How to enjoy Harvest Moon

It sounds strange to advise people on how best to enjoy a video game. After all, they are made for enjoyment. The problem is, life sims like Harvest Moon are formulaic, and attract people with a meticulous nature, who get too attached to doing as much as possible, as well as possible, as fast as possible.

Especially as Harvest Moon games generally work at about x10 speed – so ten minutes real time is ten hours game time. This makes you run around like a headless chicken trying to finish everything until the day ends, and you get to start all over again.

A bit of hurrying is fine, because the challenge of that game is basically your ability to Win At Life, which is why life sims have a draw on people with an obsessive streak; real life doesn’t operate so predictably, so life sims give you an escape from unpredictability. But in order to stop my fellow obsessives from falling down the rabbit hole of frustration at one’s inability to Do All The Things, here is a list of things to avoid doing – against the game’s own advice.

Mario & Luigi franchise

I’ve played Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga so many times, I keep forgetting that video games make me as bad tempered as a goat and as apt to spout obscenities as a small electronic box with buttons that swear when you press them. It’s one of those clever RPGs, the ones that realise that there’s nothing more tedious than wandering around and waiting to be pounced by endless hordes of monsters you can’t see or avoid.

There are two ways to deal with this without ruining the RPG standard; one is to have lots and lots of cheap in-game insect repellent taking up most of your practically endless inventory space, as can be seen in Breath of Fire. The other way is to program in an “auto” option – the option that literally translates as: “You know the drill, game. I’m strong enough to just stand here and take a beating without healing all battle and I’m only ever going to use this one incredibly expensive weapon which I upgrade every time I arrive at a new town or settlement, so there’s no point going through the charade of pretending I’m going to use any magic or special items until my next boss fight. And even then, there are no guarantees.” This is normally accompanied by excessive and anal healing after every ten battles of so, or as soon as the numbers turn red.

Phoenix Wright

Phoenix Wright is not a game series it’s easy to find fans for in daily life. I’ve got two brothers, one of whom hates slow paced games with lots of dialogue and the other is so lazy he won’t even take a game suggestion from me because that would involve borrowing a DS and putting some time aside to play it. It truly is a mystery. Anyone would think I was asking him to dig me a military war bunker lined with currency that’s been out of circulation for thirty years.

In any case, Phoenix Wright is one of two franchises I’ve played that was heavy in dialogue. The other was Zone of the Enders on the GBA. Ah, what a nostalgia trip that is. The repetitive witticisms. The character clichés. The endless text-scroll boxes. The incomprehensible storyline. The insultingly easy game play. Phoenix Wright is much newer and better and is more like an interactive story than a traditional video game. There’s no shooting the thing or poking the squirrel or whatever it is you do in popular entertainment nowadays.