s a tropical island but still

I was really gonna give this game a 2nd chance, DEI fine but nah actively pushing an agenda with the pride flag, yeaaaaaah I'mma pass.

Stardew valley is a superior game because it's a finished game when it's first released

Cannot take this too serious, when the gameplay part is almost as long as the representations part...

Coral is based on south east asia country vibe. Im from there too it’s bit weird for me to see SEA with winter 😂 but nonetheless i love coral more than stardew even though i agree with most people being 1.0 release isnt finished. Luckyly in my steam region coral cost around 15$ and Stardew 8$. I dont mind pixel art but dateable guys in SD just not my cup of tea.

You have a very pretty nose.

You forgot to say about the art style... It's the same that movie Tarzan 1999!!!

That's why It's so beautiful ☺️

Its true, the game crashes constantly. If you play it on xbox you will see. If not for the crashes, which happen at least 3 times a game day, the game would be awesome

Love Stardew Valley, and I love Coral Island even more. I've been waiting for the game since the Kickstarter AND I have the game on Steam since it's first alpha release on version 0.5

All I can say is this: Coral Island is on Version 1.0 but it's not Finished. We still can't go to the Savanahs, and there are characters that have full sprites made for them but they only appear once for now. There are also characters that are not romanceable even if it feels they have plans for that.

Marriage is still not fully implemented and you can run out of dialogs with your married partner AND the game will break the immersion by literally saying your recently new husband/wife has NOTHING MORE to say to you, it's hillarious.

The game has some deep troubling issues with FPS drops and bad optimisarion with the AUTOMATION of sprinklers. In this game, instead of magic creatures slowly grabbing the things for you, you can craft an item that will auto collect everything. The thing is: The thing deesn't slowly collect everything during the day, it literally makes the entire farm doa PLOP and absorbs all of the crops. This literally makes my game go for 60 FPS to 12 for seconds.

Now here's the thing: The kickstarter for Coral island wanted around 80K for the whole game which I always felt it was too low of a budget. 3D is easier to work than 2D, but even a small team of 10 people working still need a full salary to survive and 70K wouldn't be nearly enough to give these people a year or two worth of a salary. That's one of the biggest traps any new Developer falls on, thinking they can make miracle with little money. However, Coral Island actually made 1.6 Million.

That's not more than enough for an indie studio to complete the game, it's enough for them to even add more than what they promised.
And so far, it's promising. Just the mainland of the game is huge, and underwater is also very huge, and the caves are very interesting too. If you go there tho remember to mine the cracks on the ground.

The game has way more acessibility, and considering the amount of money they made, I think it's fair to say they did the bare minimum.
There are a LOT this game borrowed and copied from Stardew Valley, but overall the core mechanics are way better in Stardew Valley than they are in Coral Island, and I could spend hours here saying about them but you will feel them as you play. However, what Coral Island does right, it literally spoils you in a way you won't be able to go back to Stardew Valley without mods.

So yeah, it's an awesome game. Both are. But Coral Island is far from finished, so remember that. In a year we will probably have the rest of the game done, just like Stardew Valley kept adding things and fixing bugs with time. Let's hope they do the game work as Concerned Ape did with Stardew, because this game needs to be way more than a Copy of Stardew Valley, and so far, it has a LOT of potential.

I DO WISH the storyline was different though. But hey, maybe they'll flesh out the story more.

I love the art of the character portraits & think it would have been amazing had the entire town been rendered in that style. II have no idea how difficult that would have been, but there are other games that chose to do the entire game in a specific art style.

Ugh woke BS!

great comparison review i hated the stamina bar thing in stardew if there was an option to turn that off i would go back to it. I liked sun haven much more because of that even though sun haven is more different in allot of other ways.

Stardew is better for many reasons, most of all is it being a finished, stable game that doesn't crash every 20 minutes. Coral island is literally a worse version of stardew that barely functions most of the time. Entire questlines are incomplete, tons of features missing, and I cannot stress enough.. CONSTANT crashes. There's no comparison between the two when it comes to whether or not they actually work. I'm enjoying my time with coral island when it actually works, but even then, it's just a 3d stardew clone in every way.

It feels like I should like coral island more than stardew. By all accounts, it’s more expansive. But I think what’s different is the sound of just everyday gameplay. Stardew music and the sounds of walking, using tools, petting animals, taking to villagers, etc is just so damn satisfying. Am I the only one that thinks this?

Great video thanks I'm wondering how in-depth the skill tree is if you can Max everything out or if you're limited to a certain amount of points

I watched this whole video and realized it wasn’t for switch at the end 😭

Coral Island seems really cool though honestly I don't love that type of 3d stylized graphics. Will still probably try it out though

Best of both worlds: play CI with SD soundtrack 😎

Love both games but the music in stardew is on a different level and brings everything to life IMO

One thing I want to share when ti comes to Stardew and Coral Island comparison is accessibility. In Coral Island, you can reduce the time by 50%, there is dyslexic font type, can increase font size, also have enemies in the mines not attack you unless you attack them I believe, and probably a few other options. In Stardew, I don't really see much accessibility options which is something people might consider when deciding on which game to purchase.

Tbh I love coral island way more than I did stardew valley, I like how in coral island it feels so lively seeing people going about their days

Love to see a game that's not Pixel art. It was fun for a little bit but we gotta move on imo

I like the side by side comparison, but we also shouldn't forget that SV did not invent the farmin sim genre. Both games heavily rely on especially the Harvest Moon series, so it is easy to tie the relations between the two games and even the three to see many similarities. Ofc the evil corporate story line seems quite redundant, but I feel like the point both games make is different. While SV wanted to have Joja as the general antagonist, CI focuses heavily on environmental issues so the Pufferfish Corporate is the natural enemy with drilling oil. Other events and a lot of character commentary focus on environmental issues or nature and I think that also gives the evil corporate in CI a different feel and a different sense. Cleaning the ocean, rescuing the merfolk and so on also ties back to damaged beaches, shores and coral sites in real life that suffer from oil drillings and waste in the ocean. I feel like the CI devs, who are Indonesia-based, seem to have quite some touching points with that as well, so I can imagine the environmental aspect was super important for them to highlight!

Overall I think CI had the luxury of being a game developed by a big team while SV was developed by only one guy. Also, the farming sim genre has evolved so much over the years, the quality of life improvements CI has seems a lot like the result from a lot of fans complaining about certain aspects of popular farming sims like Story of Seasons or Stardew Valley.
The devs worked really close with their backers and implemented a lot of cool mechanics from the feedback that makes CI feel a lot smoother gameplay-wise.

At the end both games are absolutely wonderful and charming in their own way. Personally I have a big attachment to CI as I was one of the backers and I so happy to see the project realized and improved from what it felt like in the beginning. It's very charming and definetily filled to the brim with cool content and great characters!

Thank you for the review!

P.S.: Switch release for CI will come soon in 2024! <3

Thanks! This sold me on getting Coral Island!

stardew valley mods alone blows any similar type games.

The side-by-side comparison is incredible lol

No no no no, cheap stardew valley knockoff

While I seriously don't like the lazy ass copy and paste of Coral, I will admit the differences make it appealing if only due to my fondness of Stardew. Thanks for this, I guess I will check it out.

Keep making content 🫂 ur contents are real nice ❣️

Coral looks good but the portrait artwork isn't doing it for me.

Interesting comparisons. Always meant to check out Stardew. Might have to check out this too!

Cool!

💛