Moonlight Basket is a trading simulation game from inutoneko, an indie game company whose library I have been steadily working through for the past couple of years. Tico, the mean and lazy alchemist from Lemuore no Renkinjutsushi, is still up to her no-good profligate ways and now has to resort to trading goods from town to town to make ends meet.

The core gameplay is simple. You buy goods in one town and sell them in another where there’s higher demand. The continent is divided into different climate zones. Forest, desert, plains, that sort of thing. What grows well in the desert might be unavailable in the forest, so if you can truck a cartload of forest goods over there you can count on a huge profit. That’s the general idea.

If she has the MP to spare, Tico can squeeze more profit out of the goods by refining raw materials into better goods. Paper into notebooks, cloth into carpets, milk into cheese, water into wine (don’t question alchemy). Sometimes the items can be refined even further, like notebooks into diaries, but whether the time and MP costs are worth it is varies from case to case. Long story short, Moonlight Basket boils down to identifying demands and meeting those demands.

There are just two little problems you have to deal with. The first is the horse and cart you need to transport your goods. The more goods you can carry and the faster you can deliver them, the more money you make. Many items are perishable so time is of the essence. Once you buy a horse, you can upgrade it, but every upgrade reduces the amount of goods the cart can carry. They’re more like downgrades, TBH, but sometimes you want to go a bit faster or explore more easily so you have no choice.

Ideally you should go for a really good horse in the first place, but the better horses are EXPENSIVE! And can only be bought at certain times of the year from a few cities. There’s a breeding option where you can buy horses from one town and breed them with others until you get your ideal horse, but first you have to pay out the nose for both the parents ($$) and the offspring ($$$$$$$$$$$!). It’s only now after 69 hours (eh?! really?) of playing that I can afford to play Mr. Fancy Horse Breeder.

Once you’ve got your horse and cart sorted out, you have to deal with the second problem: security. The continent of Ishwald is ridden with monsters and bandits that have a good nose for treasure. The more expensive your goods, the stronger the monsters that attack. You need bodyguards…. Actually you shouldn’t need bodyguards because Tico and her slave/apprentice Ruvel are plenty strong already, but neither of them want to fight so yeah, you need bodyguards. Bodyguards that join you readily are weak. Stronger ones make you jump through a ton of hoops before they join.

The good news is bodyguards are free once they decide to join you. The bad news is you have to provide their equipment yourself. The absolutely terrible news is that you have to sell 100 copies of any one weapon before you’re allowed to equip it on your guards. And you can’t equip the same weapon on different party members either. For example even though both Fill and Shio use swords, if you sell 100 Wyvern Swords you can only give one of them a Wyvern Sword, the other will have to keep using that pointy stick until you sell another 100 of a different kind of sword.

It’s even worse than that, though. Party members’ stats level up as they fight. They have a level cap that depends on the power of the weapons they wield, so you can’t just equip them with weak stuff and try to compensate with levels. Not only that, but for anything but the weakest weapons, you have to forage the materials yourself, give them to blacksmiths around the country, return the next season and buy them ($$$$$) and move to a different area to trade them before you can rack your sale count up enough to be worthy of equipping the weapon. Oh, and if you wait too long to buy the weapon, the smith will sell it to another customer and you’ll have to start all over again from step one. See why I said the game has “too many limitations” in the post title? I haven’t even gotten into the convoluted skill system yet.

If you want a break from all the trading and breeding and fighting, there are a few other things you can do. Farming, dungeon crawling, battle tournaments, playing doctor at local clinics, etc. However, like all the other stuff in this game, you can only do all these things at particular times and particular locations. Planting and harvesting can only be done in March, June and September and you have to supply your own water, seeds and fertilizer. Which means you’ll regularly have to dump all your valuable goods to truck 100KG of water halfway across the content so you can get a few herbs 3 months down the line. So many limitations!

And yet… 69 hours… Where did the time go? For the past 10 hours I’ve been working on a goal of earning 1,000,000£. I thought it would be impossible, but I’m already up to 500,000£ now. I put it in all 5-year bonds at an 11.47% interest rate while I try to earn the rest of the money. Ah, if only real world interest rates were that delicious.

What’s keeping me playing Moonlight Basket despite all the inconveniences? MONEY. I like making game money. Also pure laziness. Everything works with a few simple mouse clicks and all the battles are automatic. The relative lack of a story and any character interactions means I can focus on my goals. Also I’m not a collectionist, but I do enjoy discovering and synthesizing new items. Oh, and making in-game money is fun too. I’m saying it twice ‘cos I mean it. Although, come to think of it… if I had applied those 69 hours to a $10-an-hour job… It’s better not to think about it.

Well, enough about Moonlight Basket. It’s the only thing I’ve played seriously for the past couple of weeks because I’m dealing with real life “stuff” that leaves me no time for “proper” games. Like Tokyo Xanadu eX+ which I started but had to shelve because the various commands take up too much mental space. Plus the enemy density is too low to provide the catharsis I crave. Too much walky-talky, not enough slashy-stabby. But I did like the little slashy-stabby that I played, so I look forward to playing it when I have the time and energy to spare. Okay, that’s enough blogging for one day. Time for a break!