All right. I ended last time by explaining all the reasons why I found this game Random and Restrictive. But to prove it wasn’t all bad, before I dig into the rest of this game, I’ll mention another good thing I liked about this game: cooking.

Cooking

As distinguished from the cooking festival, which I’ve already explained was pure crap. Your team members lose the contest for you despite your hardest efforts, and it’s the same lines and the same events repeated over and over again. The town mayors vary their lines a little as the towns get closer, but it’s one variation, 5 repetitions, one variation, 5 repetitions, ad nauseam.

No, what I do like is the actual cooking. From the crops you grow and the things you process, you can cook over 300 different dishes in your kitchen, most of which look absolutely delicious. Salads, soups, hors d’oevres, main dishes and several other things. And unlike many other HMs, you don’t have to be taught the recipe to do it. You either cook over and over again until you’re “inspired” and suddenly learn a new recipe, or you can go straight to an FAQ and save yourself the pain of wasted ingredients. Here’s a link (Japanese) to save you time as well: 料理.

Even better, your energy doesn’t go down while you’re cooking, so you can cook all day and all night if you want. And you can make several items at once instead of just one at a time. You can select ingredients that are in your storeroom as well. If I had to mention just one drawback, it’s that the game keeps questioning you. Want to make a variation? Want to keep the quality of the dish? Etc, etc. A bit annoying having to click through all that, but it’s okay. I like cooking in real life, so I tend to like cooking games too.

Boring

1. The marriage candidates – Wow! They all look so nice! And they all suck so much! This is a very subjective opinion, so I’m not going to run my mouth on about it and invite needless argument. I’ll just say they weren’t my type. I keep comparing this game to Grand Bazaar because they’re very similar gameplaywise, stylistically and characterization-wise, but even the marriage candidates in GB had (a tiny bit) more spark than the ones in this one. The girls in Twin Villages are just dull, bland and similar, not much to choose between them. I chased first one then another, but I still couldn’t find anything to like. If I ever do a replay, I might try playing as a girl instead, maybe the guys are better.

Lia – Cute, friendly, likes cooking
Raspberry – Cute, friendly, likes animals
Nana – Cute, friendly, likes nature
Licorice – Cute, not so friendly, likes plants
The Sage – Cute, friendly, mysterious
Ariella – Cute, friendly, religious

There, that’s it. That’s all. They’re cute, but there’s nothing to choose between them. Remember the girls in the original Harvest Moon? Karen, Ann, Mary? Or even more recently, all the different girls in Rune Factory 3? Compared to that, this is just a giant snoozefest. You can go out on dates with them, which is even snoozier because you have to ask them out at certain times of the day and take them to certain places only. Then they have the nerve to get jealous if you date other girls. Man, you just can’t win with some people.

2. Time passing – Sooo slow. S o o o o o  s l o w. Just like in Grand Bazaar, one in-game minute corresponds to one real life second, which sounds fast until you actually play it and realize it takes forever for anything to happen. With the innovations in farming and ranching, namely planting in rows and getting your pets to take care of your animals, it doesn’t take long to get your morning duties done. Wake up at 6, do everything by 8 and then… then… then… If you like you can plant crops in both Kotonoha and Bluebell and go back and forth and water them, I did that after a while and it still didn’t take that much time.

You can go exploring in the mountains, which gets real old real quick. You can do some pointless quests, more on that below. You can talk to townspeople and try to woo your bland marriage candidate. You can…uh… You can do like I do and start going to bed at 12pm every day, that’s what. Just like in GB, the more you water your crops the faster they grow, but do you have any idea how tedious it is to stay up doing ABSOLUTELY NOTHING all day long just so you can water your crops again like you’ve done a million times before? Just so they grow a little faster and give you more money that you don’t even need? After the first year I just couldn’t take it any more.

3. Still no mining – I guess the fans didn’t complain enough when GB came out with mining removed, so Marvelous repeated the crime in Twin Villages. Your main way of getting the ores you need for quests and upgrades is to find them in the underground tunnel once you’ve got it open. Even then it’s all a matter of luck when you break the ore open. After years of making mining increasingly more broken, Marvelous has obviously given up and said “This is a farming game! Go play Minefest Moon if you want to mine!” And that was the end of that!

EDIT: I am informed by akira666 that if you play far enough, you can unlock a wider network of tunnels that you can go exploring and ore-hunting in. This makes it better than Grand Bazaar, at any rate. I stand corrected.

Repetitive

1. The cooking festivals – I already went into why these suck above and in the previous post. It’s the same pattern every time: mayors say the same thing, Pierre says the same thing, and takes forever to do it too, Harvest Goddess says the same thing, etc, etc. The only nice thing is that you may occasionally get good quality seeds or ore from your mayor after winning. But that doesn’t make up for the extreme tediousness after the first few festivals. There are other crop and animal festivals as well. They’re equally repetitive, but they happen a little less frequently, so I don’t have an issue with them.

2. Your daily schedule – Wake up, water crops, groom animals, play with pets, talk to townspeople who will say exactly the same thing all the time, fill a few quests, give a few gifts, roam through the mountains…There’s quite a bit of stuff to do. But it’s the same “quite a bit of stuff” every single day, every single week, every single month, every single year. It got unspeakably dull to me after just a few hours. Especially the mountain exploration, I just couldn’t stand it. Jump here, pick up this item, jump there, pick up this other item, run there, jump there, avoid this stupid bear that comes out of nowhere and attacks you… I read a few Japanese reviews which loved that aspect of the game, but I just couldn’t stand it. I couldn’t.

3. Quests – Taking a cue from the Rune Factory series and similar games, Twin Villages introduces a request board system where the townspeople can post quests for you to fulfill. I’m not going to wax lyrical about Rune Factory, because that series is hardly perfect either, but at least in RF (2 and 3) the quests are partly used as a way of getting to know the characters, getting closer to them and exploring their personalities. Accordingly there are a number of repeated quests, but there are a lot of new, one-time only quests as well. Essentially they form part of the story.

*sigh* Talk about taking the form and missing the essence. Twin Villages has quests all right. Tons of them, ranging in difficulty from E to S. You even get nice rewards for the better ones. But there’s no point. There’s no soul. There’s no progress. You’re just the town errand boy, doing one fetch quest after another forever and ever and ever. I swear, these townspeople are the laziest people on the planet and you, the player, are the biggest enabler ever! How many times are you going to fetch poison mushrooms for Ayame before you shove them down her throat and choke her? It never ends! Get me this, and that, and this, and that, and this, and that. As you get further and further into the game, their requests become fussier and more convoluted: “Not just any rose bouquet, it has to be level 2.5 and above or I won’t take it, hmph!” At that stage of the game you’ll have to plant/produce the components yourself and create whatever item it is, and give it to them for a reward you usually don’t need if you’re that far into the game. So…yeah.

Misc

1. Controls – I wasn’t sure whether to add this because at first it really bothered me, but after a while I got used to it and barely noticed it any more. Basically this game is going to hurt your wrist. In order to run, you have to press the L button and hold it. Doesn’t sound so hard huh? Try pressing the L button now, holding it, and using the directional keypad at the same time. Go on, keep doing it, keep going. It’s extremely uncomfortable and takes a while to get used to. It would have made more sense for the R button to be used, or for you to be able to press L once to turn dashing on, and L again to turn it off. What’s worse, I don’t even think it’s good for your L button to be depressed that long. However, just like the awful touchscreen-only controls in Island of Happiness, once you get used to it you don’t really notice it so much any more. As long as you don’t have any wrist or finger troubles (or very small hands), you should be okay.

2. The Harvest Goddess is annoying – She’s always been annoying, but I swear she gets worse and worse with every passing game. This time she caused half the trouble in the game by sealing the tunnel, and instead of fixing it she makes you have to do it. Not content with this, she insists on popping up every time you do something insignificant. “Ta-daa, you just ran 100 steps on your horse!” “Ta-daa, you just pulled up 100 turnips!” “Ta-daa, you’ve done a ton of errands, I hereby dub you ‘Errand Boy!’ As your reward, you can do even more errands!” <– yes, this really does happen. I can’t stand that cow.

3. Bad carryovers from Grand Bazaar – I already mentioned the slow pace and the lack of mining.

-They took out the double jump, which would have made navigating the mountain easier.
-They added more bugs and fish to catch, but only have a few designs for each one so that catching one feels just like catching another. And if you use the wrong fish in a recipe it fails, hard.
-Again you can only have one save point, and you can only save once a day, right before you go to bed.
-Milking and brushing your cows and sheep takes forever.
-Just like GB, the game comes with your house, kitchen and barn set up already so you can jump straight in. I miss having to construct all those things. Then again with the horrible upgrade system, maybe that’s for the best.

And so on, and so forth. I think I’ve devoted more than enough time to these explanations. To be fair there are a few things I did like, like the stuff I’ve already mentioned, and the graphics and the calm music, but they were few and far between, and not enough to override the negatives.