After completing this game I want to share some of my feelings about it. My "not recommended" rating comes with a reason and I'll also explain why I feel comfortable giving it, as I did enjoy the game and quite happily 100%'ed it (okay, I'm at 98%, but if you look why it makes more sense, in a week it should be 100%).
Throughout my play-through I've found quite a few flaws and inconsistencies that I feel take away from this game's enjoyment. From what I've understood, the second game improves on a bunch of these criticisms, so I feel fine giving a negative rating for this one and recommend people to give the second game a try as it's A LOT like the first game, but more polished and it looks like they have taken a bunch of the criticisms of this game seriously.

So let's start with the positives:
- You indeed do a lot of farming initially
- It's nice to see your farm and wealth grow
- Unlocks feel pretty good
- Playing it together is quite fun
- It's kind of cute and laid back.
- Being able to visit other people's farms is also really nice, some of the other farms are really crazy and inspirational.
- Farm customization is pretty fun, though a little limited. (they all kind of tend to look the same-ish since it's the same few handfuls of decorations, especially without the DLC's).

Then for the negatives:
- As you get further into the game, a considerable amount of your time is spent trying to sell off your produce since the selling is so slow. When you have to sell 9000 fish per 100, with an animation that takes a few seconds each, that means you are going to be spending like 5-10 minutes just sitting around with the spacebar pressed, and that is just for 1 resource.
- Income/costs of items are sort of opaque. You have no idea what sometimes might be draining your money halfway through the progression once you unlock the farm hands. Animals can cost a lot of money out of seemingly nowhere and you will be wondering while your money is close to 0. So an overview that shows the in/out for specific resources would be really nice.
- Animations are very slow. This especially becomes very obvious and annoying in the later stages of the game when you try to get some crops planted for which you only have 1 season, like chard and .
- Farmhands do not work while you are not in the game. This led me to just leaving the computer on way more than I probably should have, while letting my guy idle somewhere on the map. Personally as a developer, it seems fairly simple to simulate what they have done during your absence.
- Farmhands have zero customizability. I'd like to be able to prioritize certain tasks for example, like having them deal with plants that will not be pick-able anymore next season. They also really lack utility when it comes to normal crops. They are kind of slow and do not re-plant. To add to the previous point, it would be nice to "pause" a farmhand or tell if they should work while you are not in the game.
- Quests suck. They arguably scale negatively as they become harder and more tedious as you level and unlock stuff, while their rewards become increasingly irrelevant. Like everything you've unlocked can be asked by the quest, with many of the late game unlocks having rather long timers. It's kind of silly that a quest that has you gather 20 animal drops, 10 early game flowers and 30 of some crop with a 30-120 min timer will yield the same 30 ribbons and 3000 exp as a quest that requires you to plant 650 graffiti cauliflowers (that have a 2 day timer).
Even for ribbons quests become completely irrelevant. There's like 4 or more other sources that are all probably faster than doing most of the quests. Jobs, gift shops and honey/candy stands all are much more effective for getting these. Quests are also quite repetitive and feel like filler content, as what you need to get for them has nothing to do with the quest.
So I think quests are quite fundamentally badly designed and there's really no reason to do them beyond a certain point.
- The "premium" resources (jam, cheese and honey) seem a bit weird, they don't really seem to mean anything and by the time you need them, you will likely just buy them using gold nuggets as that's easier to get and less time-gated than these resources themselves seem to be, as you get gold nuggets very often in the end game. Also, there seems to be little reason why they cannot have a 'fast' building to sell them at, like the other resources. Also it's strange that there's no wine resource considering there are a few grape and wine centered resource buildings.
- Storage is kinda crappy too. The late-game storage (Warehouse) offers way too little storage, with a timer that makes it very slow to level it (why does this one have a timer anyways? You get like 50 storage per upgrade and it's not like it has any sort of exponential growth effect that the boost buildings have), so everyone just ends up with filling a massive area of their map with red barns, as they are just 250 diamonds for 2x more storage than an upgrade to the warehouse (and they don't have you wait 20 minutes before you can add another 50 storage).

very nice