Harvest Moon Twin Villages – I don’t like it

Yes it’s strange, isn’t it? Before Bokujou Monogatari: Futago no Mura 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 Harvest Moon games, 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 Harvest Moon: 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, but 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.

Radiant Historia – Follow up

As a follow up from yesterday, I did play a little further in Radiant Historia, and I can confirm that Character XYZ who dies in timeline A is still alive and well even after timeline B passes A. This is all around Chapter 4 of the game, for those who are playing along. In other words that whole line the game feeds you about characters dying in both when they die in one is a big fat lie. Either that, or the power of the timeline fades in comparison to the almighty Plot Armor skills.

It’s possible they’ll explain why this was so later on in the game, but I still feel gypped. These writers don’t have their heads on straight.

Radiant Historia – Paradoxes strike again!

So far, so good. About 19 hours into the game, so I’m probably more than halfway through, but I’ve been playing Radiant Historia really late at night when I’m super sleepy, so half of that time might consist of nodding off, haha.

I’ve learned even more field abilities now that help you to get all sorts of goodies on the field, not to mention you usually can’t pass some arbitrary roadblock in a certain part of the story unless you learn them. What are field abilities? Well in Radiant Historia, it’s stuff like the ability to pull those barrels in the picture over to the rocks on the left and then blow them up to create an opening. It can also be the ability to slash at vines in your way, or to see invisible treasure boxes and barrels.

That last ability was a real treat when I got it, ‘cos I went back to my old haunts and made out like a bandit. Unfortunately there’s a tiny number of locations in this game and a sickening amount of backtracking, so it’s not as exciting as it would normally be. There’s your city Alicetel, Lazvil Hill (dungeon), Alma Mountain(dungeon), Sand Fort, the roads to and from it (dungeon), Granorg, some pointless village whose name I can’t remember, and Celestia, village of the Saturos. Only that, in 19 hours of playing. And I thought Ar Tonelico 2 was bad. Well, at least Radiant Historia has the excuse that it’s on the DS.

Oh, I got some new party members too: Ath, some huge guy whose name I shockingly can’t remember (hold on while I check…ah, Gafka). And one other spoiler character whose name I won’t mention. Okay fine, it’s Elca. It’s not that big a spoiler, I guess. I’ve had them for a while, and the same thing happens to them as happens to Rainey and Marco – when they level up in one timeline, they automatically get stronger in the next one. This is because, as I said in my first RH post, what happens to them in one line directly affects them in the other one, if they die in one, they die in the other. This actually spoils part of the story in-game, when certain characters are missing, presumed dead in one line, but are just fine in the other, so you know they’re not really dead. All well and rational, right?

NOT! Those cheating writers, they’re giving favoritism to certain characters! XYZ just died in timeline A, why is XYZ still perfectly fine in timeline B? No fair! The only explanation I can think of is that you’d progressed a little further in A than in B, but in that case if you progress with B without fixing A, XYZ should drop dead pretty quickly. I’ll progress a little further tonight and what tell you happens when I get there (as if those nepotistic writers will let that happen).

Radiant Historia – Battle system

Ideally I would have liked to make a video to demonstrate the system, but that would take too long (i.e. I can’t do it), so I’ll just briefly describe what Radiant Historia‘s battle system is like.

Firstly, it’s really just a normal turn-based system. You can field up to three party members at a time, and apparently you can switch them out but I’ve never had to yet you can’t switch them out so be careful when choosing your party. If you’ve played FFX or Nostalgia, you know what it’s like to have the characters moving according to their speed, with little icons showing who goes first and who goes next. If you manage to chain your allies’ attacks in a row, you get more EXP and money at the end of the battle.

But what do you do if the enemies’ turns interrupt yours? Well, then you can use the Change command to switch places with an enemy. Again I haven’t experimented much with this, but my few experiments show that the gains are not that big in a regular battle, and since the Change command leaves your party member highly vulnerable to attacks for a while, it’s dangerous to try in a boss battle. I’m thinking of trying it again when my characters are a little stronger, right now they’re only level 20.

Now, do you see those dots on the picture above? The enemies are arranged on the battle map in a 3×3 grid, with most enemies taking up one spot and a few larger ones taking up several. I’ve seen up to 6 enemies appearing at once. On that grid, they can move forward, back, left, etc. The closer they are to your party, the more damage they do but the more damage they take as well, and vice-versa the further away they go. Magicians and projectile-users don’t have such a handicap.

So what do you do when an enemy’s right in your face killing ur doodz (easy game is easy, but let’s just assume)? In this game, you have attacks that can change the enemy’s place on the map. Just use your “push” attack to knock him back on the map! Or use the “pull grapple” attack to pull that pesky bowman closer so you can knock his block off!

It gets even better, though. Attacks in this game don’t affect enemies per se, rather they attack the spot the enemy is standing on. What I mean is, if you use your push/pull/left/right attacks to get two or more enemies to stand on the same space, subsequent chain attacks by your allies will hit all two/three/four enemies. You can even knock enemy A into enemy B, then pull both of them together onto enemy C’s space before whacking all three with your best magic! Sweet!

It ain’t all sunshine and roses though. Let’s see, how do I describe this? Has anyone ever played Lufia and the Fortress of Doom? No, not the super-famous Lufia 2 that just got a DS remake, I’m talking about the first Lufia game. It’s one of the first RPGs I played on my own so I have very fond memories of it but damn, the battle system was stooopid. You entered all your commands at the beginning of a turn, then even if the enemy targeted was dead, the characters would still run up and slash at the empty space instead of picking another target!

Well, fine, Lufia 1 was released in 1993, 17 years ago. Radiant Historia was released just last week! Why the <bleep> do they do the same thing?! I’m talking about the chain attacks. If Stock attacks an enemy and kills it, why the <bleep> do Rainey and Marco follow up and hit it too? Sure it’ll break the chain, but shouldn’t any character with a lick of sense go for the next enemy?! You don’t get overkill bonuses in this game either and as I said the extra EXP isn’t worth it, so this is realllllly annoying! Argh! Stupid, stupid, stupid!

Still, as I said, the battles are really easy so far. Either your level is high enough and you walk all over the enemies, or your level isn’t high enough so you spend some time grinding or moving the other timeline’s story forward instead. I’m only 8 hours in because I’ve been playing TokiMemo Girl’s Side 3 (Aizawa route), but it’s still on rails. Fun rails though, I’m having a good time. Later!

Radiant Historia – First Impressions

I’m about 5 hours into Radiant Historia so far and it’s not bad at all. Of course, seeing as even short RPGs these days go for over 30 hours, 5 hours is pretty much nothing, but I’m liking it so far. I stayed up till 5am playing it last night. The thing about a game like this, though, is that no matter how good the music and battle system are, the story can ruin the whole game completely if it’s not done right. I’m thinking Chrono Cross and FF8 (ooh, but I love that game) for starters, but I can think of more examples.

So, the story. You live on a continent that is gradually turning into desert. Two countries, Alicetel and Granorg, are at war over the remaining fertile land and resources. You play the part of Stock, an Alicetel soldier who comes into possession of the White Chronicle, a book that lets you go back into the past and change events. Guided by two mysterious twins, you embark on a journey to restore history to the way it should be. Once you find out there’s an evil party using the Black Chronicle to mess up history, it’s up to you to go back and forth across time and dimensions and set right what went wrong.

Okay, so far so good. But what’s a time/dimension travel story without gigantic plotholes? It’s only been 5 hours and I’ve already spotted one. See, the very first time you use your powers is to go back in time and save your teammates Marco and Rainey from death, right? At that time you’re gravely injured, and the injury doesn’t go away even when you go back in time. The twins explain that this is because “your time” is different from “the world’s time“. If you get hurt or killed, it affects you, not “the world”, so it won’t go away. That’s why if you die, you’re dead and you can’t go back and change that. Cool, awesome, makes sense.

But! Once you use your powers to bring back your teammates and keep playing, you discover that they have “their time” as well. If their level goes up or their HP goes down in a particular dimension, when you travel to the other one, they still keep their new level/status/abilities. But if they do have “their time“, how come you were able to save them from the dead? And if they don’t have “their time“, then they count as part of “The World”, which means they shouldn’t be able to travel back and forth with you in their current states. When you go back to the old timeline, they should revert to their lower levels and states, right?

And isn’t it funny how they never remark on it? Like, “wait, weren’t we at point so-and-so 5 minutes ago? How did we get halfway across the world in a few seconds? And why do I suddenly have all these new abilities?” Unless it’s a different Rainey and Marco in the old timeline, in which case how do they have the same levels and equipment? Or maybe the process of crossing over affects their memories too so they think they always were like that? Phew, I’m giving myself a headache just thinking about it. Maybe it’ll be explained later on, I’ve still got a long way to go.

Another thing about this time/dimension traveling stuff. It’s way too limited. I mean, yeah, they couldn’t just let you hop back and forth whenever you want. That would be too much for any programmer to handle. As it is right now, however, the story is largely on rails. You take 10 steps forward in Path A and realize you’re supposed to meet Character A but he’s dead in this timeline. So you go to Path B, prevent Character A’s death, and when you go back to Path A, he’s alive again and the story can go on. Because somehow the Character A in both worlds is one and the same person and yet somehow they’re not, so if A dies in one world he also dies in another. Unless he’s on your team, then he’s perfectly fine. The game’s quirky like that.

I’m liking the art, the character designs and the music so far and trying to keep an open mind about the story. I was going to post about the battle system as well, but I did stay up till 5am so I’m tired. Maybe tomorrow, we’ll see.