Regarding an early favorite

When I was a kid one of my favorite video games was Harvest Moon 64. It's a very simple game: you inherit an empty farm and have to make it successful and functional. The mechanics are very simple. You can also marry one of the girls in the neighboring town and eventually have a kid. It's easy on the surface, but there is a lot to do and it's infinitely replayable. It's possible to befriend every citizen of the town, and you can put additions onto your home.

Farming consists of hoeing a plot, nine squares by nine squares, and planting seeds. Every day you have to water each square and eventually the plants will mature and you can sell the crop to make money. You can also raise chickens, cows, and sheep for eggs, milk and wool respectively. If you work too hard in a day, you will eventually pass out. There's too much to do to describe it in detail but it's an amazing game. Perhaps not for everyone but really really fun.

The reason for writing this is because this weekend I purchased Harvest Moon: Island of Happiness for Nintendo DS and man, is it disappointing. All the fun, simple stuff has been made needlessly complex, and certain gameplay elements are just stupid and annoying. For some reason, instead of just watering your crops everyday, they have a certain threshold for both sun and water needed in order to mature. If they get too much water, they can even die. Also, your stamina goes down so fast that often you can't get in as much in one day as you want. In Harvest Moon 64 it was never impossible to tend to up to maybe six or seven plots and still be able to go out and chop wood, gather wild fruit, and talk to most town citizens. In Island of Happiness you're lucky to be able to water two plots and do any other chores, and the wood chopping system is needlessly stupid.

Another problem is the tools. In all Harvest Moon games you have five tools: the hoe, the axe, the hammer, the sickle, and the watering can. In Harvest Moon 64, repeated use of each tool will cause it to become Silver and then Gold, meaning it will have a larger area of effect or be stronger: for example, the Gold Watering can can water a 9x9 square in one use, rather than having to water each individual square by itself, and the Golden Axe can cut a tree stump in one swing rather than the typical six. In Island of Happiness, however, you have to attach certain things called "Wonderfuls" to your tools to change their function. Wonderfuls, though, can only be obtained late into the first year at the earliest, whereas in 64 you could start getting Silver tools as early as the third or fourth day. This means that it is much more difficult to get cropping started and completed during the incredibly vital first three seasons.

Anyway, the whole point is that a working formula doesn't need to be messed with. There are no glaring flaws in Harvest Moon 64, other than that time essentially stops after six or seven years, and there's no point in continuing. I don't think any of the changes in Island of Happiness are improvements. I've owned a few Harvest Moon titles between 64 and IoH, and it's irritating to see the trend they've been following away from 64.

Bottom line: play Harvest Moon 64. So much fun.