THIS IS ALL OPINION!

Please take all information presented with a grain of salt, everything is based on first impressions and official previews.

    The Only Remake

I don’t have opinions of this game really; it Exists and is just a remake of the first game launched April 2012. Also, it’s only on mobile so I don’t care, and was probably just a gentle transition into the world of microtransactions to top up your resources.

My response to that;

Don't spend real money on virtual fruit you noob

It's probably the most authentic of the mobile-exclusive games, since it's basically just a rehash of A New Home into the 2012 artstyle, as far as I'm aware the puzzles and general mechanics are all the same as they were from the original game so it has that going for it.

I hope it STAYS the only remake. Forever.

        Origins 2

I haven’t played it, for several reasons; firstly, it’s a mobile game and has no plans for PC release, LDW is also known for its mobile published titles so this isn’t really out of the ordinary, but I’ve dipped my toes into the realm of LDW mobile games, namely Virtual Families 2 (2012), and frankly just don’t like them that much.

Secondly, the art style just doesn’t have that kick anymore, it really looks the part of a mobile game and that’s not an aesthetic I particularly jive with.

Thirdly, I’ll be straight forward, the game mechanics are dated; they don’t hold up to modern simulators of similar types and from what I’ve seen on official sources lean into common mobile systems of crafting, and daily rewards. The real time aspect of the game is probably the only mechanic that works well for mobile games but even then, that can be circumvented on PC by just… pausing the game. It’s encouraged by the game itself because it knows what it is.

Not to mention the weird fourth microtransaction currency of ‘Lavastone’ in addition to the base food and tech points, because of course there’s a special currency, this is a mobile game.

I say fourth because wood, previously just being an infinite resource represented by a pile of firewood similarly to grass, has become its’ own currency. I’m left questioning as to why that is, again these games are at heart a series of puzzles, the life sim aspects are secondary but I’m hoping that there was something reduced in exchange for making this change, ie; build times getting nerfed.

If I had to treat wood like a harvestable and wait eight real time hours (variable, depending on how the villagers AI wants to behave) I think I’d go crazy. Not only for the wait times, but also that makes a larger window of failure where your villagers can just pass away while you’re not looking via age or lack of food, because food is already a harvestable.

Finally, the initial five games have a nostalgia factor, yes, but they’re simple and very small, they can just hang out in the background of whatever you’re doing because New Believers, the most bloated of the main five, is comparatively is about 3.6 times smaller in file size, topping out at a whopping 69.1 MB, Origins 2 is ~251 MB and it doesn’t even have God Powers.

They’re lucky that Apple doesn’t show you RAM usage, because I know for a fact that it’s probably more than the meagre ~250 MB that New Believers uses.

      Divine Destiny

I wasn’t even going to mention Virtual Villagers 6, yes the official sixth mainline title, because I didn’t think it was released yet since it’s not listed at all on LDW’s prime website, which seemingly hasn’t been updated in a while, or the series’ Wikipedia article (which irritated me so bad I made my first Wikipedia edit in several years LMAO), but it was released about seven months ago from the date of writing this. (4/26/2025)

It seems… very much the same as Origins 2, just with the God Power system from New Believers which is more than a little disappointing since that’s currency #5 which can also probably be danced around via microtransactions. The power system also seems to have added an extra 75 MB of data, larger than the entire size of New Believers.

I already talked about my dislike of this case of mobile gamifying, so nothing new there, but from what I can tell from reviews there’s also exceedingly long ads and the game can be flat out difficult in the beginning either to incentivize in-app purchases or a result of a dated design ethos since starting difficulty has been a complaint since 2007. Could be either, could definitely be both.

I wanna make something clear, the mobile gamifying isn’t a new thing, all the games except for the original PC release of the first Virtual Villagers have been ported to mobile since the beginning, not including the ‘Lite’ Free versions, thus the games have always had the influence of that platform.

It’s more so the pushing of things like microtransactions and watching ads and whatever that you mostly associate only with mobile games and the 'freemium' model. It doesn't escape me that there’s probably a reason that Origins, Origins 2 and Virtual Villagers 6 are exclusive to mobile. The ports of 2-5 comparitively have a small, one-time charge of 99¢ to play them indefinitely.

After all, the original five are now free to play on PC, they’re not profitable and they probably can’t reasonably add microtransactions to their almost twenty-year-old series, let alone introduce the new ones into a market they no longer have any sort of hold on.

So, I understand, but it sucks.

...and the art style sure is... uh, something.

Ok listen, I'm an artist, I know some things, this art style is like fundimentally extremely unappealing. I can't even pinpoint what exactly has gone wrong in the art department.

I know, I know, nostalgia goggles or whatever and high resolution assets will always look different than we expect, but it just doesn't work here! It's like 'realistic' Minecraft textures or that AI that was given a tiny JPEG of Barack Obama and spat out some white guy in an attempt to upscale the image, the villagers have been yassified.

I just really don't like this art style choice, at least when the villagers had approximately twelve pixels to their name, we could fill in the blanks and not just have weirdly semi-realistic textures plastered on the original proportions.

Hell, they could have stuck to something like the illustrated technology bars from New Believers, those have aged better in thirteen years than the maybe seven months Divine Destiny has been around.

Pluis those masks are sauceless and look like
New Years novelty glasses.