I'm really glad I'm not a farmer.

There are many obvious reasons for this. Being a farmer means performing hard, manual labor for long hours in sometimes harsh conditions. Being a farmer means depending on the vicissitudes of the weather and the global food market for your livelihood. Being a farmer means facing competition from huge, multinational agri-business conglomerates. The list goes on. But, if Harvest Moon: Island of Happiness is any guide to the life of a real farmer, then I have to add one very important new reason to that list of "Reasons I?m glad I'm not a farmer":

Being a farmer means being really bored.

Don't get me wrong, I wasn't really under the impression that the life of a farmer was as thrilling as that of, say, an astronaut or a professional roller coaster tester. But the Harvest Moon series has been going on for 10 years now, and has gained a decent-sized following of supporters in that time. So before I dove into Harvest Moon: Island of Happiness, I figured the designers must have done something to make the basic tasks of planting and harvesting crops into an engaging and fun experience.

If endless toil in the fields is your idea of a good time, have I got a game for you!

Turns out I was wrong. The process of clearing brush, tilling soil, and spreading seeds is every bit as mind-numbingly dull as you might expect, and made worse by Island of Happiness' frustratingly touchy and unpredictable touch-screen interface. The controls aren't nearly as bad as the pure tedium of the actions they simulate, though. Virtual day after virtual day, it seems that a ridiculously significant chunk of my play time was spent simply wandering around the fields, painstakingly watering square after square of tilled land in the hope that it would eventually grow into something edible. Apparently, different crops require different amounts of water (and yes, you can over-water), but the game gives precious little guidance in this regard. It's only through painstaking seasonal trial-and-error that a virtual farmer can find the perfect water-to-sunlight ratio for a crop, and the long growing season for most crops makes it hard to quickly determine if your water is having any effect at all. Those crops had better be ready in time, too, because the very day the season changes, all those spring stalks suddenly and immediately become dead summer grass. Don't even get me started on how walls of tall-growing plants like corn can block watering access to inner squares, leaving inevitable dead grass.

This cute picture of a cow is actually one of the best parts of the game. Seriously.

When I wasn't watering crops in my first hard year of island farming, I was actually scrounging for food. Yes, that's right, in a game that's based on the planting and harvesting of food, our farmer is forced to literally roam around searching for wild grass that he can munch on to keep up his stamina. Without this life-sustaining food, our farming hero will get tired after only a couple of in-game hours (real-time minutes) of watering and be forced to sleep in until noon the next day just to recover. Yes, you can eventually find sustenance from the crops that you grow, even combining the ingredients into delicious recipes after many seasons of subsistence living. But biting into your crops means eating into your profits, as every potato you eat is a potato you can't put in the magical "shipping container," to be magically transformed into money (the game never quite explains why a boat that can apparently pick up crops can't save the shipwrecked inhabitants of this "happy" island).

Time to feed the chickens. Time to feed the chickens. Time to make the donuts...

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.

She'll only break your heart in the end. They all do...

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.)
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Of course, some may say that I'm just not focusing on the right things -- that trying to maximize profit and development in the shortest amount of time is somehow missing the point. They'll argue that the beauty of Island of Happiness is the tranquility of a simple, agrarian life, the zen rhythm of the changing seasons, the joy that can only come with responsibility. To these people, I offer up a hearty raspberry. The joy to be found in Harvest Moon: Island of Happiness is more like the joy of playing tic-tac-toe -- minimally interesting at first, but quickly developing into a pointless waste of time.

This review is based on a retail copy of the game purchased by Crispy Gamer.