I’ll start by giving out a link to the developer’s website where you can download this game and try it for yourself…HERE. It doesn’t need installing. Unzip, play, delete when tired.

Haretari Kumottari N (Sometimes it’s Sunny, Sometimes it’s Cloudy N) is billed as an adventurer sim. Having played it, however, it comes across as more of a life sim, where the main character just happens to be an adventurer. I say that because the majority of things you can choose to have Fill do have very little to do with adventuring. The only character in-game who gets to have real adventures is Theo, an adventurer you hire to go dungeon exploring for you.

Check out some of the things Fill can do every day (hardly an exhaustive list):

Laundry, take a bath, go to the library, paint, admire painting, cook, think about cooking, take a job, train, polish his sword, wear perfume, talk to friends, hang out with friends, flirt with friends, give friends presents, run a lunchbox shop, go adventuring, take quests from the guild, go swimming, take a class, look at the sky, go fishing, go shopping, clean his room, etc etc etc.

And every week/month:

Play the lottery, visit neighboring countries, take part in cookery/exercise/fitness/painting/swimming contests, sign up for classes, visit the forest to progress the ‘story’, buy/expand a farm, visit the guild to pick up his paycheck, etc, etc.

You notice “traditional” adventurer activities like, you know, adventuring and doing quests form only a tiny part of his day-to-day life. But of course, that’s the choice you make as the gamer, picking which of the many, many available actions you want Fill to take part in. After all, you have to juggle a couple of stats at the same time. First, Fill’s finances. He starts out 5000£ in debt and pays interest every day. He also needs a LOT of money to buy and upgrade weapons, upgrade his farm, upgrade his lunchbox shop, enter certain contests and all the other things your average adventurer needs money for.

Secondly, you have to watch his hunger, since Fill has a metabolism that would put many Harvest Moon protagonists to shame. If he gets hungry he can’t take quests (though he can do everything else just fine) and if he outright begins to starve his happiness and popularity drop like a rock after Shio bails him out.

Which leads me to the third and fourth things you have to watch: happiness and popularity. TBH I’ve never let them drop too low, so I don’t know what happens if you’re unhappy or unpopular. If you’ve very happy, you get to throw a party, or just enjoy your happiness. Parties raise your friends’ affections and your abilities at cooking, swimming, etc. If you’re very popular, you get to be Mayor for a day, which actually improves the town. Somebody fire the regular mayor already!

That leads to the seventh, eighth, ninth…I’m losing count. Basically you’re expected to improve the city by improving safety, increasing the population, beautifying the place, etc. Being Mayor is one way to do it. So is donating money to various collectors. So is taking quests.

I haven’t even gotten round to talking about quests and Guild Rank yet. And then I have to describe weapons and how to improve them and how combat works. And there’s a story in there as well. Phew. Okay, I’ll try to keep this short.

The Guild: You take quests. Some involve fighting. Some don’t. They all increase your hunger and popularity while decreasing happiness. Quests are ranked 0-6. 0 quests have no fighting, 1+ quests have increasingly difficult fights. In addition to the immediate compensation you get for quests, you also get paid a monthly salary depending on how many Guild Points you earned in combat. On top of all that, you can purchase Guild Rank licenses, from Rank G to Rank A. The higher you go, the better the stuff you can buy in stores (especially weapons) but the harder enemies and quests get. However you can switch ranks at will. This means you can go up to Rank A, buy Rank A weapons, then lower your level and fight Rank G enemies.You can also switch between (IIRC) 15 different classes, from swordsman to priest to playboy. I’ve only unlocked about 10 so far.

Weapons: Fill’s stats depend almost entirely on the weapon he has equipped. Weapons come with basic stats. You have to pay money and use Mana Points, intrinsic to weapons, and Mana Bonuses, which you get by leveling up, to improve ATK, HP, MP and Speed.

Skills: The marketing copy boasts of “over 100 equippable skills.” Cutting, thrusting, pounding, magic, recovery, etc. This is probably the worst part of the game for me. I just can’t figure out what makes one skill better than another. The stats are just too horribly obscure and hard to read. I followed basic RPG logic and assumed the later you get a skill, the better it must be. It’s worked out pretty well so far.

Combat: Fill equips up to 8 skills. At the stat of a battle, the CPU chooses one skill at random. Say, skill no.3. Then for the next 5 turns Fill works his way through skills 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. If the battle still hasn’t ended by then, the computer chooses another skill at random and the cycle begins anew. If Fill runs out of HP or 20 turns elapse without a winner, he loses and forfeits all rewards. It’s not a bad system, and for a doujin game they actually have a reasonable selection of enemies. I know I would have enjoyed it way more if they had used a regular turn-based battle system though.

Story: Not much to start with. Fill is a fresh immigrant to the city of Ishvald. He has to try and survive as best as he can, that’s it. A little way into the game, he is beset by a fairy named Rakish, who requests his help to drive monsters out of nearby Mellow Forest. This turns out to be caused by the evil fairy Lily. Lily’s trying to release some evil dragon god sealed somewhere. Needless to say, this story progression is done entirely at my discretion. I’m more interested in having Fill eat Chinese food and go to the circus than in saving the world, but I’ll get there.

Characters: The developers Inu to Neko seem to use the same characters in all their games, but this probably the first game where they all appear together. I say that because this time they actually explain things like why Ruvel has a crush on Yayoi, and what kind of relationship Fill has with Shio (more than friends, less than lovers, also Shio is not a trap 0_0), that sort of thing. As you increase your friends’ affection by giving them gifts and talking to them, you’re treated to character skits and short character-specific sidequests that teach you more about them.

Blah blah blah, and so on and so forth. TL;DR there’s a LOT to do in Haretari Kumottari N.

Enough about that, on to what really matters: Is this game any good?

Why yes, yes it’s good. For, say, two or three days. There’s so much to do and so many activities to try that it’ll keep you busy for a short while. Also this is just me, but I really liked the characters and enjoyed hanging out with them. The reasons why it doesn’t last longer than a few days are:

1. That’s how long it’ll take you to max everyone’s affections, reach Rank A, win most contests and complete the story. It’s a short game.
2. Apart from battles, everything plays out text-only, no animations. You don’t get to see Fill picking up trash or giving elderly people massages. This makes it easy to get tired of doing things.
3. Battles are aight, but not much fun. That means a big chunk of the game – fighting, weapon upgrades, skills, can and should be ignored most of the time.
4. Having so much to do and so little time to do it in is first exciting, then frustrating, then boring. Especially when you combine it with #2.

So it’s a good, short, fun diversion, which is exactly what I was looking for when I picked it up. I’ve gotten the sim game bug out of my system for a little while now. Back to Zero no Kiseki (geh) and Xenoblade Chronicles (urgh) now.