Disney Dreamlight Valley

Or: Disney Crossing

Most crossover video games tend to be competitive in some way, if it’s not a fighting game it’s likely racing or something else that involves characters competing with each other or fighting against a common threat. Disney Dreamlight Valley is an exception, taking the life simulator style of Animal Crossing, combining it with elements of farming sims, and then basing it around Disney characters.

The titular location is a dream world that the player insert character arrives in one day. Once a prosperous place filled with Disney characters, an event known as The Forgetting caused the residents to lose their memories and the valley to be overrun with thorns, leading to many fleeing the valley. Thankfully the player character has the abilities needed to restore the valley.

Once you get the valley past its initial completely ruined state, the plot becomes less immediately urgent. You strike a balance of farming/resource gathering, spending time with marketable Disney friends, and progressing the plot by unlocking new areas of the valley and completing their respective questline.

Each new area of the valley is blocked off by thorns that require a Dreamlight resource to dispel. Dreamlight is earned by completing various tasks, like increasing your friendship with characters or harvesting a certain amount of crops. You have no choice but to take things slow rather than rush, which actually feels fitting for the game’s tone.

It’s a casual game where you can decorate a little village and your home, not an intensive quest. At the same time there’s also more clear cut and lengthy progression than something like Animal Crossing. Paths will be barred until you get the right upgrade, and shops have clearly labeled upgrade costs instead of coming whenever you spend enough money at it. And there’s an actual story that doesn’t vanish after the tutorial.

For the most part the game isn’t too story heavy, then the final area of the valley ramps up the focus and led to an ending that resonated with me. There’s even a content warning in one late game quest, which I felt was a bit excessive, but shows that the game is about to go deeper than just making you get x amount of y item that suddenly refuses to appear.

Being a Disney crossover, your fellow villagers are the main appeal. Merlin is the go to explainer for anything plot related, Mickey Mouse is obviously one of the first characters you meet, Scrooge McDuck and Goofy are the main shopkeepers, and the roster expands from there. New villagers are found either in the sealed off parts of the valley, or separate realms that also take Dreamlight to reach.

Despite being a mostly peaceful game, several villains end up as part of your local community. There is an option to get rid of villagers you don’t like, but I’ve found that the villains fit better than expected. They add bits of conflict to the day to day life of the village.

Each character comes with their own series of side quests that unlock as you increase your friendship with them, some of which are required to unlock other characters. These are where you get to see a wide range of fun interactions between Disney characters, like Mushu appointing himself the Beast’s therapist, or Ariel and Wall-E trading items from their respective collections.

The fastest way to level up a character’s friendship is to hang out with them, where they’ll accompany you and help with certain actions. You almost always want a friend by your side, both for the friendship points and the increased yields when fishing, mining, gardening, or foraging. Which fits with the core appeal of the game, having Disney characters around, so I think it was a smart design decision.

I like that the developers were willing to embrace the quirks of the cast, small characters like Remy and Mushu are allowed to be small, while Ariel and Ursula keep to the water. Though you’re unable to hang out with Ariel or Ursula unless either is in human form, which makes leveling up their friendship difficult. And Ariel’s human form is one of several things you can only get after completing Ursula’s questline, which requires reaching the maximum friendship level with Ursula.

Of the various characters I think Scar has the most interesting portrayal. He has some fondness for the player avatar, but is ultimately still his same scheming self, both of these come out well in the last act of the main quest. I also liked Merlin taking an almost parental role with the player character, which again came across most strongly in the last act.

Inventory and storage was my main pain point while playing the game. There are so many items to gather and collect, and inventory space is limited. Even the chests you can build will quickly fill up, unless you use Dreamlight, you know the currency needed to get new characters and progress the game, to craft larger chests that will still fill up but more slowly.

You’ll want to stockpile items too. At first I sold all the gems I got from mining, then kept running into quests that required gems as items, which took an annoying amount of time to complete due to not having them on hand. Sorry Donald, the nearby mining spots aren’t coughing up any emeralds all of a sudden so you’ll have to stay in the weird dark dimension for a little longer.

Most of my house in the game is just chests to store my items. And I’m still struggling for inventory space. I don’t care much for the decoration aspect of the game, but I felt locked out of it for a while by my need for storage space. Apparently even the developers have joked about being scared of people’s storage solutions, to which my response is give us better storage then.

For a more severe issue, despite being a game with an up front price tag, the game has some free to play elements. In the game’s menu you can access a store using a currency acquired either in packs of fifty per day, or by spending real money. For sale are various in game items and new outfits for some villagers. And the game has its own version of the ‘battlepass’ system found in multiplayer games these days, referred to as ‘starpaths’ due to a lack of battles.

I found it easy to ignore the in game shop, but the fact that it exists at all is not good. And as mentioned earlier one of the premium items is Ursula’s human form, which does in fact change the gameplay by making her friendship easier to level up. Use your free currency on that, it will make things far more convenient. But then try to forget about the shop if you’re the type to be suckered into spending a ton on ‘free’ games.

On a less negative note, this game is still getting updates, and despite the presence of a paid expansion with another being teased, there are still new characters getting added to the base game alongside other new features and refinements. While I have yet to get the current expansion (A Rift In Time), the base game has been such a fun experience that I do aim to eventually get it.

Also to close this off, and in the classic spirit of talking about any crossover game, there’s one character in particular I hope gets added.

Where the fuck is Lilo? The movie is Lilo and Stitch, stop separating them and only adding Stitch while we have pretty much the entire main Frozen and Lion King cast and also Nala. Lilo would fit right in both thematically with the game’s narrative about forgotten memories and in terms of fun character interactions.

Regardless of how future updates turn out (rant above aside), I’ve already had a good experience with Disney Dreamlight Valley that felt complete. And I like its more laid back approach to a crossover game. Not every video game crossover needs to involve competition or fighting, and I’m glad to see some big name experimentation in that department.