Harvest Moon and Xenosaga

[cuddlefish]

I finished my first playthrough of Harvest Moon. It WAS fun, because the whole series is fun, but there were several disappointments and places where I missed reality. First was not being able to get married. Because the game takes place over the course of one year, there isn't enough time to get married and have kids. Instead they have nine different endings, some of which do show one of the girls falling in love with your character. So there is some replay value, though I only plan on playing through it once or twice---most of the endings are too hard or not interesting to me. (I really liked the ending I got, though.)

Another thing was the animals getting sick. Like I said in my last entry, one of my chickens got sick and died, and at first I didn't know why. I didn't even know she was sick because I didn't know how to check up on animals by pressing the select button. It doesn't say anything about this in the manual, I had to read that in an FAQ online, which is already a bad sign. And then the chicken died because I wasn't putting the food in the right feed box. Would labeling the feed boxes stop a chicken from eating in real life? I don't think so. Did they want me to be able to starve a single chicken while letting the rest live? I don't know. It was weird and I don't know why they had to do it that way.

The other animal death was my dog. Now, you can only have one dog in this game, so if my dog were to actually die, I'd be in a fix this game apparently does not want to put me in. So instead of my dog dying, one day I woke up and Gwen (an animal-loving character) was standing outside my house, and she said she'd sensed that my dog was sick and given him some animal medicine. I'd checked my dog the day before, and he was fine, which means that suddenly, and for no reason that I knew, my dog was sick unto death. That was surprising coming from a game that takes so much care to make me love its little polygon animals. It was also frustrating considering I live with a dog and I rather like her. I don't like to see dogs sick or dying, and I don't know why some stupid game had to show me that for a reason I still don't know.

So I played Harvest Moon, but there were some problems and I don't plan on playing it any more. I've moved on to Xenosaga. I've played through the first hour or so, and so far I like Allen ♥ but I don't really like Shion. She's good at her dangerous job in a safe, adorable way. I hope this improves.

Comments

[moumusu.livejournal.com]

I hope she gets into more danger and has more opportunity to make mistakes. I kind of want to see her make mistakes.