I first played Shepherd’s Crossing 2 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 quite 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 Shepherd’s Crossing 2 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 2 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!