I'm confused about the negative feelings towards the features of this game. I'm a die-hard Harvest Moon fan. My favorite has to be the original on SNES, the one I obsessed over for weeks before it finally came out and I played it to death. But it had problems. The time limit was a big one - once it ended, that was it. You couldn't keep going. Limitations in general - limited time, limited space, limited options. But it was the first try, and it was well done. Ever since I played that game, I've always been looking for something very similar but with the problems and shortcomings addressed. None of the other HM games gave me what I was looking for. I wanted freedom to design my farm, decide where to put things. I wanted to be able to interact with more of the world, not just run to pre-generated locations for picking berries in the forest, for example. Because of the time limit, you were forced to maximize your time every day. I never felt truly free to explore.
In this game, I will have more freedom. I can design my farm how I want. I can plant things outside my property. There will be a nice, big variety of things for me to plant. And then there's the mines - they look fantastic! A little bit of fighting, some mining, and a whole lot of exploration of procedurally-generated areas. That hits a happy button in my brain. I love exploration.
Sure, some players will want to maximize their profits or score or whatever. But I'm not in it for that. I want to roleplay. Sure, the game might not have any mechanics in place that encourage me to plant some flowers outside the house of the girl I like. But I can do it if I want, and tell the story in my head, in my own way. I might not maximize profits by planting a variety of crops, but I can do it for aesthetic reasons. (I used to make pictures in the SNES HM by planting crops in particular shapes. I was very proud of my Mario head.)
Basically, from what I've seen, this game has everything I want. It even has a multiplayer feature - I've been looking for a proper multiplayer Harvest Moon for years, and none of the terrible ones on BYOND has even come close to hitting the mark.
Vector, you say there's no story-driven gameplay and it looks like it will be a grind-fest. But that's all in your play style. I want to tell the stories myself, and this game will let me do that. I can make a female character and date a girl in town - might seem unimportant to you, but I've never been given that option in these games. I was always either forced to play a male character (like in most games) or forced to only date boys (ugh). If you look at it as a "game" in the sense of it being driven by shiny rewards and progress markers, then sure, this game is probably not what you're looking for. But if you look at it as a fantasy world where you can create your own character and story, and be free to play them how you want without being constrained by a pre-written storyline, then this looks absolutely amazing.
So maybe it comes down to whether you actually like roleplaying, or just "winning." Don't get me wrong, I enjoy games with good storylines. It's something that will sell me on a game even when the mechanics and design are terrible. But most so-called RPGs just don't really seem like roleplaying to me. They seem like watching an interactive film. I'm not playing the role, I'm just hitting the buttons until the next plot point. That's the real grind-fest - fight X low-level enemies to get strong enough to fight X mid-level enemies to get strong enough to fight X high-level enemies to get strong enough to fight the boss. All just button mashing with a story behind it. A real roleplaying game has to be open-ended. You have to be able to decide how you want to play. You have to have options, even when it comes to something as simple as what to plant and where to plant it.