• she/her

Victoria Rose | Bi trans girl | Game/UX Designer | Creator of Secret Little Haven | Your local otherkin cartoon snep kitty :3



QuestForTori
@QuestForTori

I'm going back to play Harvest Moon: Another Wonderful Life and More Friends of Mineral Town in hopes of doing a link-up playthrough, but this is the most I've played of a HM game released before HMDS, and wow it is making me miss the nice quality of life features of even just that game.

AWL/AnWL does away with the shipping crate mechanic, forcing you to hold onto all your crops and foraging items until a traveling merchant shows up in your town, and only then can you sell each item in your rucksack individually. Thankfully, the rucksack size is pretty big, and items inside can stack, so you don't have to spend weeks on end unable to do anything because your bag is full. Still, it's a real pain to have to sell stuff individually this way compared to nearly every other entry in the genre. Plus, these games introduce a hunger mechanic in addition to the still-extant stamina mechanic. Both are similar in function, providing a hard limit to what you're able to do in a day. However, hunger does not automatically reset after each day. So (at least in the early game) you'll need to dedicate time every day to hunt down the few well-hidden wild edible plants that spawned in that day to sustain yourself, in addition to the milk from your cow, making sure to save the scraps to feed your dog as well. Finally, it's possible to buy out-of-season seeds at any time. They'll still sprout, but they'll just disappear overnight with no other player feedback. So if you're just starting out and not paying much attention at first, you could totally fuck yourself over and paint yourself into a corner where the best way out is just to erase your save and start over. This does succeed in making it feel like you're living off the land, barely surviving until you're able to gain a foothold and learn the lay of the land, but wow does it do nothing at all to ease you into things.

FoMT/MFoMT is a bit more forgiving in its farming mechanics - keeping the shipping bin, keeping seed availability to match the seasons, and giving you way more options to restore your stamina, but it hamstrings you with what may be the smallest starting rucksack size of any HM game at a whopping TWO item spaces. And it does not stack. You can carry one last additional item, but you damn well better be on your way to sell or gift it because you can't do much of anything else while holding an item that isn't getting rid of it. This makes you basically chained to the shipping box in the early game until you can afford the first rucksack upgrade, which still doesn't give you that much extra space. This change alone makes the game feel way more limited than it should, and discourages me from exploring the world since I'm always worried about not optimizing my time to optimize my trips back to the shipping box. God, and that's not to mention the weird input contortions that you need to learn for basic actions like swapping tools or held items (Which themselves use inverse A/B button prompts than AWL which makes a linked playthrough miserable on your muscle memory). The L button is treated like a modifier button for other inputs to perform all but the basics, so it's important to keep the game manual on you until you have them all memorized. Now, I don't blame the game itself on this, and I think it's probably one of the better solutions you could make for the limited buttons on the GBA, but at the very least, combining the rucksack and tool space to use a single pool and relegate lesser-used functions like whistling for your horse or dog to an item would have gone a long way to make more logical use of those buttons.

I'm going to try and keep going with both games to push past the early game and see what lies beyond it, because I'm curious about how they evolve over time, especially the apparently-huge timespan of AWL... but wow a lot of the time I just wish I could play HMDS instead >.>


QuestForTori
@QuestForTori

Now HMDS has a mountain of its own problems, most especially being one of the most egregious examples of the HM tendency to gate mid/endgame progress behind some truly ridiculous and tedious tasks. You can't get married in that game until you get the majority of the harvest sprites, and what do you do to get them? Doing insane shit like catching 50,000 fish, of course!

HMDS may be my personal favorite due to nostalgia but WOW is it ever in need of a redesign.


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