Harvest Moon: Hajimari no Daichi (3DS)

05.10.11 / Harvest Moon, Japanese, Marvelous, Simulation game, Video game / Author: / Comments: (0)
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Harvest Moon for the 3DS, coming out early 2012, blah blah blah. If I know my Marvelous, there’ll be at least one delay before it comes out, so Summer 2012 is a safer bet.

Is it just me or are those some huge-ass vegetables? How are you going to harvest those? And would anyone seriously eat those monsters?

The stuff I’m hearing about the game isn’t setting my world on fire, though. Lay out your farm however you want? Design your own character? Change your hairstyle? This isn’t Animal Crossing, but fine. But what I really want to hear about is the farming system. Those neat rows from Two Towns seems to be missing now, and your farm looks a little plain. And I’ve been planting those same cabbages and eggplants and sweet potatoes since…since. What’s new this time? I’m seeing something about a “field levels” (段々畑) system that takes advantage of the 3D gimmick, but I’m not clear on how that works yet.

Until any really exciting news comes out about this one (or about Rune Factory 4!! Do want!), I won’t be shopping for a 3DS just yet.

I want a new Shepherd’s Crossing… ‘_’

Games that just didn’t work out

16.07.11 / Action RPG, Nintendo DS, Otome game, PS2, RPG, Simulation game, Sony PSP, Strategy RPG, Video game, Visual novel / Author: / Comments: (0)
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I play a lot of games from start to finish. I play even more from start to whenever-I-get-tired-of-it. However every once in a while (…actually pretty darn often) there’s a game that I try to play only to give up very quickly for one reason or another. I usually don’t even mention them here firstly because I have nothing to say, and secondly because I have better games to write about, but I’ll list a few recent victims of this practice here.

Remindelight (DS) – Long intro, cliched story about rescuing sister from forces of evil, meh graphics, massively squashed-up text that’s incredibly difficult to read, terrible battle system that consists of slashing randomly at the screen, etc. I don’t think I got even an hour into this one.

Houkago Shounen (DS) – One of the games you have to be Japanese to appreciate, I guess. It follows the life of a little boy in 80s Japan as he goes to school, comes home, plays with his friends and tries to avoid moving away with his family at the end of summer. It was heartwarming but, frankly, extremely dull, and none of the mini-games he plays seemed like any fun. Instead of me playing a game about him, he needs to play the game about my childhood.

Astonishia Story (PSP) – I played about an hour last week, and it reminded me of Tactical Guild in terms of sheer terribleness. Even the samey-looking bad guys, walk-up-and-attack battle system, forced humor and paper-thin characters are similar. I could grow to love this game, I know I could. But I’ve already played one so-bad-its-good game this year, so AS will have to wait till at least 2012 to get its turn. If ever.

Inugami DS, Allison & Lillia DS – Not games, just books put on the DS by publishers out to make a few extra bucks. I thought reading light novels on the DS might be more fun than reading scanned copies on the screen (Buy? what is this “Buy” you speak of?), but this probably only applies to books that are worth reading in the first place, i.e. NOT Inugami.

Destiny Links (DS) – Shame, it’s a really promising game. Destiny Links had lots of elements I love in an RPG (quests, item crafting, world exploration, multiple character scenarios to play through), but I just couldn’t get past the pure action RPG battle system. I can handle ARPGs with level ups because then I can just grind till I’m strong enough, but systems that require me to actually show some skill and dexterity are a no-go. I managed to finish the first island, then threw my hands up after that. The tiny characters and the mostly-hiragana text didn’t help either.

Mimana Iyar Chronicle (PSP) – Plays like Tales of the Tempest, feels like a Grandia II rip-off. If I had a dollar for every grumpy mercenary with a chip on his shoulder… I made it to the first boss, who promptly wiped me out. Now I either have to grind or actually get the hang of the battle system,  neither of which appeals to me right now. Dumped until further notice.

The World Ends With You (DS) – I’m giving it my best shot, I really am, but… It’s not doing anything for me. I’m just getting more and more stressed by the moment. Not only is the “story” not going anywhere I care to follow but also the battle system is all over the place. Which part of this is supposed to be fun? If it’s the 7-day Lockdown in Tokyo thing, I already did that in Devil Survivor, thank you. And can I get another couple of dollars in here for the “Everybody just leave me alone” protagonist? I haven’t thrown in the towel yet, but…

Hoshigami Remix (DS) – From the makers of my beloved Stella Deus, but this one is a wash. The battle screens make me claustrophic and the battle pace is downright catatonic. The characters on the screen are tiny (I complain about tiny characters because I have bad eyes, true story), the character designs are fuzzy and awful, the story is boring, the music is unremarkable, etc. Basically everything that can be wrong with a game is wrong with Hoshigami Remix. But I like SRPGs enough that I’ll probably play it on and off for a while to come. I especially like the Tower of Trial being unlocked right at the beginning. Maybe I’ll even finish it, eventually.

Harvest Moon Boy & Girl + Hero of Leaf Valley (PSP) – I shouldn’t have to repeat how much I love Harvest Moon games, but both original versions on the PS2 were a bit of a failure for me (I liked Innocent Life though, for some strange reason). I don’t know what I expected from the PSP remakes, but what I got was a whole lot of nothing. Hero of Leaf Valley seems to have a bit of potential – I did play quite a bit of Save the Homeland – but Boy & Girl is definitely out.

Breath – Toiki wa Akaneiro (DS) – I probably haven’t mentioned this before, but I don’t really like visual novels. Every couple of months I give one a shot just to see what’s going on, but it never works out. Breath would have been bad enough on its own, but the existence of several stupidly irritating games that force you to blow into the DS mic repeatedly was the last straw.

Hiiro no Kakera (DS) – Like I said, I don’t like visual novels. I gave this a shot because it’s one of the few otome ‘games’ for the DS, but I sorely regretted it. None of the male character designs appealed to me. The main character was whiny, ungrateful, stubborn, bitchy and mean. My dream was to lead her to a painful, ugly death, but I quit long before I got the chance. The story seemed to have potential, but every single scene, no matter how petty, dragged on for ages and ages so I gave up. This is a feature of all visual novels, btw, which is part of the reason why I don’t like them.

Berwick Saga: Tear Ring Saga series (PS2) – Gave up right in the middle of the first mission. I love SRPGs, but the hexagonal model was too confusing and the battles were hard. It would probably have turned out well if I’d pushed through to the end, but it came at a time when I was up to my nose in other SRPGs, so it just couldn’t compare. I looked around to see if it had gotten stellar reviews or anything, but “meh” seemed to be the general response so I dumped it.

Legend of Heroes I & II (PSP) – Nothing wrong with them, they’re just boring. I should have played them 15 years ago along with BoFII and Lufia I, then they’d have fit right in. I tried both LoH I & II in turn, but I think I’m going to have to save them for when I’ve run out of other PSP RPGs to play. Gotta say, I love Falcom’s character designs though.

Now back to the stuff that is working out. I really need to get off my butt and just finish Saigo no Yakusoku no Monogatari and three or four other games I’m almost done with but never got round to posting about.

Harvest Moon: The Tale of Two Towns!

08.04.11 / Harvest Moon, Marvelous, Nintendo DS, Simulation game, Video game / Author: / Comments: (1)
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Natsume is bringing Harvest Moon: Twin Villages over as Harvest Moon: The Tale of Two Towns! When exactly it’ll be published stateside, sometime in 2011 is all they’re saying. Natsume have been known to postpone release dates before, not to mention Twin Villages itself was delayed at least once before release. Anyone who’s read my posts about TV knows I wasn’t a big fan of it, but it did great sales in Japan and I hope it does great sales in America as well.

Marvelous has been putting a lot of effort in the Rune Factory franchise these days, which is good (I want Oceans!!), but I don’t want them to forget HM entirely. As long as the success of TV doesn’t mislead them into thinking that once-a-day saves and repetitive contests and rampant store closings and bland characters and forcefully slow progress are the way to go, no problem at all. Plus Harvest Moon: Grand Bazaar was a disappointment to many HM fans, so maybe they’ll like TV better.

As for me, it’s too soon to replay Twin Villages The Tale of Two Towns, so I’ll be saving up for when RF: Oceans comes stateside. I suppose could also buy RF: Frontier while I’m waiting, but everything I’ve seen and heard of the runey system sounds so frustrating that I don’t really want to get involved. In the meantime, back to my other games.

Shepherd’s Crossing 2 DS

18.12.10 / Nintendo DS, Simulation game, Success, Video game / Author: / Comments: (4)
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I first played this as Hakoniwa Seikatsu: Hitsujimura DS (箱庭生活ひつじ村ＤＳ), which is the Japanese version. I liked it. I really, really, really liked it. I played it for hours until my arms ached, I lost track of time, I forgot to sleep, I just totally went head over heels for it. There’s so much to do and in-game time passed so quickly, it was only low battery warnings that could get me back in touch with reality.

Eventually I enlarged my house to the greatest size, expanded my fields to the limit, got married (to Mika!), had a son, filled out my almanac and pretty much did everything there was to do. I retired, enjoyed the credits and put the game to rest.

Until I played Harvest Moon: Twin Villages. I’ve already gone into my thoughts about that game, so I won’t repeat them here. But my disappointment made me think about this game again. Harvest Moon is getting stale, I thought. It would be nice if there were other farming games, I thought. Yes, wouldn’t it be nice if someone localized Hitsujimura DS? I idly googled and found, WTF, someone did localize it! And apparently released it with little or no advertising, because I had no clue until I looked it up. How can people buy games they don’t know exist?

On the other hand, thanks to that it’s going very cheap on Amazon, so I guess that was a good thing. I had to shelf it a little while I played some other games (i.e. more TMGS3 than was good for me), but I started playing it hardcore again last week. I retired just yesterday, with Maki as my wife and a cute little daughter who looks exactly like her. Sweet! For farming game lovers this game is very addictive, but there are several ways in which it falls short. You have to take the good with the bad, so I won’t pull any punches.

Bad: Relationship values don’t exist. You might be fooled at first when you find out you can share your cooked dishes with some of the village folk. When you visit, they’ll make some light conversation and give you some food, so you might think “Oh good, they’re liking me more” and stuff. Nah, don’t bother. It doesn’t make any difference at all. Whether the village folk are nice to you or not depends on their programming, not on your actions. Furthermore,  marriage is all about how many sheep you can give in exchange for her (if you’re a guy) or how many bed covers you can offer him (if you’re a girl). It makes things simpler than HM, but I seriously missed interacting with other people and being able to walk around the village.

Good: Your spouse isn’t useless. Even after marriage, she’ll be seen doing various things on the farm, and every month or so she’ll give you her salary for doing various jobs. Maki grinds flour, makes bread and cuts hay, etc. She also regularly calls you in from the field so you can eat together. Aww. Your kid is useless though.

Bad: This game is sexist. It is heavily biased against the female character. If you choose the male character, you can run out of each important item (main dish, side dish, firewood) several times before you get a game over. And that game over is in the form of getting married to the “hottest” girl in the game, who takes pity on you. If you’re female, you automatically get kicked out of the village the moment you run out. Furthermore, a male can get married with just two or three sheep, but a female needs several bed covers, and it takes months to acquire enough wool, wash it, spin it and knit it to make a single bed cover because sheep can only be sheared once a year.

Bad: Starting up is hard. The game does not hold your hand one bit. It shows you the controls at first, then tosses you on your farm and says “Survive. If you can.” Figuring out what to do, how, when, can be extremely frustrating for newbie players. Even worse you have only a tiny amount of money to start with. Make the wrong decisions and you’ll be flat broke in no time at all.

Good: Once you know what you’re doing, it’s almost impossible to fail. I had a ton of close shaves in my first game, but this second time was a total cakewalk. I never even came close to starving. In fact I had more food than I knew what to do with most of the time. A tip for new players: you can start planting crops on the 16th of the previous season. More time for planting = more crops = more money!

Very, very Bad: Your farm is highly disorganized. This was a major flaw that I really couldn’t stand. Everything else (for me) was minor and could be lived with, but this was close to a deal-breaker. There are no storage facilities, no animal pens, no barns, nothing. If you want your animals penned up, you have to create fences and fence them in yourself, but the fences go all over the place and are hard to place right. Your tools will be lying all over the place, your pets will be running all over the farm, your food will be all over the floor, etc etc. It all seriously gets in the way and impedes freedom of movement. Not to mention it looks terribly messy.

Very, very Bad: You can only hold five items at a time. Five (5). If you want to hold more, you have to drop something else to do so. Since there’s no storage, you just drop them on the floor and come pick them later. Before long your items will be all over the place, even if you make an effort to keep them in one place. Some items are stackable, mainly straw and branches, but most are not. It really doesn’t make any sense that you can only hold five carrots at a time (haven’t you heard of pockets?) and is very, very inconvenient.

Good: Time only moves when you do something. The time you spend walking around, eating, feeding your animals, etc, doesn’t count. Time in Shepherd’s Crossing only progresses when you do actual “farm work” like planting, harvesting, knitting, etc. This takes a lot of panic out of the game because you can spend the whole day planting, then go round feeding your animals at the very end of the day and it’s still fine.

Bad: Some tasks take a disproportionate amount of time. Especially sowing seeds and harvesting certain crops. A whole day just to knock three plums off a tree? A whole day to harvest five cabbages? Ridiculous. If you have the whole plot of land unlocked, it can take days to plant crops on every plot. At least they don’t need watering or the game would be nearly impossible.

Good: You can skip forward in time.  If you find yourself with nothing to do on a certain day or season, just hit the L button to forward to the next day. HMTV really needed a function like that to make those boring days pass faster. You have to make sure your animals are eating their food before you do so though, because they’re so stupid they’ll just die if you forward without checking.

Good/Bad: Plot fertility goes down (represented by those green circles in the lower half of the picture). The less fertile the plot, the more likely your crops are to die or disappear You have to either practice crop rotation or use copious amounts of fertilizer if you want to keep farming the same pieces of land every time. I solved that by letting a few plots rest every season, but in any case I had more fertilizer than I knew what to do with, so I didn’t worry much.

Bad: Random disasters affect your crops All. The. Time. It’s the rare crop that grows all the way to maturity without being afflicted by some kind of disease or bug that causes you to lose half of it. Also in the beginning, before your pets are fully grown, you’ll have trouble with rampaging boars, ravaging wolves, greedy hares, plundering rats, etc etc. Wolves ate all my sheep once, I was so mad! It keeps you on your toes, though.

Good: You can kill your animals. Not just the meat ones like chickens and sheep but also the ferret, for its lovely pelt. Which you can then tan and sell for munniez, you savvy sadist, you. You can do the same with your rabbits, with the added benefit of getting to turn their meat into a delicious stew that most of the villagers love.

Bad: Vegetarians will hate that. Even if you choose not to kill your animals, you won’t be able to avoid an event where Mika kills your first chicken the minute it’s old enough. Luckily I’m not a vegetarian so I just spent my time drooling over the tasty-sounding dishes.

Good: You can grow many different types of vegetables. This isn’t much of an improvement over HM, which has more. Where the difference comes in is in the types of grain: wheat, sorghum, millet and buckwheat. Harvesting them can be a whole process that takes several days. For wheat, for example, you have to chop it down with a scythe, pile it up into stacks, let it dry for several days, undo the stack, thresh the wheat with a threshing stick (which gives you lots of straw for your animals, yay) and then finally toss it into grain bags. If you want flour you’re going to have to grind it with a stone mortar as well.

Good: You can cook lots of dishes in your kitchen with your meat and vegetables. The recipes aren’t that many, but they’re very detailed. Some of them need 5, 6, 7 different ingredients and cookware to complete. You feel a real sense of achievement when you cook them, not to mention they sound extremely tasty. Additionally you can make food products like cheese, butter, sausage, ham and bacon (mmm) from milk and meat.

Good: You can keep a lot of pets. Cats (only one type), ferrets (only one type) and many, many different breeds of dogs. And they all have their own little “playing” animation. It gets old really quickly, but if you like dogs you’ll enjoy it.

Bad: Pets eat a lot and aren’t multipurpose. In this playthrough I was very well-organized, but I had a really hard time of it in my first game, ‘cos those little critters eat a LOT of meat. The general store sells some meat scraps, but in general you’re going to have to butcher your animals regularly to feed them. Fortunately my rabbits bred like, well, rabbits, so that was fine. The fact that the pets aren’t multipurpose is annoying though. Each one only does one or two specific things, e.g. the terrier only chases rats and weasels. The Sheltie only herds cows, the Sheppard only chases wolves, etc. So instead of one or two dogs you need four or five (I had four) to do the same amount of work.

And more flaws, and more good things. I most enjoyed the time-management and butchering aspects of the game. If things had been a little more organized, if you could hold more items and if you could interact with the other characters a little more, this might have become one of my favorite games of all time. I hope they make a sequel!

Harvest Moon Twin Villages – More reasons why I don’t like it

30.11.10 / Harvest Moon, Japanese, Marvelous, Nintendo DS, Simulation game, Video game / Author: / Comments: (16)
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All right. I ended last time by explaining all the reasons why I found this game Random and Restrictive. But to prove it wasn’t all bad, before I dig into the rest of this game, I’ll mention another good thing I liked about this game: cooking.

Cooking

As distinguished from the cooking festival, which I’ve already explained was pure crap. Your team members lose the contest for you despite your hardest efforts, and it’s the same lines and the same events repeated over and over again. The town mayors vary their lines a little as the towns get closer, but it’s one variation, 5 repetitions, one variation, 5 repetitions, ad nauseam.

No, what I do like is the actual cooking. From the crops you grow and the things you process, you can cook over 300 different dishes in your kitchen, most of which look absolutely delicious. Salads, soups, hors d’oevres, main dishes and several other things. And unlike many other HMs, you don’t have to be taught the recipe to do it. You either cook over and over again until you’re “inspired” and suddenly learn a new recipe, or you can go straight to an FAQ and save yourself the pain of wasted ingredients. Here’s a link (Japanese) to save you time as well: 料理.

Even better, your energy doesn’t go down while you’re cooking, so you can cook all day and all night if you want. And you can make several items at once instead of just one at a time. You can select ingredients that are in your storeroom as well. If I had to mention just one drawback, it’s that the game keeps questioning you. Want to make a variation? Want to keep the quality of the dish? Etc, etc. A bit annoying having to click through all that, but it’s okay. I like cooking in real life, so I tend to like cooking games too.

Boring

1. The marriage candidates – Wow! They all look so nice! And they all suck so much! This is a very subjective opinion, so I’m not going to run my mouth on about it and invite needless argument. I’ll just say they weren’t my type. I keep comparing this game to Grand Bazaar because they’re very similar gameplaywise, stylistically and characterization-wise, but even the marriage candidates in GB had (a tiny bit) more spark than the ones in this one. The girls in Twin Villages are just dull, bland and similar, not much to choose between them. I chased first one then another, but I still couldn’t find anything to like. If I ever do a replay, I might try playing as a girl instead, maybe the guys are better.

 

The sage. Looks like a loli, talks like an old crone

Lia – Cute, friendly, likes cooking
Raspberry – Cute, friendly, likes animals
Nana – Cute, friendly, likes nature
Licorice – Cute, not so friendly, likes plants
The Sage – Cute, friendly, mysterious
Ariella – Cute, friendly, religious

There, that’s it. That’s all. They’re cute, but there’s nothing to choose between them. Remember the girls in the original Harvest Moon? Karen, Ann, Mary? Or even more recently, all the different girls in Rune Factory 3? Compared to that, this is just a giant snoozefest. You can go out on dates with them, which is even snoozier because you have to ask them out at certain times of the day and take them to certain places only. Then they have the nerve to get jealous if you date other girls. Man, you just can’t win with some people.

2. Time passing – Sooo slow. S o o o o o  s l o w. Just like in Grand Bazaar, one in-game minute corresponds to one real life second, which sounds fast until you actually play it and realize it takes forever for anything to happen. With the innovations in farming and ranching, namely planting in rows and getting your pets to take care of your animals, it doesn’t take long to get your morning duties done. Wake up at 6, do everything by 8 and then… then… then… If you like you can plant crops in both Kotonoha and Bluebell and go back and forth and water them, I did that after a while and it still didn’t take that much time.

You can go exploring in the mountains, which gets real old real quick. You can do some pointless quests, more on that below. You can talk to townspeople and try to woo your bland marriage candidate. You can…uh… You can do like I do and start going to bed at 12pm every day, that’s what. Just like in GB, the more you water your crops the faster they grow, but do you have any idea how tedious it is to stay up doing ABSOLUTELY NOTHING all day long just so you can water your crops again like you’ve done a million times before? Just so they grow a little faster and give you more money that you don’t even need? After the first year I just couldn’t take it any more.

3. Still no mining – I guess the fans didn’t complain enough when GB came out with mining removed, so Marvelous repeated the crime in Twin Villages. Your main way of getting the ores you need for quests and upgrades is to find them in the underground tunnel once you’ve got it open. Even then it’s all a matter of luck when you break the ore open. After years of making mining increasingly more broken, Marvelous has obviously given up and said “This is a farming game! Go play Minefest Moon if you want to mine!” And that was the end of that!

EDIT: I am informed by akira666 that if you play far enough, you can unlock a wider network of tunnels that you can go exploring and ore-hunting in. This makes it better than Grand Bazaar, at any rate. I stand corrected.

Repetitive

1. The cooking festivals – I already went into why these suck above and in the previous post. It’s the same pattern every time: mayors say the same thing, Pierre says the same thing, and takes forever to do it too, Harvest Goddess says the same thing, etc, etc. The only nice thing is that you may occasionally get good quality seeds or ore from your mayor after winning. But that doesn’t make up for the extreme tediousness after the first few festivals. There are other crop and animal festivals as well. They’re equally repetitive, but they happen a little less frequently, so I don’t have an issue with them.

2. Your daily schedule – Wake up, water crops, groom animals, play with pets, talk to townspeople who will say exactly the same thing all the time, fill a few quests, give a few gifts, roam through the mountains…There’s quite a bit of stuff to do. But it’s the same “quite a bit of stuff” every single day, every single week, every single month, every single year. It got unspeakably dull to me after just a few hours. Especially the mountain exploration, I just couldn’t stand it. Jump here, pick up this item, jump there, pick up this other item, run there, jump there, avoid this stupid bear that comes out of nowhere and attacks you… I read a few Japanese reviews which loved that aspect of the game, but I just couldn’t stand it. I couldn’t.

3. Quests – Taking a cue from the Rune Factory series and similar games, Twin Villages introduces a request board system where the townspeople can post quests for you to fulfill. I’m not going to wax lyrical about Rune Factory, because that series is hardly perfect either, but at least in RF (2 and 3) the quests are partly used as a way of getting to know the characters, getting closer to them and exploring more about their personalities. Accordingly there are a number of repeated quests, but there are a lot of new, one-time only quests as well. Essentially they form part of the story.

*sigh* Talk about taking the form and missing the essence. Twin Villages has quests all right. Tons of them, ranging in difficulty from E to S. You even get nice rewards for the better ones. But there’s no point. There’s no soul. There’s no progress. You’re just the town errand boy, doing one fetch quest after another forever and ever and ever. I swear, these townspeople are the laziest people on the planet and you, the player, are the biggest enabler ever! How many times are you going to fetch poison mushrooms for Ayame before you shove them down her throat and choke her? It never ends! Get me this, and that, and this, and that, and this, and that. As you get further and further into the game, their requests become fussier and more convoluted: “Not just any rose bouquet, it has to be level 2.5 and above or I won’t take it, hmph!” At that stage of the game you’ll have to plant/produce the components yourself and create whatever item it is, and give it to them for a reward you usually don’t need if you’re that far into the game. So…yeah.

Misc

1. Controls – I wasn’t sure whether to add this because at first it really bothered me, but after a while I got used to it and barely noticed it any more. Basically this game is going to hurt your wrist. In order to run, you have to press the L button and hold it. Doesn’t sound so hard huh? Try pressing the L button now, holding it, and using the directional keypad at the same time. Go on, keep doing it, keep going. It’s extremely uncomfortable and takes a while to get used to. It would have made more sense for the R button to be used, or for you to be able to press L once to turn dashing on, and L again to turn it off. What’s worse, I don’t even think it’s good for your L button to be depressed that long. However, just like the awful touchscreen-only controls in Island of Happiness, once you get used to it you don’t really notice it so much any more. As long as you don’t have any wrist or finger troubles (or very small hands), you should be okay.

2. The Harvest Goddess is annoying – She’s always been annoying, but I swear she gets worse and worse with every passing game. This time she caused half the trouble in the game by sealing the tunnel, and instead of fixing it she makes you have to do it. Not content with this, she insists on popping up every time you do something insignificant. “Ta-daa, you just ran 100 steps on your horse!” “Ta-daa, you just pulled up 100 turnips!” “Ta-daa, you’ve done a ton of errands, I hereby dub you ‘Errand Boy!’ As your reward, you can do even more errands!” <– yes, this really does happen. I can’t stand that cow.

3. Bad carryovers from Grand Bazaar – I already mentioned the slow pace and the lack of mining.

-They took out the double jump, which would have made navigating the mountain easier.
-They added more bugs and fish to catch, but only have a few designs for each one so that catching one feels just like catching another. And if you use the wrong fish in a recipe it fails, hard.
-Again you can only have one save point, and you can only save once a day, right before you go to bed.
-Milking and brushing your cows and sheep takes forever.
-Just like GB, the game comes with your house, kitchen and barn set up already so you can jump straight in. I miss having to construct all those things. Then again with the horrible upgrade system, maybe that’s for the best.

And so on, and so forth. I think I’ve devoted more than enough time to these explanations. To be fair there are a few things I did like, like the stuff I’ve already mentioned, and the graphics and the calm music, but they were few and far between, and not enough to override the negatives.

Harvest Moon Twin Villages – I don’t like it

25.11.10 / Harvest Moon, Japanese, Marvelous, Nintendo DS, Simulation game, Video game / Author: / Comments: (12)
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Yes it’s strange, isn’t it? Before the game came out I posted about how excited I was and how I couldn’t wait for the game to come out, blah blah blah. Then once it came out, I made one first post and then…nothing. And if someone hadn’t commented asking me about it, it would have stayed as nothing because, quite frankly, I didn’t like the game.

Well, so why didn’t I post saying so? First of all, it was hard for me to admit to myself that a game in one of my all-time favorite series, and a game I’d been looking forward to for so long, actually kind of sucked. I played the game for about 5 in-game years, longer than I’ve played most other HMs, because I was waiting and hoping that it would suddenly get interesting, that the light would suddenly go on in my head and I’d fall in love with it. When that didn’t happen, I decided to go for plan B: stop playing the game for several months, start all over again and see if you can discover the missing magic. That’s what I was working on when I was asked to comment, so if I do play Twin Villages again and suddenly like it, I’ll be sure to post about it.

Now the second, and equally valid reason why I haven’t posted about this earlier is: the game isn’t that bad. ‘Cos you know, if you hate a game, the words just flow off your keyboard, you can’t wait to bash it. If you love it, it’s the same, you can’t say enough good things about it. But if it’s merely average, or in this case rather less than average, it’s like…okay…what do I say…should I even bother? Does it deserve my time? Let me just move on and play something better, etc, etc. So I’ll put this out there from the start: Harvest Moon Twin Villages is not a terrible game. It’s just boring, repetitive, predictable and uninspired.

Before I go into the details, I’ll just mention the one thing I did like, and that was the ability to farm in rows. See the way the land is shaped in the pictures up there? By pressing and holding a button (I think it was A?) when you’re tilling your field, you can plant your crops in a row instead of on individual spots. What that means is that when you water one plant in the row, you water all of them as far as the water in your can will allow. This saves a lot of time and effort when watering. Plus it looks really cool. In the same way if you stick a bottle of fertilizer into your field, it affects all the crops in the row instead of just those in the immediate squares. I really liked that innovation, it made farming a whole lot easier.

Now for everything I didn’t like. And there’s a lot of it. In order not to make this a huge block of text, I broke them up into four main divisions: Boring, Random & Restrictive and Repetitive. There’ll be some overlap between the four, which is why I put Random and Restrictive together, but in general that’s how I saw things.

Random and Restrictive

1. How you progress the story – The story behind this game is that two villages, Bluebell and Konohana, are at loggerheads with each other (except not really, they’re actually quite friendly). As a result, the Harvest Goddess got angry at the bickering several years ago and blocked up the tunnel under the hill that they used to go back and forth. Now she wants you to get everyone back together and happy again and to reopen the tunnel. (If you’ve played Rune Factory 3, this reunion mission might sound vaguely familiar). Fine, okay.

Unfortunately, the only way you can get the villages together again is by winning a series of cooking contests which are held a few times a month. After you bring them together enough, the local engineer Airin decides to reopen the tunnel, which she only does in stages every couple of months or so, whenever she feels like it. So the story can only progress in a very specific way at very specific times, and if you miss those moments, you have to wait even longer to get anywhere. Alrighty then.

2. Winning the cooking festival – What got my goat, then, was that winning the festival wasn’t up to your own skill. It was largely based on luck. You compete in the festival in randomly chosen teams of three. One week you, Ayame and Chihiro go up, the next week it’s you, Gonbei and Kiriku, etc. You can’t control who’s going to be on your team and you can’t control the quality of the food they’re going to present. So you can spend the whole month lovingly growing and tending your crops to grow the best vegetables you can, raising your animals’ love levels so they give the best milk and eggs. Prepare lovely tasty dishes that Pierre will simply adore. Present them. Then Mao or someone else will present some burnt crap, ruin your score and let the other village win, just like that. You still build some village rapport when you lose, but it slows you down a lot, not to mention pisses you right off.

Shenlow, the lazy blacksmith with the panda fetish

3. What upgrades you get – This is the big one, which probably did the most to spoil this game for me. In most Harvest Moon games, there’s a lumberjack or whatever you call him. When you have enough lumber/material and money to upgrade something on your farm, you go see him and you upgrade, simple. Additionally, there might be quests to do in the beginning to get the fishing rod, hoe, axe, etc, once you have them you can usually upgrade them whenever you’re ready. Cool.

Not so in Twin Villages. There’s a quest board available and if you want an upgrade to your farm or to a tool, you have to check the message board at the beginning of the month. Find the upgrade quests Airin and Shenlow have posted. Go see them and they’ll let you pick ONE upgrade you want done, even if you can afford 2000 upgrades. You pay up, have that upgrade done, and then you have to wait (im)patiently until the next month to get another chance to pick another upgrade. Just one. And you can’t get makers (cheese, wool, etc) until you’ve upgraded a certain number of times, which slows your progress even further.

Accordingly, both your facilities and your farming/ranching tools only grow very, very slowly, leaving you steaming and fuming for the rest of the month. I know they did it to extend the longevity of the game, but instead it just feels like forced and senseless slowdown and makes Airin and Shenlow look like the laziest <bleeping> pieces of <bleep> in Harvest Moon history. What in the world are they doing for the rest of the month?

3b. While I’m on the subject of restrictiveness, the game makes things even harder by specifying certain levels of items you can use. In the beginning any kind of stone or lumber will do, but later on Shenlow might say he wants only moonstones that are 2.0 stars and above. Oh, too bad you can’t mine them. And don’t bother jumping in the waterfall either, anything you get (at a much lower drop rate than Grand Bazaar), will never be more than 0.5 stars. Your only hope is to try your bad luck in the intervillage tunnel once you’ve opened it up fully, and such high level ores don’t appear until the 4TH YEAR of game play. Yes, you read that right. Fake longevity, anyone?

4. What seeds/items are available for sale -Yes, the pain doesn’t end there. Twin Villages also randomizes the items available in the general store (the one run by the Mexican siblings) and the seed store run by Gonbei. Let’s say you want to plant some cucumbers at the beginning of the spring. Unfortunately you don’t have any cucumber seeds left over from last season, or you haven’t gotten the seed maker yet ‘cos Shenlow and Airin are…no comment. So, full of hope, you run down and check Gonbei’s store, but he only sells 3 random types of seed every day. No cucumbers for you today. Today it’s turnips, potatoes and cabbages. No problem, I’ll come back tomorrow. Nope, no cucumbers for you then. Okay, next day. Oh no, he’s not open that day. Next day, holiday. Next day, still no cucumbers for sale. Want some turnips? Next day, it’s raining so he’s not open. It can be days before you finally get those cucumbers to plant, by which time you’ve probably filled your field with something else.

The same goes for the general store. They do keep feed for your pets in stock regularly, but that’s about it. It can take ages for you to find rice on sale, or oil on sale, or curry on sale, or flour. These things all go bad sooner or later in your storehouse, so you can’t just buy 99 of each every time and hang on to them. You have no idea how frustrating it is to want to make a recipe in time for the cooking contest or just for fun and neither store in Bluebell or Konohana will stock the one item you need to make it. I mean, at least for the seed store you eventually get a seed maker, but you never get an oil press or a curry maker so it’s just Graaaaargh!!!

5. Random store closings – Oh, you thought that was all? Guess what, not only are the storekeepers flighty enough to stock only what they feel like stocking, but they’re also lazy enough to close up shop all day when it rains. Even if it’s not their day off, they just don’t work when it rains, full stop. When you couple that with their weekly day-offs, the festival closings and the just-documented difficulty in finding a particular item in the stores, you can see just how annoying it can get. Maybe Marvelous was trying to promote ‘strategic’ gameplay, or maybe they were trying to keep an element of surprise in your day-to-day affairs. I don’t know. All I know is, I hated those storekeepers so, so much. So much.

Okay, this post is getting a bit too long. I’ll rant about the other things next time. Or maybe I won’t and this is representative enough of why I had a poor time with this game. I wanted to like it, but it didn’t want to be liked by me. Oh well.

Harvest Moon Twin Villages: Marriage candidates 1

02.11.10 / Harvest Moon, Japanese, Marvelous, Romance game, Simulation game, Video game / Author: / Comments: (0)
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As I said in an earlier post, I’m assuming Marvelous is going with 4 marriage candidates each for its main characters. Unless they announce any more, it looks like it’ll be 2 girls each from Bluebell and Konohana, and 2 guys each from Bluebell and Konohana. Of course I could be wrong… Anyway, time to compile the details I have so far on the potential partners from Bluebell.

GUYS

Ash (アーシェ)“He runs a rival farm. He’s always kind to everyone because he believes it’s a man’s duty to protect weak people and small things. As such he’s especially kind to  women, children and elderly people.” He looks and sounds pretty boring and generic to me. Next!

Camille (カミル)

“A quiet guy, doesn’t talk much about himself. Has a great sense for flower design (?) and stuff along those lines. His dream is to someday win a  flower arranging contest (!). Likes cats.” Okay, not to perpetuate stereotypes or anything, but that doesn’t sound very manly to me. Flower arranging!? He’s even called “Camille!”

GIRLS

Lia (リア)

I’ve also seen the name romanized as Leah, but I think Lia is cuter. “She’s very popular in the village because she’s cheerful, considerate and organized. She likes to make tea and candy. She wants to open a shop in the city one day so that people can enjoy the sweets and tea she makes.” Not bad, not bad. She’s a bit bland, but not bad.

Raspberry (ラスベリー)

“Blunt, lighthearted, doesn’t discriminate against anyone. She’s usually optimistic, but she does get depressed sometimes. She can also be quick-tempered. She moved to this village as a child, but she still has the accent from her hometown.” Kyoooot! Even her name is cute, and I like her design and outfits. Looks like I’m playing as a boy this time round. Based on the one screenshot they showed of her, it looks like she speaks in a Kansai accent.

Looking good, Marvelous! Keep me posted!

Harvest Moon: Twin Villages – First thoughts

02.11.10 / Harvest Moon, Japanese, Marvelous, Romance game, Simulation game, Video game / Author: / Comments: (3)
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I’ve shelved TMGS3 for the time being while I decide which guy to go for next. I’m very satisfied after dating Konno-senpai, so to throw myself back in the dating game for an inferior guy is like, hmm… But I get the feeling Shitara’s route will be all kinds of awesome, so maybe I’ll do that. Thanks to all who wrote about how to change the picture on my desk. I thought for sure Fujiyama was stalking me, *brrr!*

Right now I’m playing Harvest Moon: Twin Villages (a.k.a Bokujou Monogatari: Futago no Mura)! I used to really love Harvest Moon games, but most of the recent ones have been iffy-to-okay, not great. Sunshine Islands would have been great if I hadn’t played it right after Island of Happiness. The similarities between the two made SI feel very stale and unoriginal. In the same way there are a lot of similarities between Twin Villages and Grand Bazaar, particularly in terms of the art style and controls, so it lacks a bit of freshness.

As far as the story goes, there are two villages you can live in: Bluebell Village and Konohana Village. Hundreds of years ago the two mayors had a falling out and the two villages have theoretically been on bad terms ever since. Theoretically. I came into the game expecting some real rivalry and hostility between the two villages, but everyone’s actually really friendly. Even the two mayors have more of a friendly rivalry, they say the funniest things when they compete in the cooking contest (taking part in which is the only way to reunite the villages, go figure). Plus you can go to any of the villages any time you want, shop there all you want, do quests for the other villagers, talk to people, you might even be able to woo the girls on the other side with no real consequences, and basically have a good time with no restrictions.

Furthermore, Bluebell is supposed to be the “ranching” village and Konohana the “farming” village, but you can start keeping cows and chickens in Konohana right away, and I’m pretty sure you can grow crops in Bluebell too. What that means is that apart from the decor, there’s not much to choose between the two. Even better, you can up and move to the other village between the 23rd and the 30th of every season if you want. I’m yet to figure out why this would be a good idea when you can travel there any time, but this is more evidence that the rivalry is practically non-existent.

As far as the game itself goes, I’m only on Year 1 Spring 26, so I don’t want to come down too hard on it just yet. I’ll limit myself to two complaints for now: One, the map is rubbish. Remember the map from Sunshine Islands, how you could see where everyone was with one glance? In Rune Factory 3 the map even tracked movements, which was really convenient. Yeah, well, say goodbye to all that. Twin Villages’ map is awful and lacks a lot of detail. You can only see where your character is at any point in time, nobody else. You get a slightly more in-depth map when you’re in town, but when you’re exploring the mountains and other places, tough luck. It wasn’t so bad in Grand Bazaar because there weren’t that many places to go, but in Twin Villages it’s extremely annoying.

Second complaint, time still moves way too slowly. They brought back that system from Grand Bazaar where if you water the crops twice a day they grow faster, but the minutes pass so slowly that you’ll be done with all your watering, foraging and quests with game-hours to spare. Luckily I learned my lesson in the last game, so I don’t chase those extra days, I just go to bed. Unfortunately the time affects other things, particularly festivals. Most of them start in the afternoon, so you might have to wait up to five real-time minutes to progress with the game if you’re taking part in one. It sounds short, but there’s nothing to DO while you’re waiting, so you’re just sitting there staring at the screen…staring…staring…starinZzZzZz…

But still, I just started. After having to eat crow on my initial Atelier Lina review, I’m going to be as optimistic as possible about this game until I’ve finished at least one year. I’ll write a second post on the game then.

Read follow-up post here.

Harvest Moon: Island of Happiness

02.11.10 / Harvest Moon, Marvelous, Romance game, Simulation game, Video game / Author: / Comments: (0)
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I’m doing  a replay of this game, ever since I gave up on it back when it first came out, out of boredom. I’ve made it to Winter 1 and now I’m rediscovering why I quit the first time. Winter is boring! I’d forgotten how boring because the most recent HM games I played, RF2 and 3, had winter farming and lots of other stuff to do. In IoH it’s wake up, feed animals, wrangle wonderfuls out of Chen, mine if I want, sleep. Repeat. And repeat. And repeat.

Mining is kinda fun though, and this time round I definitely want to get married so I’m toughing things out. My goal now is to make a ton of money in the mines this season, buy as many town upgrades as I can in spring, get married, have a kid and then put at end to the game. I hate having unfinished business.

You might be wondering what’s happening with the more recent games I’ve been playing (Saga 2 DS, DQIX) and why I’m playing old stuff over them. Well, I’m wondering that myself. I guess it’s just the case that sometimes the old, familiar game is more fun to play than the newer, drier ones. But I’ll get back to them eventually.

New Year’s game resolutions

02.11.10 / Namco, PS2, RPG, Video game / Author: / Comments Off
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[Obviously an old post (3rd January 2010), now appearing here because of site crash and recovery. Happily enough I managed to play every single one of these games]

Finally finished Xenosaga III, and with it the whole series. I thoroughly enjoyed the gameplay in all three games, even the undoubtedly inferior II. I also liked most of the characters, except that stubborn, idiotic, moronic Shion. People talk about how fresh it is to have a female character as the lead, but Shion only makes girls look bad, being dumb, weak-willed, dishonest, helpless, only finding meaning in and being redeemed by the males in her life (Kevin, Allen, Jin). But apart from her I enjoyed all the other characters, especially chaos. Throughout the series I was hoping he had a really unique backstory and interesting powers, but we find out everything about him in the last 30 minutes of the entire series and it’s not that interesting either, so…yeah. I learned a lot more about him from reading wikis than I ever did from the game itself. That’s the sure sign of bad writing and an overly-complicated plot.

Real life kept me from playing a lot of games last year, so I’m going to be much less ambitious in my gaming plans this year. There are only a few major games I want to finish, and then I’ll leave the rest to chance, or to whenever something I just *have* to play comes out. Here’s what I want to get done, ASAP:

1. Saga 2. I just killed Apollo, I think I have just one more boss to go.

2. Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey – I’ve had it for a while but I haven’t even started it yet.

3. Harvest Moon: Twin Villages. When it comes out, I’m gonna be all over it!

4. Digital Devil Saga 1 and 2: Almost done with 1, I just went back to kill a few side-bosses and now they’re kicking my ass.

5. Angelique Special 2: Old game for PSX, but it’s been on my mind lately.

6. Dragon Quest 9: I’m a few levels into this. It’s interesting, but not especially gripping. But I’ll get to it sometime.

7. Atelier Lina: Lise and Annie were pretty much fail as far as I’m concerned, so I haven’t been in a hurry to get to this one. I wish they’d go back to the pure alchemy-centrism of the older games.

If I manage to finish just these by the end of the year, it’ll be enough for me. Yeah, I’m that busy.

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