Farming and Nostalgia

[Chris]

^ Harvest Moon in a nutshell.

To save you a lot of reading, TL;DR: Chris is really high off nostalgia and made a few paragraphs explaining the mechanics of Harvest Moon: Friends of Mineral Town and Harvest Moon: Back To Nature. But if you want to read this, go ahead, I won't stop you.

Seriously. I fucking loved Harvest Moon growing up, and I still do. In fact, recently I decided to replay Harvest Moon: Friends of Mineral Town and I've gotten so high on nostalgia that I feel like I'm six again... Oh, how I used to run around town and buy the seeds, plant them at le Chris Ranch, and then watch them grow... God I love Harvest Moon. For those of you who don't know, in Harvest Moon: FoMT you take control of Pete, a young man who inherited a farm from an old man he befriended as a child. You have to restore the farm, befriend the people, and get a wife. It's actually a port of a PlayStation game which had (basically) the same plot, called Harvest Moon: Back To Nature. One of the biggest differences is that the latter has a time limit; if you can't turn your farm into the second Eden, befriend a bunch of people, and get a wife in three years, you'll be prevented from playing again.

ANYWAY, the game's biggest gameplay mechanic is farming. You have to use the gold you start out with to buy some seeds, then you plant them and water them for a bit and in about five to eight days you'll get plants. Weather also effects the plants, so if it's sunny you'll need to water them and if it's raining you get to slack off. When I first began, I didn't know what the fuck I was doing, but after a while I got the hang of it.

Another big aspect of the game is friendship and romance. As I said, the player can get married and befriend people. I don't know what benefit befriending them brings, but it's a nice little thing. Anyway, the romance mechanics are simple: Talk to the girl (Or guy in the female version) a lot, give them lots of gifts, and once they have a red heart under their potrait AND you've upgraded your house a lot, you can get a blue feather and propose. BUT BEWARE! If you don't marry the girl in time, then your rival for the girl will marry her! Don't worry, you have to wait 'till Year 4, so it's all good. Here's a list of the bachelorettes:
Elli (Chris' favorite), Popuri, Karen, Maria, and Ann. In the GBA version, you can also romance the Harvest Godess but it's pretty friggin' hard.

*Sigh* Well, I got all the explainging out of the way. Well, the game mainly just consists of your little guy running around and doing this stuff. Yeah.

The end.

[Slasher]

I fucking love Harvest Moon. Even Tree Of Tranquility for the Wii was kickass.

[Chris]

So this video sums up the game pretty well:

[Sent]

That reminds me, I'm thinking of making a farming visual novel where all the plants and things you raise are sentient things with adorable smiley faces, and you have to be friends with them and keep them happy so they'll grow fruits and veggies for you. Eventually, once you get enough money, you'll be given the opportunity to buy adorable cow nekos and raise them for milk, manipulating their bodies with food and hormones and shit and being forced to Grapple with the moral implications of forcing this on another human being.

Eventually, the player will become romantically involved with one of these girls, and they'll make secret plans to run away and live a happy life away from this society that forces them to devour hormones for mere profit.

It would culminate in a tasteful, understated, but climactic and romantic sex scene after a dinner conversation that highlights everything they know and love about each other, and then, right in the middle of it...

The farmer blinks his eyes, and then sees that he's fucking a cow. Not a cow-tsune, not a fat chick, but a four-legged, mooing, bovine animal. He is forced to come to the realization that his government has been drugging him for years, making him live a horribly constructed lie that his sadistic overseer decided to uncover right when he was fucking a cow.

He had no friends, and he never would. He lived a life of isolation to provide for a world that didn't care what happened to him so long as he provided them with food and drink.

He had no life, he never had any accomplishments, "money" was the thinly veiled illusion of rapport, with which he proved his drugged fantasy self was sane enough to safely handle the Syndicate's livestock.

He was nothing, and neither was the cow. It was not his lover, the corn was not his dear compassionate friend. The cow was a dumb fucking animal and the corn was a soulless fucking plant.

Then he'd take a fire extinguisher and hit the cow right behind the head, several times. Knocking it out, snapping it's neck. It was a meaningless death and a meaningless kill, but so was everything else in this cruel disgusting world. Did that cow evet have regrets? Did it have hopes? Dreams? Did it ever want to be something more than a bloated shadow of its evolutionary ancestors eating itself to death and lactating for a calf that had been taken from it months ago to have its brain gored in with a little pole about the width of a marble?

It didn't even care about the calf. It was a dumb fucking animal. He was a dumb fucking animal. He was nothing, and neither was anything else on this god-forsaken, broken planet.

He'd stop eating and drinking any more than was necessary to keep him barely alive, stopped watering his corn, and one dry day he would herd up the rest of his cows, lead them into the corn field, close the gate and light the barren plain of brown dead stalks, and himself, on fire.

From nothing, to nothing, with nothing in between. A shallow lie in the face of a sickening, insurmountable truth. The struggle is now over. Such is life.

Now that'll teach those Weeaboo bastards to fap to random sim dates they downloaded off the internet! Hah!

[Chris]

Well then... Yay.

[Sent]

In other news, Harvest moon is simply an excellent example of gaming wonderfulness.

[Chris]

Indeed.

I'd pay for you to make that, though.

[Sent]

Sure thing!I'll just download the good ol' visual novel maker and... Shit, I forgot the most important part! I can't draw anime! I CAN'T DRAW ANIME! NOOOO!

[Chris]

That exists?

Here, plant the seeds and sell them when the crops are ready. *gives Sent bag of seeds and several tools* Then, you can hire an artist to draw for you!

[Sent]

... But then they'll judge me personally whenever I ask them to draw a cow-neko! They're different from cat nekos, y'know! Unlike cat nekos, they exist only to be fetish-fucked like crazy! If you see a cowtsune, it's always porn! ALWAYS!

[Chris]

Well get good at art! We need that visual novel, it's gonna be funny af!

[Sent]

Somebody as left-brain dominant as I am does not simply "git gud" at art. It's a wonder my profile pictures are even recognizable.