#all that being said: TONS of farm sims have released in the last few years and i have played so very few of them. the genre just exploded.

[ironfloret]

it's almost 2024. you know what that means. fields of mistria release year (tentatively). :) i'm so looking forward to it AGH. nothing new in terms of farm sims since SoSFoMT has impressed me very much....i had my share of fun with olive town but it had so many problems that really bogged it down. and to be frank, AWL bored me to tears despite how excited i was when it was announced. 😭 but FoM looks just so completely up my alley in every conceivable way. feels good to REALLY be looking forward to a game release again. it's been a long time!

[tomyo]

Harvest moon Save the homeland

Going into this game, I knew it had a reputation for being a bit short but ironically that’s something that worked for me in the long run as we reach my desire to play through a crap ton of games in a short span. The concept itself didn’t bother me too much to begin with but compared to even it’s neighboring releases it’s a bit empty and maybe that’s the point.

STH is about a dying population, a common occurrence in japan over that last few decades. And you play as a farmer’s son come to clean out dad’s little land before it all get’s demolished in one year. For once, romance isn’t on the table because you aren’t expected to know anyone long enough for this town to survive (albeit they change that in the remake). At most you can buy chickens and cows but you can’t upgrade the barn, only the house a singular time and grow 4 crops that you can’t even ship, just sell to the other villagers. Your world feels small and where it feels a little bit half done, the other sense is its very intentional. Everything you do in STH feels like what one would expect when you drop into a town you don’t expect to survive.

The concept of what HM was doing at this time feels really interesting in context to be real. Like I said, Japan’s dwindling countryside has been a long standing issue for decades at this point and definitely something starting to come up in the millennium. So HM’s releases at this point are the original old times one, the modernized 64 one where one grandkid want to leave for the city, BTN/FoMT that tries not to dwell on that, and alongside STH, AWL which is also a rural and dying country side that’s aging. While population feels pretty unspecific, the look doesn’t. FoMT has nicer looking buildings in a dense organized spacing while AWl and STH had big pockets of emptiness, no formal community events, and older looking houses. Often the conditions barely meet the expectations of basic living like a kitchen or bathroom with dim lighting yet somehow a TV mattering more to the lost parent. I feel like I can smell these places and the sensation of the humidity clinging to the poorly insulated walls.

STH basically makes the player feel the effects of its story despite how much people complain about it.

Now as for my gameplay; For whatever reason I chose the Goddess Robes route to be my playthrough. I actually didn’t expect it to be easy but in the end it’s a pretty straight forward path that only requires 3k money and handing out free items as gifts to various people. Despite this I’m attempting to raise animals although I keep killing so many chicken. Idk if I’m missing something but they get sick so quickly. Halfway through spring I realized being outside is a part of the health system but at the same time I’m lost to how to efficiently move animals in and out of the barn. At this current point, I’ve reached the goddess thread spinning section and all I really need is to wait out the time. In the mean time I’m trying to earn the 10 house renovation to go through on a further playthrough but my success in farm life is absolutely minimal. Outside of speeding towards an ending, there isn’t much side stuff to do and as I waxed about before, I kind of like it in this case.

Now this is on the list of games I am playing through to eventually reward myself with Hero of Leaf Valley of which I expect to burn through up to 6 in a month and then drastically slow down the more I will likely have to play a 3DS game. Playing through this first has given me a lot of thought into what girl I would eventually want to marry in that one and I hate to admit I’m being drawn towards Katie. Narratively, I think she works best towards a ‘true girl’ story most dating sims have some form of. She is the grandduaughter to a man who loved your grandmother and wants to perfect her baking recipe to save the town she acts like she hates. It weaves nicely between change and preservation like the story of the village itself. I’m hoping though I will eventually be drawn to either Auriela or Alice instead.

I keep fearing preemptively posting these write ups before I truly finish the game but at the same time, I am hoping I could finish a playthrough in two or three more play sessions. There is almost certainly the possibility I could just sleep to the end, however I’d prefer to do some things rewarding to me in order to feel fulfilled from the game. Because of that, the house upgrade is a part of my personal completion goal and one I don’t think will be too hard to reach if I just keep a routine of watering my plants and animal care.

After this I think it’s AWL SE