… I’m still not pissed off at the runey balancing mechanic yet, but I’m getting there.
The fighting is basic but refreshingly simple, and the characters are actually interesting enough to care about as opposed to Harvest Moon games. I’m trying to have the hero flirt up a nerdy girl who lives in an archive and spends all day and night reading and writing books (I suspect she’s reading slash fanfiction considering the reaction of the main character when he finds one of her books) - and Mist, who the series seem to pin as a main female character, can go dangle herself by her ankle in an apple tree for being a ditzy, demanding little biatch trying to be too cute to dislike.
This game, however, shines with a gleam of pure awesome bizarreness when it comes to the farmwork. You can of course do it yourself, but the game lets you tame monsters to get milk and eggs etc from, however you can also make some of them work for you. I’ve recruited a sword-swinging goblin to harvest my veggies, a slime to clear out rocks from the field, a floating demon mage thing with a skull face to cut wood, and a scythe-wielding ghost to cut weeds. How could you not love that?
I only played the DS version (I understand Frontier is some sort of sequel-port hybrid of that) and I thought it was great until I hit first Autumn and ran out of shit to do until winter. And that stuff I got done with before NotChristmas so… yeah, nice mechanics, needed way more content…
…and a little less green preaching. Yes, nature is important, SHUT UP ABOUT IT FOR HALF A FUCKING SECOND. This game made summoning ancient divine dragon to wreck shit on an invading army seem about as badass as a hippie protest. C’mon people.
From what you are saying, it seems the monsters are at least more useful. One huge dissapointment I had was when I got a badass silver wolf as a mount, only to find out that it was only about as fast as Raguna, couldn’t go into town and was way worse at fighting than Raguna alone. Having a dragon as a pet got far less awesome once I realized the thing did absolutely nothing but eat my stamina each time it threw a useless fireball that did 1/100 of the damage of a single sword swing.
The workers were a far cry from my beloved Harvest Sprite [STRIKE]slaves[/STRIKE] assistants in FoMT. And the profits from keeping monsters were crap as well. Then again, EVERYTHING was crap compared to farming a bunch of Lv 20+ diamonds for tens of thousands a pop. I thought they had fixed the “Mining is broken as shit” issue in HMDS, but this is even worse than FoMT in that regard. At least there, I had to hit Level 25 before getting anything worthwhile.
My opinion of Mist is that she is deranged. Like Kafuka from Zetsubou Sensei.
Yeah, something sure seems off with Mist. She’s probably pure evil.
I haven’t tried to fill the whole field up with crops yet so I’m not sure if a monster can polish that off by himself, but other than that, the monsters work fine. The wolf mount can go anywhere and can fight while you’re riding it (or you can fight side by side, but if you’re riding, only the wolf takes damage), doing three times as much damage as Raguna - though that could be because I need to make myself a new sword. I haven’t played the DS version so I couldn’t make a fair judgement, but from what you’re describing, Frontier is far superior. The monsters work for grass, and their attacks doesn’t take away from my stamina at all.
There’s a lot of stuff to do, I’m in the first autumn and have started exploring the second dungeon. I could have put it off for longer in favor of socializing with the townsfolk and following their storylines, but eh.
The monsters in the DS game didn’t consume stamina with regular attacks, but all those that cast spells (or had magic-like skills like fire breathing) ate from my RP pool.
If you are in autumn already and still have things to do, then yeah, the game is clearly vastly superior.
Another thing that irked me about the DS version was that grass needed to be re-planted every time you cut it, unlike every other HM game ever. Did they change that?
SE, you ever play the second game? THey fixed a lot of the broken issues in RF2 by making it so higher-level crops/gems/anything actually only increased the cost minimally. And you can only mine one area a day. My main issue with it, though, is how you can only explore a tiny part of any dungeon until the second generation Which always takes me about a year to set up. THere’s a long period of boredom between when you get married (you have to, for once), and when you complete building the village schoolhouse. Especially if you were growing the super-crops that take months or a year to plant, which are available from the start.