Autumn, the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, has arrived in Stardew Valley

I want to play Stardew Valley all the time, but I don’t have all the time to play Stardew Valley. Yup, it’s a double-edged sword. Or perhaps a tilling grub hoe would work better in this instance. Anyways, I’ll do my best to explain.

Stardew Valley is capable of devouring hours of your life. In your mind, you might think that this is the sort of game you can sit down and play for a little bit and then stop. That is false. Oh so wrong. It is amazingly difficult, at least for me, to not continue into a new day after the rooster crows and I check the TV for the weather report, my fortune, and if any new kitchen recipes are available to learn. I don’t even have a kitchen yet. If I step outside my house, it is inevitable that I’ll see something that needs my attention, whether there is a letter in the mailbox or crops to harvest or just the fact that my kitty cat’s bowl is empty. Unlike Animal Crossing: New Leaf, where a day in-game was identical time-wise to a day of real life, one could play a number of in-game Stardew Valley days over the course of a few hours. With so many things to do, it’s easy to lose yourself in your pixelated farm.

I won’t go into much detail about how Stardew Valley plays, as I think I covered most of it in my last post. In terms of progress on Perdido Farm, I just finished the summer season of my first year in Pelican Town, and autumn is now working its magic spell on me. Falling leaves and swirls of reds, oranges, and yellows–it really is the best season, and I’ll hear no other argument about it. I’m excited to grow some fall-only crops, which will help in my progress to upgrade the community center. Bring on all the gourds and stalks of corn and weird, other worldly mushrooms. I should also begin preparing for the winter, which is most likely a season where you can’t grow a ton of crops. Hmm.

However, I’d really like to talk layouts today. I’m terrible at them, as well as terrible about planning ahead. This is definitely the case in Stardew Valley, but I’ve also run into the same problem in games like Terraria, Minecraft, and Fallout 4. You’re given all these elaborate and open-ended tools to create things–farms, houses, settlements, etc.–and then it is up to you to either get creative or smartly efficient. In fact, my favorite update to Minecraft was when they added in NPC-occupied villages, so that I never had to worry about constructing a functional house for myself. The answer is always squatting, I guess. I mean, I’m okay on the creative side of things, and if you don’t believe me please come over to my house in Fallout 4‘s Diamond City to see how many paintings of cats I was able to hang up on the walls.

Unfortunately, went it comes to farms, efficiency is key. Sure, there’s merit in being creative and laying everything out in an eye-pleasing, organized manner, but you need to place a greater emphasis on ensuring your crops grow and can be cared for with ease. For Perdido Farm, this is not the case. I just sort of dug up the ground directly in front of my house, built some stone paths around it, and threw scarecrows and sprinklers in probably not the best spots because…well, I got the items and wanted to immediately place them into action without pausing to think for a split second where they could best be used. And now I feel somewhat stuck in what I’ve started, as it can be dangerous to unearth some of the items you placed and replace them. If I was better at all this, I’d have planned out my farm from day one and created something much more effective. I mean, look at some of these things.

Perhaps this is something I can focus on in the winter, in preparation for an even better spring harvest. Y’know, when I’m, at the same time, trying to worm my way into Maru‘s heart, of which, I am currently rocking four hearts with her. Also, if you are curious where that nifty turn of phrase in this blog’s title came from, check out the poem “Ode to Autumn” by John Keats.

Farming is a profession of hope in Harvest Moon: Back to Nature

A few weeks back I listened to a bunch of Retronauts podcasts, and one of them was devoted to musing and gushing about the entire Harvest Moon series. Well, as much as they all could. I noticed they neglected to touch upon Harvest Moon: Grand Bazaar, the only one I’ve actually played up to this point. But since then, I’ve had the itch to either return to that DS title or try another in the franchise; the fact that you do a lot of farming for special plants and ingredients in Disney Magical World possibly also played a part in pushing me forward. Fortuitously, there was a PSN sale on a bunch of old PS1 classics some time back, so I grabbed Harvest Moon: Back to Nature for like a buck, planting the seed.

Well, in true Pauly fashion, this newly acquired farm is not off to a great start. But how did I come to be its caretaker, you ask? Via a somewhat somber opening cutscene. As a young lad, your summer vacation with your father is suddenly cancelled, and so you end up paying your grandfather–and his farm–a visit in the countryside. Things move quite differently out there. You also meet a girl, and, together, the two of you sing songs and play in the fields. You make a promise to her that you’ll be back one day. It has now been ten years since that summer; sadly, your grandfather passed away and left you the farm in his stead.

I’ve only played a week and a few in-game days for Harvest Moon: Back to Nature, but I’m finding it extremely slow-paced. More so than Grand Bazaar. Granted, I understand that these games are built upon routine, but it seems to even be an uphill climb to begin putting that routine into place. You begin day one on your grandfather’s farm–which I decided to name Freaky Farm–with 500G, a bunch of obvious tools, and no animals other than your dog, dubbed appropriately Chomp. Well, I was terrified to spend all my money in one lump, so I bought nine cucumber seeds, cleared a section of the very cluttered farmland, and planted and watered them each day. Alas, I picked a little poorly, as cucumbers take a very long time to grow.

Your initial tasks are not very obvious, and so you can end up wasting most of your day wandering around the farm and the nearby village. Wait, wasted isn’t the right word. Instead of farming and making money, you’re instead focusing on speaking with the local townsfolk, hearing about their problems and triumphs, and reacting accordingly. So far, a strange man has appeared in town to the policeman’s detriment. I also noticed that many customers are taking advantage of the supermarket’s clerk, using credit to “buy” things and never fully pay for them. A big part of the Harvest Moon games are structured around relationships, and growing a friendship or love thingy takes as much time–or even more–as that 3×3 field of potatoes. I also attended some kind of rose festival, where a bunch of girls did a dance. Also, I’m not even joking when I tell you it took me five days to figure out how to place produce in your bin, which is the only way to sell items and make some money; I kept throwing it from the wrong angle, which I guess destroyed the item.

After a week and a half of farming, I am beginning to see my Freaky Farm routine. It goes a little like this:

• Wake up at 6 AM
• Check the crops (water them, harvest them if ready)
• Head up to the hot springs area and grab three bamboo shoots to toss in the produce bin
• Head back to the hot springs, but go behind the waterfall, where you can use the hoe to dig up valuable minerals
• Back to the farm to pet the dog and say hi to Freckles the horse (no brush yet)
• By now, it’s probably a little after noon, so I’ll stroll through the village in search of any story scenes
• Return to the farm to pull weeds and toss rocks while waiting for Zack to show up and take everything in my shipping bin
• Go back inside and hop in bed despite it only being like 5:30 or 6:00 PM

And that’s it…so far. I imagine once I get more animals, more plants, and more things to do, I’ll have to switch the routine up. But for now, this at least earns me around 300 to 500G every day. Unfortunately, everything in the game is costly. I think a cow alone is like 4,000G. So I have a ways to go still. There’s so much I want to buy though: cows, chicken, brush for horse, bell, different seeds, etc.

I can most assuredly count on one hand the number of times I’ve looked at the manuals for the numerous digital games I’ve purchased, but Harvest Moon: Back to Nature‘s manual reading is a must for all newcomers. I can’t stress that enough. The game does not hold your hand and spell everything out; it’s about learning, taking things day by day. However, I’m also using this guide from time to time, which taught me what fatigue looks like, as well as the best way to save money and level up your tools.

Harvest Moon: Back to Nature is acting as a great palette cleanser before I move on to either Suikoden II or Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater. I do find it a bit stressful when the day is over too fast and I have very little to show for it, but it’s a learning curve. Evidently, you can hire magical forest elves to help out on your farm, just not during spring as they are all gaga over some upcoming tea party. I’ll take all the help I can get. Oh, and there’s some kind of horse race event coming up; I hope Freckles is up to it. Stay tuned for further farm updates…

30 Days of Gaming, #15 – Post a screenshot from game you’re playing right now

I’m gonna take advantage of today’s topic train from the 30 Days of Gaming meme to also link to a new review I did for The First Hour. It’s of Harvest Moon: Grand Bazaar, the most recent iteration of the seemingly popular farming sim games. I covered the game’s first thirty minutes, and most of that time was spent in a slow tutorial downpour. I’ll be back at a later point in time to dig deeper into the game because–no matter what–I’m going to at least get through an entire year of this slog.

Here’s the image I’d like to present to y’all to represent the game, and the reason I’m picking it is for the absurd amount of G this character has:

I think the highest I’ve accumulated at this point is around 15,000G, and that’s after selling everything I owned–including my very soul–at this week’s bazaar. Oh, and Antoinette is totally snobby to me, too. Why anyone would want to pursue her for marriage is beyond me. I’m going after Sherry, but at this point, it seems like it’s easier to get chickens to like me than actual people. Sad and disturbing, but also very true. Ah, the life of a farmer…

Harvest Moon meets FarmVille meets a mouthful of sleeping pills

I’ve spent the past two weeks so far packing up my little studio apartment and slowly moving everything over to Tara and I’s new place, now officially known as The Leaky Cauldron. Cause, uh, when it rains, the ceiling leaks. How fun! And I’ve discovered a number of videogames that I bought and kind of forgot about as I shove them into boxes and bags. One unmemorable piece of plastic and coding turned out to be Rune Factory: A Fantasy Harvest Moon, which I bought during an extreme spout of depression back in late June. I thought it might help fill the mild void that FarmVille left; side note, I was never addicted to the Facebook farming game, but I did log in every day for a few months to see what was what, but eventually lost interest despite liking the idea of crafting a piece of land into exactly what I wanted.

It’s a farming game with a mix of monster killing/monster raising, but I never got very far with it. It’s also been described as “Harvest Moon where you wield a sword.” The mechanics of it all though were very cold and regimented, leaving me confused and unsure of my farming skills. I basically started the game as Raguna, a fellow suffering from amnesia and wandering into the local town called Kardia. There he meets a girl named Mist who gives him a piece of land to farm and then…well, then you farm it. No tutorial really, no explanation. Exploring the city’s shops and houses allows Raguna to meet a host of characters, eventually finding himself face to face with the mayor who will allow him to enter the first cave and clear it of nasty monsters attacking Kardia. From there, Rune Factory: A Fantasy Harvest Moon is open-ended. You can continue farming, trying to earn money by selling logs, woo women from town, or go cave-clearing. Or you can do what I did and try to clear the first monster cave only to get so far and then run out of health, exit out to rest, and go back to find ALL THE MONSTERS I PREVIOUSLY KILLED RESPAWNED. Meaning, I was not moving forward, only wasting my time.

Supposedly the storyline will not continue on unless new caves aren’t opened and cleared by beating the boss at the end. Greaaaaaaat.

Well, let’s try farming. Maybe I will become an expert farmer instead of a supreme warrior. So, in Rune Factory: A Fantasy Harvest Moon, you have two gauges to keep track of: Hit Points and Rune Points. I think we all know how HP functions (if not, maybe Grinding Down isn’t the blog for you), but Rune Points more or less convert to stamina, and just about every single action Raguna takes uses up RP. If you run out of RP, then every subsequent action depletes your HP bar. Let’s take a look at what uses RP: digging, planting, watering, picking crops, swinging weapon, cooking food, and so on. RP is essential to living life, and it’s a shame because after maybe planting 9 seeds and then watering them, you’ll have run out of RP and are then forced to go to bed to restore your bar. And that, to me, seemed to be all I could do, day in, day out. I tried selling some logs and plants to make some money, but had no idea what to buy.

Either I’m missing something or I’m just not good at this game. It might be a mix of the two, but I found myself growing bored very fast as doing the same exact tactics over and over was not very fun. Maybe someone can explain it to me? If anything, Rune Factory: A Fantasy Harvest Moon is a gorgeous-looking game. So there’s that at least, but it’ll most likely never get played again…

Breaking news: I bought the farm

…and by that I mean I removed the FarmVille app from my Facebook profile and no longer have to click, click, click until every crop has been harvested, every animal has been tended to, and every job has been done. It’s quite a relief actually, but truth be told…I was never a good farmer to begin with.

I signed up for FarmVille like countless others did sometime last year, curious to its appeal. I quickly found myself plowing some land and planting my first seeds. The crops grow in real time, meaning eight hours means eight actual hours. So once you plant your crops, you basically have to wait to get more money to plant more crops. Yup, it’s a cycle, and the cycle certainly can be addicting if you’re into that sort of work/reward process. While you wait, your avatar can decorate your farm with an assortment of farm-like and unfarm-like items, ranging from barns to hot air balloons to themed statues. You can also visit your neighbors (i.e., Facebook friends) and check out their farms, fertilizing their crops and feeding their chickens. But other than that, you must wait. And this will be how you play FarmVille for the first few weeks. It’s not until you level up considerably and get a decent chunk of change can you really design your farm to your heart’s content and focus on the crops you most enjoy growing.

But then the game plateaus. For me, this was around level 25.

At this point, FarmVille tried too hard to cater to every kind of gamer, casual and not. It threw in collections and ribbons (basically Achievements) and co-op gameplay and pet owning and headshots and tea-bagging and so on. The game also basically made it really hard to play without interacting constantly with neighbors and posting BS to your Facebook’s wall. In all of my 33 levels of farm powers, I might have posted a total of four items publicly; my sister made me do it. It’s not fun to do, and I feel annoying even just thinking about it. Sorry, Facebookers.

And so, just recently, I realized I hadn’t logged into my farm for a few days. My crops surely had withered away. My trees were most certainly all full of fruit, all ripe for the picking. I can see all my animals, all of them stuck forever in place, waiting for me to collect their feathers, calm them down, or gather up ice cubes. It seemed like too much for me, and I was not ultimately happy with the layout of my farm, feeling stuck; that said, I was also too lazy to start anew, and so my next option was to cut loose, set them free, and find something else worth clicking about on.

The app was removed in a matter of seconds, no bells and whistles, no hoops to jump through. Surprisingly easy.

I’ve always been curious about the Harvest Moon games, and I might have to try one of them out soon. Farming simulation can be fun, but for me…I need a little more direction than just plant, harvest, plant, harvest, plant, harvest, and plant, harvest.