This is a pretty nice game. I liked it as a simulator and thought it managed to transalte a lot of things nicely and gamify them. It has some underlying flaws in it's design however (that I dont see being fixed in the sequel supposedly in development) as well as a slew of balance issues and poor design choices.

the jist of this game is simply you go to a locale and fish. The game comes with many places you can fish and there are DLC packages that add more places to fish. In all, honesty, this game has too much fish and there isn't really much variation. Some fish have a different fighting style, but overall it's based on the type of fish and their weight.

I really did like fishing for catfish and trout. and late game found myself really enjoying the challenging marlin fights but got burnt out actually having to go hunt for them on the open sea. (I'll mention some of these things in detail and explain some of the games shortcomings and grievances in it's design)

First of all, the starting area with all the trout is hands down the best place you will get to fish for a while. While you can move to some of the more exotic places (such as the lake with bass in it) there isnt really much reason to do so because the trout are fairly plentifu, easy to find, and yield the most money and can be caught maybe as often as one every 40 seconds... other places do not have this kind of a sweet spot in terms of return for your time. For every fish you land you net XP and money, and as you level and gain wealth you unlock and buy stronger equipment (rods, reels and lines) which makes it a bit less likely for the line to break when you get a bite.

you can lure fish in several ways, and many methods are overly complex and make the player 'work too hard' by clicking in certain way. With catfish it's pretty easy to do it in a weird way where rather than use feeder rods/baits you just put too much weight on a bobber by increasing the sinkers on it until it sinks to the bottom... then you can just drag this around. I found this to be a bit more work than just slow spinning every single time or using the nice triple rod pod with bobbers and waiting. however, 'trolling' using a yacht is the best for deep sea fishing as you can just drive the boat providing you've got the right hook/size bait. I grew tired of spincasting/fly casting after a while, and never really saw the point in using the more creative casting techniques because they are just too much work.

anyway after you master luring fish the way you like the fight mini-game is the best part of the game because here too you have a few different approaches to how to go about it. the easiest way to do it is just decrease drag to zero and reel as hard as you can and stop as soon as it hits red and do this until you catch the fish. the trouble with this method is you cant really win big fish this way without losing line... i found that mid-game i could leave my reel on a slight (minimum) bit of drag-tension (10% or 17% of 33% depending on what level of granularity for drag-tension your reel allows for) would result in me having fights that (depending on the species) would either last a bit longer but result in fish not actually being able to get as far away (the pulling would tire them out) or fish that i simply could not tire out in time (because active bursts of reeling tires them out the fastest, at the expense of them running with it really costing you lots of distance in terms of line)

by the time i got to deep sea fishing i actually learned of a THIRD technique that really worked well with marlin (the other techniques were not suitable) which was pumping. with decent strength equipment i could reel and actually pump (thrust the rod back) and do this as much as i could to tire the fish out... some fights lasting seconds. but i did not go back to test this with low level equipment or even any other species of fish.

I abandoned playing this game because I wasn't finding the last half dozen or so species of fish, and found it really hard to find some of the deep sea fishing. I wanted to check out the really big fish in the final map but, the grind for XP in the last quarter of this game is just insane... Catching huge monster marlins and releasing them back helped but it takes long to find them. this means i cannot unlock the final tiers of equipment suitable for sharks and such.

In addition to this XP 'tiered' approach to equipment... the game is broken. so many things about the equipment just are terrible. the ui is janky and you can get different kinds of bugs (like your bait increasing in size if you switch to a larger hook) there are sets of baits/lures that are associated with species fish that they simply cannot catch, so it just means its more confusing to read everything to see what is relevant. the sorting of rods is a mess. the nature of fly fishing is silly. feeder rods and spin rods dont really matter. feeder baits just cost money and dont really do anything. the game is overly complicated by all the stuff you can spend your money on and completely unnecessary. You can unlock equipment associated with fish really early that is helpful and then later you unlock stuff that isn't useful at all. I dont really see the point of any of the SAKURA content it just makes it needlessly complicated. In addition you do not need more than a handful of lures and there is just everything you can think of from soft and hard lures to rotating spoons and other things, that all really just do the same thing.

The fish dont seem to really prefer colors or certain kinds of food. They either like a food or the dont like that food. switching baits is just a matter of avoiding certain fish to target the ones you want, but the result is you have 75+ lures to keep track of when you need maybe 6... as well as baits that instead of costing 1-3$ per catch cost $20-60 a catch. this all gives the game a feel of 'sameness' and extraneous and needless content that doesnt really feel like anything more than something in a spreadsheet given a model and text description.

The worst part of this is the fish themselves. Some of them are reskins or different colors, and you'll be tempted to catch them all like pokemon and happy to move on to another more interesting map. And some maps are pretty lame.

the game is very unoptimized and laggy. if i wasnt so hooked i'd have dropped it by the time i got to deep sea fishing where this became a painful discovery to realize.... after 150-250 M of line (i forget which)... something happens where the game will just crunch CPU cycles and result in 1FPS... i actually played the game this way and learned how to time the pumps and maintain that my marlin weren't getting away from me.... often just barely.

For all its shortcomings it really was a good relaxing time and offers a fairly exciting and enjoyable minigame for a sim. its fun collecting trophies and breaking new records. a great game to play while you are reading or doing something else (using drop pods or trolling as they dont escape if you ignore them)