Crops and love.
That's pretty much what the Harvest Moon series boils down to.
And spinning about twenty different plates in order to get the "best" ending.
And trying not to tear your hair out when one facet of your grand agricultural-slash-romantic
plan falls apart because you didn't get X item at Y day under Z conditions.
Still, it's been Natsume's prime cash cow (COW, get it?!?)
since the 16-bit days, making one wonder, just where the hell are all these abandoned
farms, anyway?
Every single time, it's an abandoned farm handed down from your grandfather.
With a contingent of gnomes there to critique your progress, and a Harvest Goddess to gripe
ironically about her goddessness.
Harvest Moon: Hero of Leaf Valley is an enhanced port of the PS2's Harvest Moon: Save the Homeland,
featuring a similar ultimatum: Round up 50,000 simoleons in two years, else the entire village
is getting razed to build an amusement park.
(Which is kinda down there on the list of "Sinister plans," I mean any situation where
funnel cake is involved can't be that bad, can it?)
If you can't do this, there's something wrong with you on a basic level; even if you leave
the farm completely fallow and just do two years' worth of part-time jobs, you can easily
drum up enough cash.
But that's just one way, JUST ONE WAY, to go about it.
In truth, there are 16 other endings that you can get depending on who you befriend
and which events you see... and, fortunately, there's a NewGame+ option that streamlines
the process of seeing all of these by allowing you to carry over your various upgrades and
developments.
Now, I enjoy Harvest Moon, and I like the multitask-centric kind of gameplay that it
brings with it... but honestly, I found playing this particular version to be kind of a chore.
First of all, the load times are unbearable, especially given how small each particular
chunk of Leaf Valley actually is.
You want to get from your farm to the coastline for some fishing?
Prepare to spend about 40% of your time walking, and 60% staring at a blank screen while the
audio abruptly cuts out.
And that's a shame, because the music is one of the better parts of this presentation,
regardless of how much it seems to bite on Epona's Song from Ocarina of Time.
The controls, similarly, are finicky to the point of frustration, with your hero often
being a pixel or two away from the "correct" spot to take an action, or occasionally jumping
over a fence for the heck of it, or picking up exactly the wrong thing at exactly the
wrong time.
A number of interesting mini-games help to balance out the experience, like the chain-reaction
mining challenge and the requisite fishing sim, and of course there's a village full
of bachelorettes to woo.
But it'll take plenty of patience - and a tolerance for load screens - to convince that
cute maid you're the one for her.
Patience and fish.