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Since you’ll be heavily dependent on foraging and mining in the early game to earn buck or two so you can start planting crops, it’s not uncommon to trek back and forth between the mines, forest or beach to the farm’s deposit box repeatedly, dropping off two pieces of ore every 20 seconds. Sadly the consequences of this design choice are felt constantly in the early game. But a paltry two slots certainly don’t fit with the latter philosophy and are an extremely in-your-face, neener-neener sort of way to accomplish the former.
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FoMT’s predecessor Harvest Moon 3 starts you off with eight empty bag spaces, plus an entirely separate 24-slot tools inventory accessible at all times! That’s how it should be! To be sure, imposing encumbrance constraints is an oft-seen game mechanic used for manifold purposes, including progress-gating and preventing item-hoarding that may break a difficulty curve. I cannot think of any game that’s stingier with inventory space. Two! But it gets worse: seed packets excepted, items do not stack.
Once you come to terms with this, you’ll discover precisely two open slots for collectable items in that rucksack. This instruction is buried inside one of eight sections … Continue reading Sometime after composing this review I revisited the in-game help pages and learned that A+B opens the rucksack. These controls aren’t customisable either, so you’ll be permanently stuck with a triple button press to perform the most essential action in the entire game – to move items about. Why, in the name of the Harvest Goddess, is whistling to call your pet dog – a feature that has no practical utility – keybound to L while opening your backpack, which you need constantly, requires you to press three buttons in succession: start, right, then A. In Friends of Mineral Town, accessing the place where gathered items are stored – the rucksack on your very shoulders – is an absolute pain. It follows that this collecting and dropping should be a simple, intuitive process – we invented door handles so we wouldn’t have to lift the entire plank from its hinges every time we try to pass through, right? Picking up things off the ground and then dropping them off in a collection box for a profit so you can buy tools and more efficiently pick things up and drop them off is the inalterable core of the series. Here goes… It’s a mainstay of Harvest Moon that you collect things – rocks, crops, fish, forage.
And while I absolutely wasn’t planning to open this retro review with a lengthy discussion of inventory management, it is so downright offensive in Friends of Mineral Town and stymies your progress from the outset that I’m completely cornered by the subject. I was bothered, however, by singularly frustrating early-game design decisions that play keep-away with the classic Harvest Moon experience for a good many hours.
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That the full potential of these ideas is not realised in FoMT, is entirely understandable, and simply implies a somewhat limited experience. FoMT innovated on Harvest Moon 1-3 for GameBoy (Color) by expanding the social experience and fuelling collectionist impulses – features that that would become staples for the genre at large.
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Add to that an apparent vicious insistence on making life unnecessarily difficult, and many of today’s less determined players will be put off by FoMT long before the game opens up and becomes truly enjoyable.Ī bit of context: Friends of Mineral Town is popularly seen as the high-water mark for Harvest Moon: the last of the classics before a quality decline took hold that goaded the series to the brink of oblivion. The problem, however, is just that: the game, by today’s standards – is all groundwork all the core genre ideas are present in a neonatal sort of way, recognisable but underdeveloped. It indisputably laid the groundwork for (spiritual) successors like Animal Crossing and the much more recent Stardew Valley. On release, Friends of Mineral Town (FoMT) was an innovative title that pushed the boundaries of the farming / social sim genres and raised their mass market appeal. I’m conflicted about Harvest Moon: Friends of Mineral Town.