Well, This is Certainly a Reversal

In brief moments of pause when I haven't been obsessively playing LittleBigPlanet Vita, finding time to spend on playing the excellent Sleeping Dogs, watching something on YouTube or throwing hours of my life at a time into watching episodes of Burn Notice (which is sooooo good you guys) through Netflix, my free time has been devoted to very very slowly progressing through Hero of Leaf Valley still, as I would like to see at least an entire playthrough through before I call it done.  This has been difficult however, which I think is hilarious, since I have reached the point in the game where I have effectively streamlined everything and am set to earn a good few thousand Gs in a single day.  I have pretty much bought everything there is to offer, tool upgrades, appliance upgrades, house add-ons, farm add-ons, you name it and I have it, so long as it's available to me.  So I basically just have to play through the day dicking about however I wish to get through it so I can then do the next day.

I think that's where the issue is, however, as there's really nothing else to do except follow the routine to a T.  Leave the house and pick up the dog, put him down, go to the food bowl, whistle for him, tell him to sit with the ocarina and give him food in the dish.  Go to the chicken coop, fill the troughs, pick everybody up and get their eggs.  Head to the stables, fill the troughs, talk to the horse and cows, brush the horse and cows, milk the cows.  Harvest and rice that has grown, water it all, fill the watering can.  Go back in the house, make cheese with the milk (at this point, I get two large milks and three smalls which means three things of cheese), make egg and rice dish if there's any rice, otherwise throw eggs in the fridge.  Go to the woodcutter's, talk to Gwen and give her a Very Berry, wait for Woody to go outside and talk to him to see if I can cut lumber.  Afterwards, go to the mine and mine the available caves using reference pictures for single-strike mines because I am a dirty cheater.  Sell ore at woodcutters.  Sell Cheese (and rice dish if any) at Grocery Store.

That list of things to do is the exact routine I end up following to start every Hero of Leaf Valley day.  It is formulaic and it only manages to get me to about 1 PM Harvest Moon time which means the rest of my day is playtime, but....there's really nothing else to do besides talk to folks.  I've effectively cut out all the fat of the game, you could say, in that I am not wasting time collecting things to sell so I can buy food to restore part of my stress/fatigue bars, nor do I have to do a lot to get to where I -would- need to, aside from when I cut trees.  With my tools fully upgraded as well as almost all the Power Berries in the game, I can do...quite a lot before getting fatigued and the house add-on has a Bathroom that allows you to take a bath and get a free boost for both anyway!  About the only thing I can do when I'm done with my routine, again outside of just milling about and talking to everybody, is going off to fish which....serves no real purpose unless I want to feed my dog some fish, because I do believe I have all the Fish recipes already and if I don't, well, who cares?  Certainly not I.

If anything, I suppose it speaks to some pacing issues that the game might have, and, in truth, perhaps some content issues as well.  Most other Harvest Moon games tend to offer a broader range of things over a longer period of time (generally you can buy something to add-on to your house with once a week, and only one thing) which allows them to piecemeal out to you a kitchen and such.  Still, it just feels like there should be more by this point, and not what I have done which is basically seen and conquered most everything.  Doing some peeking in guides, I've learned that there is another slew of upgrades available in the third year, but that's....well, a year and a season away of nothing in between besides gathering and getting prepared, I suppose.  I already have 51 excess lumber, and I think one project maybe requires 100 pieces, but I doubt it.  My point being that I will probably have a good bit, if not all of the lumber stocked up for said upgrades well before time.  Though I'm not sure what else I could hope for, and I certainly would not have hoped for a sort of arbitrary restriction keeping me from getting what I have before now either.  Since that just would have been padding.

I'm not really sure what to think.  Certainly, I've been in this position before in Harvest Moon games, where I have everything streamlined, but it was always because there was just something else on the horizon.  While that technically holds true for Hero of Leaf Valley, in that all of Year 3's offerings await me (including being able to marry Gwen), it's....not quite enough.  I want something a little more immediate or close enough to it.  The closest goal I have is winning the Horse Race towards the end of Fall which I am pretty confident that I will be able to do, since I have my horse all the way up to max affection which means he can apparently 'run like the wind'.  I believe that has something to do with one of the many endings the game has to offer in which you have done something amazing to save the Valley that wasn't outright buying it, and that's fairly cool enough for me, but there's just the whole getting to that point (since I assume the endings come into play at the end of year 2 or 3) that has become difficult.  With any luck, I'll soldier through it, however, as I still do quite like the game, which I'm surprised by.

More Postings About Hero of Leaf Valley

So I am beginning to think that I may, in fact, be a giant idiot and/or a poor judge of what I might enjoy as a thing when I play it.  People who follow my Twitter (or read it on the sidebar) know that I have tweeted obsessively about Hero of Leaf Valley whilst playing it (which is something that will not get old, thank you Twitter for making a fantastic app) and that is because I really like it.  A lot.  It has quickly ingrained itself to me as one of my more-liked Harvest Moon titles which blows my mind considering I was really teetering on whether or not I should buy it, even on sale for $7.50, and how close I was to leaning the other way simply because my games backlog is long enough, even though I desire more Harvest Moon in my life.  Like, constantly, always more Harvest Moon to sate my need for more Harvest Moon after I have completed the previous taste of Harvest Moon, because they are fairly hard games to just 'do-over' after you've played them and requires at least something of a change-up between one game and the next to keep it fresh.

Hero of Leaf Valley's simplistic approach is reminiscent of the earlier games, something the likes of being between Harvest Moon 64 and Friends of Mineral Town in terms of 'things to do overall' which is a pretty sweet spot to be in, really.  Friends of Mineral Town honestly has a surprising amount of depth to it, with the different tool upgrades you can have done (whereas in 64, your tools just upgrade as you use them more) as well as the mines and such beyond that.  Hero of Leaf Valley dabbles in things but doesn't fully commit to the degree that those elements have been expanded on in other iterations which is refreshing in itself somewhat.  Cooking, mining and tool upgrading are all present and accounted for, but the ways about them are all different than the standard fare, mostly in favor of being slightly more....stream-lined I could say.  Missing completely is crafting which is no surprise; unless you have a lot of need for things you could craft (like armor, weapons and such in the Rune Factory titles) there's no real place for it.

Mining is what really saw the biggest change from other titles in that Mining in Hero of Leaf Valley is less "Hit rocks, gain ore" and more "Look at rocks, move yellow ones to establish a chain and try to clear a room with a chain reaction.".  That's right, mining is a puzzle game in Hero of Leaf Valley, or at least has an attempt at it since you can, should you desire, completely ignore that aspect and just hit rocks.  However, stamina is not cheap and it's always best to exert as little as possible to keep enough open for other tasks that you might desire to do.  It's hard to detail this without a picture, and seeing as I am unable to provide one (can't take screencaps of PSP games, IGN has none showing it) I will do my best to invoke a mental picture.  When you walk into one of the mining areas (a new one opens at the start of each new season) it switches to an overhead mode that shows off all of the rocks available to be mined ranging in colors from red to blue to green to yellow.  Each color aside from yellow has its own shape - red ones are a dash basically, blues are a cross (or an X, depending on the orientation), and green are simple circles - with yellow being able to be any of those sizes as well as what amounts to a tear drop shape.

Whenever you shatter a rock, it launches out bits in the direction of its points (so green shoots all around, blue shoots from its four points and red from its two) and any rock of the same color in the range of those bits gets shattered in the same fashion.  Hence, chain reaction.  The rub is that the rocks can only destroy their own color....except for yellow rocks that can be moved and shatter anything it hits.  Do you see the strategy now?  From what I can tell, every room layout (there are only a handful or so for each room, so once you know the answer, it's just a matter of doing it right) is designed in such a way that you can configure it to be cleared with a single smack of the hammer which is really neat in itself.  I can't find a correlation between single-hit room-sweeping and getting better things, but I -did- find two Blue Rocks (items used for the initial tool upgrade) in a row on full-sweeps, so considering that you save stamina, maybe there's more than that reason so shoot for them.  Also it's pretty satisfying to see it run out the right way.

Upgrading your tools is a matter that is something of an exercise in frustration but the end-result, as always, makes up for it for the most part.  The issue at hand, basically is that to get your tools upgraded you have to track down the ore first of course (which is a pain in the ass since first-tier is a Blue Rock and it took me forever to find -one-) and then find a day when the Tool Shop owner, Louis, is actually working.  I say this with a little ire because his shop is closed Wednesdays and Sundays and guess which days I've found my Blue Rocks on.  Alongside the ore is a required cost which is likely in the lower 1,000 range at first and only grows with each upgrade.  1,000 'gold' is nothing to scoff at in this game, at least not yet, as I only have three chickens, two cows, and a field that contains 16 rice plants and 8 Corn which haven't produced a single harvest yet.  Perhaps when I get a greenhouse (which I assume prevents crops from seasonal wilting) I'll be able to go a little crazier with planting things which will bring in more dosh but until then, I've got to play a little more conservatively.  A twice-upgraded axe is basically all I need at the moment since it makes my lumber yield that much better since it takes less to use.  (As well as digging up a bunch of power berries.)

Cooking, now that I have finally gotten the house add-on (50 lumber seemed insane.  Then I harvested like 18 pieces in one go.  Love my super axe and big stamina bar.) is fairly bare-bones as it usually is.  You have utensils (start out with frying pan and a pot if nothing else) and you throw things in them and if you've done a recipe correctly, you get food.  If not, failed dish.  The odd thing I've found about Hero of Leaf Valley's implementation, however, is that you have to actually upgrade your kitchen tools.  The starter Frying Pan and Pot can only hold one ingredient each which...as you might think, limits just what you can make.  The local cook, if you work for her, has appliances that can hold three ingredients which I assume is the top-tier.  Upgrading these things is essentially the exact same as upgrading a tool - you get ore, take it to Louis and pay a fee.  Thankfully there's no "Okay, I'll get it to you in three days" like in other games, but it's still a bit odd that, of all things, I have to upgrade a frying pan to be able to cook two things in it.

If it's not obvious, I've really gotten into the position where I've hit my stride and started really going with Hero of Leaf Valley and it's -awesome-.  Increased Stamina and some better tools means that I can do more in a day instead of picking a single task that I wanted to make sure got done (like picking between mining and chopping lumber) and being able to do more, in the end, means more money for me.  My next outing in wood-cutting will likely net me enough lumber to pick out either my chicken coop or barn to upgrade which means I'll be able to get more animals which means more offerings for more money.  Eventually, I'll be able to earn in a single day what I was making in a week towards the start of the game, and that's really one of the most satisfying moments any Harvest Moon game can offer because it's real, tangible progress.  It's like going back to starting areas in RPGs and kicking the shit out of the enemies that were a challenge to start with.  Except you're earning lots of money in Harvest Moon as well as satisfaction versus just a smug sense of superiority and piddling experience.  Which....that's good too, but money.

Okay, Hero of Leaf Valley is Pretty Good

I am legitimately surprised by the revelation that I've stumbled across these last couple days when I've been putting some work in on the ol' farm, as it were.  Hero of Leaf Valley, despite what it's connected to by virtue of being a remake of (more or less) seems like any other Harvest Moon game in its own right, which is a compliment mind you, and I find it a little hard to put down when I get going with it.  Truly the sign that there is a good Harvest Moon game in my hands, you see.  Always striving to get just one more day in, to keep the schedule tight, to get one goal done with before I stop playing.  I need my chickens to give me medium-sized eggs.  I need my cows to start producing milk.  I need to make more money so I can buy more things so that I can do more in a day.  More more more more more, I need to -play the friggin' game more to get this done-.

....Ahem.  I'm sure the general spirit of what I was trying to get across made it through all that.  My point is that a mark of a good Harvest Moon is that it has the freedom, the openness that it allows you to simply form your own goals as I clearly have and do whatever to meet them.  Granted, there's basically only a few ways to accomplish things unless they are generally vague, ala "make money, get paid", but it still ends up feeling like 'your' way, no matter how it gets done.  Whenever I manage to track down a friggin' blue rock to upgrade my hammer with, for instance, it'll be -my- accomplishment, not one the game has guided me towards.  When my stupid friggin' dog finally likes me enough that I can tell him to search for Power Berries and I find one - that's all me, that's mine.  It's entirely much more excitement to come from a farming simulation game than one would expect to ever occur, but it is there and it is glorious.

Something that I'm not quite sure about the game, that I'm deciding whether or not it's a double-edged sword is the simplicity the game seems to carry.  Not only the actual simplicity it carries, like all Harvest Moon games do, but the simplicity that I feel the game carries over the others.  You can only farm chickens and cows like previous games, you just have a tiny plot to farm on, and whatever you grow, you sell to villagers instead of shipping it to parts unknown for profit, and there's really only a handful of villagers around.  They are mostly utilitarian, as per normal, with there being six different 'store-fronts' with which you can deal your wares with (of course, everyone only buys certain things so you don't have a one-stop-shop) and little extra fluff.  Despite there being over twenty characters running around, it feels like considerably less since there is not a day where you are likely going to interact with all of them, and much less a chance of a week going by where you do that either.  Unless you are particularly social, there's no real reason to spend your valuable time running around and talking to everybody, so you tend to keep it cut down to who is necessary to speak with and more or less, those people don't really change.

For instance, my normal day (at least, what I'm trying to get into) consists of getting up, feeding the stupid dog who lost a heart for me because I brought him inside when it was raining hard because he's a stupid, stupid mutt and then going off to take care of my three chickens and two cows.  I go back to the farm proper and harvest/water the Rice crops I've got going (They apparently stay viable from Spring to Fall and give multiple harvests without mention of wilting.  Seems perfect.) and head off towards the woodcutter's.  I hand off a berry to Gwen, who my character will probably be marrying and then (depending on the day) wait for 9 where I can work for Woody to cut down trees.  Eventually doing this will allow me to actually keep lumber with which I can expand my farm with, something I am desperate to do.  Then I hit up Bob and/or Ronald to do side-work for them for quick money and by that time it's time to go to bed.  That is four characters only and unless somebody is directly in my path, I don't waste time.  The variation on this is when it rains, or if it's a day the Woodcutters is closed, I head off to the mines in hopes of getting Blue Rock so I can get a better, lighter hammer which costs lest energy to use which means I can do more in a day.

Moreso than in previous Harvest Moon games, I feel like I am fighting time instead of simply abiding it and that's something I'm really not too happy with.  Either my character moves too slowly or time simply passes too quickly and I start feeling like I could get more done, talk to more people, have a little down-time, but there's not a whole lot I can do about it.  I'm clearly enjoying the game, even if it's not unequivocal, so that's really all that matters at the end of the day.  Everything is sort of a "matter of time" process regardless, so schedules change rapidly based on what happens.  I didn't use to devote time to running off to the barns to tend to animals, after all, so that was factored in, and once I'm able to get more steady resources (better quality eggs, some friggin' milk, etc.) I'll get more money and won't have to rely on the side bits.  Hell, once I get some Blue Rocks, I'll probably never mine again, unless there's another tier of upgrades after that, which there honestly could be.  It's just all a matter of making sure everyday gets you a little closer to getting a little more tomorrow and I've got that balancing act down-pat.

I do wonder if this will be a case of the glow starting to fade eventually, as I'm clearly not -completely- enamored with the game, just....mostly.  I can't help but feel like I want more than the game can provide, and worry that it's only really a stop-gap between this and the next HM-related title I can get my hands on, but I'm only rounding the end of the first Spring so I've honestly barely dug into the game at all.  It just feels like it since I have really gotten quite a bit of progress out of it in such a short time.  Once the events really start presenting themselves, as I get to know the townsfolk more and more, I'm sure I'll start feeling the full breadth of what the game has to offer and start considering things for the 'long term', but that's off in a distance that I simply cannot get to yet.  Still, I am excited, which is still a surprise, to see how it goes from here.  And certainly, I've gotten my $7.50 out of it by now.

I Bought Harvest Moon: Hero of Leaf Valley Today

I still don't know why.  I mean, I know why - it's because it's $7.50 in the Playstation Store for Plus Members instead of $30 and goddamned if I don't like a value.  Of course, Harvest Moon:  Hero of Leaf Valley's value was, before I purchased it, highly suspect, as it seemed to be a port of Save The Homeland, which I didn't care for at all, what with the year time limit the game has in place.  While I'm not sure if it's a hard time limit or not, I'll likely never find out as I'm not planning on playing Save The Homeland again anytime soon, and Hero of Leaf Valley is much more loose with it than previously indicated, I suspect.  This is for many reasons, but the important bit is that, when presented with the same scenario with slightly different end-goals the game did something that I suspected it was not capable of doing, being what it is:  It drew me in and made me want to play it.

I am not absolutely certain, but it seems that the time limit in this game, as opposed to Save the Homeland is two years, rather than one, which is certainly a lot easier to swallow when informed of that upfront.  I'm not sure if that's going to be correct, or if there's some sort of subtext that I missed, but the CEO of the place that is coming in to bulldoze the entirety of Leaf Valley told me that I was to have 50,000 G before two years had passed, so I'm just -saying-.  Or, rather, she said "I guess if you have that much money before we come to tear this dump down in two years, I'll sell you the deed" or something that amounted to it but semantics.  So right off the bat, you have twice the time that you have in Save the Homeland, or at least the game presents as much to you.  There is still an end-point and that's still a thing I'm not comfortable with, but I handled it with the Rune Factory games, so I believe I can handle it here.

Beyond that, after checking a few things that point out the differences between Save the Homeland and Hero of Leaf Valley, one of the big differences is that you can get married in Hero of Leaf Valley which is such a goddamn Harvest Moon standard that any game that doesn't include it is pretty permanently on my 'nope' list for this fact.  It's only a big deal because it's a goal to strive for, a meta-goal even, in a game that is built on its own meta-goals because, in most cases, it doesn't have a 'goal' itself, which is the inherent strength of the Harvest Moon series.  Learning (perhaps re-learning) that Save the Homeland doesn't include the feature while Hero of Leaf Valley does, it only served to push the former further down my list (Below Innocent Life, even because let's face it, Innocent Life at least has a goddamn dune buggy) and the latter higher up in prospective places.  Since I barely played it at that point, you see.  In all reality, I've -still- barely played it, as I'm only on Spring 8th in my save file, but I'm sure you see the distinction.

Beyond the fact that it was $7.50, I think the other reason that I bought the game is that I always, always crave having another Harvest Moon game, and one that is at least somewhat 'new' as Hero of Leaf Valley is.  Despite a quick play of Save The Homeland years ago, the place is basically a clean slate as the inhabitants of Leaf Valley are not featured in any other Harvest Moon game to my knowledge.  At least, no other game that I've played.  There is a such thing as being over-familiar with characters, you see, so any game in the Harvest Moon line that offers me an opportunity to romance women who are not Ann, Popuri and the other caste from Mineral Town is a game that I will happily attempt, if nothing else.  Even though I believe Friends of Mineral Town to be one of the better Harvest Moon games out there.  If they could just take about 90% of that game and just fill it with new characters, that would probably be the next best thing, really.

Seeing as I expect my days to be filled with Sleeping Dogs when available, having Hero of Leaf Valley serves as quite a fine counter-point.  An indulgence after another indulgence if you will.  I get to enjoy the violence, the visceral nature of Sleeping Dogs and then step into something that is wholly counter to that, yet entertaining on its own merits.  While jarring, it's a nice jarring, something that I don't think a lot of people get to experience or, if they do, enjoy, which is a little bit of a shame really.  Both are equally valuable, however, which is what I want to embed, so people who don't enjoy a good slow down with Harvest Moon or similar games are missing out I say, but not in a way that is detracting from what they're enjoying regardless.  Which sounds a little muddled now that I wrote it out, but whatever, it's late and took me like three hours to type this up because I am tired.  Off to bed, folks.