Why do we play Harvest Moon?

Welcome back guys.

Today, I'm feeling Harvest Moon. I've been playing Harvest Moon: Wonderful Life for a while and question myself what keeps me going. 

The Game

Come here dear cows, time for your hugging session!

I'm a Harvest Moon fan since their first game (Harvest Moon SNES), and have played most of these games since then. In most of them, your objective is simple: to take a rundown farm and turn it into a successful business. You have many ways of doing so, but it usually involves buying some animals and taking care of them, planting some crops and harvesting fruits and vegetables, taking part in some part-time jobs at the village, foraging berries on the forest, fishing in the local lake / rivers. 

Apart from the farming-simulation part, most of these games are full-fledged social simulators as well, as you can usually woo a number of eligible bachelorettes (or bachelors depending on your sex and game), get married and have kids. So as to balance farm life with socializing with villagers, some festivals and birthdays are thrown into the formula, which are usually fun and help to break the daily monotone chores.

The Reasons

So how come this mix of daily chores and virtual life get to shake away gamers' lives? Many reasons come to mind: because it's so addicting, because you get to escape your daily monotonous life and live in an interactive fun village, because you get to feel fulfilled because of your actions and hard work. 

Tending the fields with my fellow apprentices.

Firstly, the game is so fun to play because it's very rewarding. You get to feel the satisfaction of working hard planting crops and taking care of animals when you harvest the produce. When you sell the goods you produced and harvested, you get to manage and adopt even more ways of earning profits, by buying more animals, upgrading tools, extending your farm and more. You can even train apprentices (harvest sprites) so as to work for you, buy mayonnaise and cheese makers so as to elaborate more complex produce, or automatize your farming processes (buying an automatic milking room for instance) -- it's an economy class for small businesses taken to practice! And one you start, it's quite difficult to stop, as it just gets better and better.

Relax... it's just dancing... or is it?

Secondly, the idea of living in a green, interactive fun village is like a dream. Personally, most of the time, I play games so as to escape a bit from reality. This game allows me to do so, as I'm taken away to a forgotten rural village with interesting characters to know and friendships to make -- in short, to lead a different life. Flirting with local ladies, getting married, having children... does virtual social interaction get better than that? However, the interaction in this game is driven in a vastly different way than The Sims. While dialogues in the Sims are fictional, they are real in Harvest Moon. Villagers will greet you and talk to you about the weather. Your bride will actually get pregnant and spend some time complaining about it. However, regarding health-management issues, Harvest Moon is much more carefree than The Sims, as in most of them, there's no health or energy bar as opposed to the complex system used in The Sims. Both games use varying levels of abstraction regarding these topics.

Caught a big one, eh?

Thirdly, and most important, is the idea that "hard work will be rewarded". The game is the living proof that if you work hard, life will reward you sooner or later. Being having a happy family that loves you, creating a big profitable establishment or saving a village from being demolished, you always get your "thanks" and feel fulfilled. And that is the central message of this game experience.



Feeling satisfied with this article and with my own farm, I'll be leaving Harvest Moon on my closet until needs for a rural escape arise. Until then, I believe I'll be trying out Pokemon Black or replaying Beyond Good and Evil.

Why do we play Grandia?

Hi there.

For a long time I've been meaning to write about things we like in games but do not realize. These things may be ideas, emotions conveyed to the player, exciting pieces of gameplay - anything at all, as long as the player feels like playing the game more and more. 'Enjoying a game and not knowing why' happens more often than not, as not everybody tries analyzing the game's approach as to how it keeps the player entertained - they simply play the game. From here on, in this series of articles, I will be attempting to analyze games separately and discuss their most original/entertaining points. 

Introduction
Playing Grandia for the 3rd-4th time has made me realize what I like the most about this game.

Grandia is a role-playing game with a very particular battle engine, charming characters, a light-hearted story and a huge sense of adventure. The combination of all these things works quite well and keeps the player going, though I have found a couple of interesting individual ideas which definitely add to the mix (and somehow stand out). What I found particularly interesting about this game is how magic and moves work, how the game motivates you to play and battle in order to learn new moves and combinations - to train as you play, to grind a little bit- and to explore, to discover new weapons and armor, and artifacts which enable you to learn magic.

How it works

In Grandia, each character can manage a number of different weapons (maces, swords, axes, whips and knives) and may be taught different elements (fire, earth, water, wind). Not all characters can handle every weapon nor learn every element or spell; in fact, every character's move list is radically different. Besides, you can only teach a character an element whenever you find a rare Mana Egg. Apart from the basic elements, combinations exist. Should you teach a character water and wind, then blizzard attacks become available. Fire and Wind mean Thunder, Water and Earth form Forest and Fire and Earth are explosion. It's fun to discover the game's magic system on the fly, and change your strategies as you keep playing.

Exploring and Item-finding

The world of Grandia is huge, and mainly unexplored at the time the story takes place. The party is constantly traveling to new places and completing what may seem as impossible feats. The setting and plot really inspire a sense of adventure, unique amongst other games, and being the characters so small and the world so huge really gets you into the game. The fact that there're scattered Mana Eggs, Secret Weapons, Armor and Stat-Increasing seeds everywhere motivates the player to explore every nook and cranny from every dungeon - and being huge as they are, this just fits in too well. The developers have successfully tied the story's main theme to its gameplay, and it shows.

Learning Moves & Magic

Apart from exploration, there's a huge emphasis in moves and magic learning. Everything has levels - each weapon has a level, each magic element has one. In a way, it's very rewarding for the player to watch his/her characters grow in every direction, and being able to direct their growth. Also, every move in the game has learning conditions. For instance, in order to learn a move called 'Zap Whip', the character Feena has to level up her whip up to Lvl 24, and Fire and Wind up to Lvl 15. These enables you to actually see (almost) all the moves you can learn, and train while you battle. After all, what's more rewarding for a player than having his character learn new moves? 

AI Patterns

Complimenting this, there's a big array of possible AI patterns you can set the characters to use. Amongst them are 'Safety' (heal often, using mainly water), 'Meanie' (inflict poison, sleep and stat-reducing spells), 'Power Up'(increase stats), 'Each own', 'Wild', between others. Depending on each character's move set, setting the pattern 'Power Up' may mean "train earth and wind till you drop", so it's quite fun to play with the patterns and train your characters. 

What's the game missing then?

What I find this game is missing are some training options based on elements and weapons. Most of the time, I found myself training 'in order to level up my mace so as to learn a new super-move', or 'leveling up wind in order to learn a devastating thunder attack', so I believe element-based patterns would only be natural. 

Another weakness I've found is the game's difficulty. I've fought every enemy I've found so far, without heavy grinding, yet I seem to be too powerful for the enemies on my zone. The game does lose its touch a bit when you find yourself every battle is a breeze.

Summary

To sum up, we've discussed 3 things of importance here: having the player train through battles in order to learn new moves and magic, making use of the different patters of attack available, and having him explore the whole world, enthralled by a sense of adventure and hidden relics everywhere. Not to mention, Grandia's battle system is surely quite different from any other game you've played, and does keep things interesting.

This has been all for today, I hope I put these ideas into good use someday.

Passage of Time in Games - Vol 3 - Games in Realtime

Hi folks.

Today, I'll be brain-storming my experiences on games that play in real-time - meaning time on the game flows as in real life. This does not refer to Massively Multi-player Online Games, as I'm not much of an online gamer (yet). Time flowing in real-time is a very interesting idea: the concept hooked me on my first real-time game (Virtual Villagers), so I began doing some research to find out this style of gaming was more spread out than I thought.

Virtual Villagers and Real-time gaming

Real-time gaming basically means that time flows as in real life. Not necessarily on a day-by-day basis, but it means there may be no means of advancing in-game time. In some games, this molds the player to play in regular intervals more than in long shots. Some of my Final Fantasy sessions have lasted maybe 6 hours or more, but I have never played Virtual Villagers for more than 1 hour. Why is this? Because time plays an integral role on the development of the game. In virtual villagers, you are in charge of a group of people, whom you must guide to build a small village. There's distinction between male, female and kids, and each may be born with different strengths and interests. The game motivates you to assign a duty to each villager, so that there's a scientist, a builder, forager, etc.

What's the deal? These tasks take time. Each villager grows up. They gradually begin to explore more parts of the island, understand what's on it, and stuff happens. The sea got polluted once, and the villagers had to turn to planting and foraging instead of relying on fishing. Another time, I noticed there were no kids on the village, and I had to start matching adults so that they 'had' babies. Each play-through involves checking new stuff (kids, scientific advances, natural disasters), assigning some duties to villagers, and checking out the status of the island.

There are, of course, some much-needed time-related options. The passage of in-game time can be configured (paused, slow, normal, fast), which enables you to play at your own pace. Going on a trip? Set the speed to pause. Wanna play all weekend? Set it to fast. There're no dying Tamagotchis here. Farmville falls in this kind of games, too, as the time you need for your veggies to grow paces your game sessions.

Pokemon and Morning/Day/Night differences

The Pokemon series have been quite famous from their start, but they have integrated a day/night cycle since their gold/silver/crystal generation. 

The facts: Pokemon change according to what time of day it is. This gives the game a great deal of randomness, if not replayability.

Firstly, it's nice to see each place change, if only visually. Unfortunately, most people act the same no matter the day or time and have the same routines, but then again, it's old-school gaming. Secondly, apart from time-of-day-specific pokemon, there are a lot of day-specific events on these games. Bug-contests are carried out on Saturdays, strange pokemon gather in a cave on Mondays, this kind of events are great, and compliment on the day-flowing system greatly. Berries also take their time to grow, so there's always something to look forward when turning the game on. And on the other hand, never will you find you can't continue playing the game because of the time, as shops are open 24-7, and there're no story-advancing time-specific events.

Animal Crossing

This game is a one-of-a-kind. Though I haven't yet played it, the mechanism to map every single calendar day to a in-game day is wondrous. This, of course, comes with its cons. If you want to be there on New Years' Eve, you gotta play the game on New Years' eve. Want to spend Thanksgivings with your Animal friends? Gotta play the day through. Of course, playing won't demand all day, but it's still interesting to watch gamers' reactions to this mechanism.


Let's sum up. Some games are played in real-time or quasi-real-time. This means, time flows as it flows on the real world, meaning you can't advance time in the game whenever you want. Games like Virtual Villagers have explored relating the in-game clock to the real-world one, letting you configure how fast time passes in-game. You are motivated to play the game in small sessions, as the most important stuff generally happens when you're not looking. Farmville plays similar to this, having you wait till your crops are fully grown in order to harvest them and plant some more. Pokemon series make use of real-time day/night cycles in order to give the game variety and color, apart from defining a day-of-week system, where day-specific events happen and motivate you to play the game on different days "just to see what happens". Animal Crossing maps real-world events to in-game festivals, having the player play through them, being quite interesting to see how the game unfolds.

I hope I can use these ideas in my own game someday, but for now, I'll be taking note of them and learning from upcoming games.

EDIT: Sorry to have forgotten, but the Laura Bow Point and Click Adventure Game Series is also time-based, though time flows according to the game's clock. Different events happen at different times, so I had fun exploring each location at each time.