I wish Coral Island were more... tropical.
Ok it's an opinion piece and maybe a hot (and stupidly humid!) take. Feel free to disagree because this is just me ranting into the void and not really a request for change lmao.
I have over 200+ hours of playtime by now so I have to preface this by saying, yes, I DO enjoy the game and I still play it regularly. However I'll always mourn the fact that CI is trying too much to mimic SV... now before you throw insults at me, hear me out.
I get that they wanted to play safe by playing into a mechanism that people were already familiar with, but they had a completely new and unique environment to work with! The island was based on real places with tropical climate, so why not build a completely new farming mechanics?
Instead of the default four seasons mechanics, why not create a new one around the dry/monsoon/rainy season found in SEA countries? And maybe change the windy weather to humid weather, where it does directly affect crops, because I don't think windy does anything in the game.
So I hear ya, the winter season is used as a off time to mine and upgrade your things from a gameplay perspective. While tropical farming IRL is generally more of a year-round labor, rainfall (or lack of it) can put a pause on your farm, providing the player with the same function as "winter" (when it's too dry to plant without massive amount of water). But then again in the typical 4-seasons farm sim, by the end of the first year you gain the ability for year-round farming anyway via the greenhouse, so it's not like it's THAT different.
And heck maybe throw farming features often found in SEA too, like terraced fields, or the usage of water buffaloes for tilling fields (we have buffalo in game! Talk about missed opportunity). Introduce something like agroforestry (this is a common farming method in Indonesia where the studio is based on) where you can combine different types of trees/crops to create better quality products and protect crops from extreme weather. Maybe add some pest management too on top of that. And also the crop selections? Why don't we have nutmeg in this game?
It's a nice cozy farm sim and I applaud the team for creating a fun game laced with SEA elements like this. I just can't help but feel they tried to be SV with a different skin when they have so much potential. This isn't going to change CI but I hope it could inspire them or a different studio/gamedev to explore this niche more. I can't be the only hoping for those kind of games, right? I appreciate you reading all the way here, so I'd like to hear your thoughts too :)