Harvest Moon: Island of Happiness (DS)

Hi-diddle-dee-dee, a farmer's life (not) for me.
9/17/2008 7:40 PM | 5 Comments | Page 2 of 3

And make no mistake, making money is definitely the overriding goal of the game. Progress is measured in the number of "improvements" you can make to the island's infrastructure of roads, bridges and buildings, and all those improvements take somewhat ridiculous amounts of cold, hard cash. While most of the non-player characters simply mill about the island, occasionally manning some store or another, it's up to you alone to plow your hard-earned profits into these vital projects. Even more galling is that you have to purchase or collect the raw materials for the construction, which means endless nights of hunting the countryside for driftwood to turn into logs and rocks to turn into building stone. It's a nice change of pace from endlessly watering crops, to be sure, but it's still about as fun as doing your chores.

In fact, every task in Island of Happiness begins to feel like a chore after about the second or third time you perform it by rote. You can form relationships with the growing cast of characters that show up on the island, but it seems pointless when they all spout the same "Sigh, times are tough"-style dialogue every single day. Mining for rare gems in the mountain regions feels awfully similar to digging soil on the farmland, and taking care of a menagerie of chickens, cows and sheep feels a lot like filling the dog's food bowl at home (despite some overly simple touch-screen-based, animal-tending mini-games). Even the occasional cut scene-laden "competitions" feel like a chore to watch, given the lack of emotional investment you'll have in the fate of your crops compared to those of strangers from other islands.

And that's the major problem with Harvest Moon: Island of Happiness. It's not the tedious work itself; it's the lack of any real, immediate reward for that work. Watering plants over and over would be somewhat tolerable if there was some sort of fanfare when your crops finally came in. Instead, each picked crop is almost immediately turned over to the churn of your daily budget, quickly becoming an anonymous line on a somewhat hidden ledger sheet. Granted, there's a small thrill in seeing a brand-new refrigerator take up space in your house or a new bridge appear on the edge of town, but the temporary feeling of achievement rarely feels worthy of the effort required to obtain it. By the time you've worked enough largely indistinguishable seasons to reach the (spoiler alert) zenith of developmental achievement -- a fully functioning greenhouse -- you might well wonder why you bothered in the first place. (By the way, I find it hilarious that the big reward for your virtual years of labor-intensive farming is a building that removes the need for such labor-intensive farming.)