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 1 of 3

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.

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.

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).