I have long since given up hope of ever seeing Shepherd’s Crossing 3 come out. Or so I keep telling myself, but every now and then I check on Success Corp’s website juuuuust in case they’ve changed their minds. They haven’t, of course. That’s why I’m here and not running down the streets shouting Hallelujah. But they did release an interesting smartphone app two days ago, a farming game called Hatakeppi (official website). There’s a Youtube trailer as well.

I know, I know, *groan* another “free”-to-play money-grubbing app, not another Farmville *groan*. The twist this time is that you can use the points you earn in the game to order up to 30 different types of vegetables and other farm products from real-life farmers across Japan. I highly doubt they deliver overseas, but I’m very interested in learning how this works out practically. After all, I must have harvested at least 10,000 veggies in Harvest Moon, Rune Factory and Shepherd’s Crossing combined. If I could get even 1% of the them in real life, I’d be eating well for weeks!

Depending on the rate of conversion and how good the game actually is, Hatakeppi might be a great initiative. The gameplay in the trailer didn’t look too inviting, but according to their twitter, the developers incorporated advice from actual farmers in their gameplay. In theory that means there’s going to be more to farming then just watering and fertilizing your crops then going to bed. Of course there’s always the risk of them going too far in the opposite direction and making farming hell. Bugs eat your crops, bears and wolves eat your animals, an early frost kills off most of your wheat… hmm, sounds just like Shepherd’s Crossing.

I’m more worried about the “points = veggies” mechanism. How do you earn points? How many points get you one vegetable? What’s the minimum number of veggies you need to get one shipment? How hard will it be to get that much? If, for example, you earn 1 point per hour but you need 25000 points to buy a single onion, it’s probably not worth anyone’s time to play it. In all likelihood Hatakeppi will be an extremely money-hungry game because every point you didn’t pay for is going to come out of the developer’s real-life pocket. Either that or it will be plagued with ads, or both.

The basic research I’ve been doing tells me it’s a program that has been running for at least 4 years (source 1, source 2, source 3, all Japanese). You pick a crop, “grow it” in the game, get points for harvesting it, then spend the points on real life veggies, fruit, meat and fish. I’m getting hungry now. Hatakeppi is the brain child of a company called LD Inc and (it seems) Success just helped them turn it into a smartphone game.

Being the good investigative gamer I am, I would love to try it out so I can provide more details but so far, no good. The Google play store link is here, but as usual it’s telling me “This app is incompatible with your device.” If I manage to track down an apk and get it to work, I’ll see if I can find out more about how the game actually works. I don’t know if I want to go as far as getting a Japanese proxy and making a fake Google ID just so I can play it, but rest assured I will make all reasonable efforts to check Hatakeppi out and report back to you. Wish me luck!