Not that anyone’s keeping score, but this is actually my third replay of Shepherd’s Crossing 2. I keep coming back to it like a bad relationship. This time, to spice things up I decided to play as a girl, i.e. hard mode. And since I was taking the tougher route, I decided to shoot for the Mayor’s son (does he have a name?). It took me 8 years and 33 pieces of wool, but I finally got my man in the end. Not a bad catch, all things considered, but dang, that’s a hefty requirement. I should have just settled for Giles; they look almost identical anyway.
I’ve been wondering this from the first time I played Shepherd’s Crossing 2
– The grisly murder and consumption of all manner of cute little critters. Cute bunny? Rabbit stew. Cute ferret? Tanned skin. Cute pig? Sausages, ham, bacon, lard, all manner of delicious meals. Actually my nephew is a bloodthirsty little thing himself, so maybe he’s not a good example for this.
– Starving baby animals to death. Apparently you’re not supposed to milk mother animals until their kids have been weaned. Milking them carelessly will cause them to dry up and their babies to starve to death right in front of your eyes. You can’t put them out of their misery, you can’t sell them, you can’t feed them any milk. You just have to sit there and watch them run around helplessly until their final, miserable deaths.
– Minors drinking alcohol. Technically Kai is a marriage candidate, but he doesn’t look a day over twelve, and when you take him the tuica (liquor) and cheese dish, he says “That’s a drink for adults.” The kid’s barely legal and you’re forcing him to drink. And surely the resulting drunkenness and his subsequent ramblings about his village girl fantasies should bump this game up to a 10+ rating at least.
– “Animal husbandry.” To put it politely. The depictions may not be graphic, but the animals are, for all intents and purposes, copulating right there on the screen. First you’ll have to explain what “in heat” means to the kids, then explain why the male animals keep following her around: “See, when 3 daddy sheep love 1 mommy sheep very much…”
– Pigcest. They’re animals. They can’t be trucking with all this “ethics” and “morality” stuff. But the game designers and the ratings board officials are (presumably) human. Yet even they didn’t bat an eye at Pigsy having his way with Mumsy… and then having it off with the resulting sister-daughter to produce a niece-daughter-granddaughter, which he would probably have boinked if I hadn’t eaten him first.
– Castration. “No sweetheart, no one’s going to cut off your balls with a knife and make you pull a plow. It’s just a game.” Easy enough.
– Marriages as business transactions. I’ve played a lot of games and wooed many a partner. Believe me when I say this game is cold. Maki and Mika, my two previous wives, were friendly in a distant kind of way. Marriage to the mayor’s son is just depressing. “(I’m in love with this other girl, but since I can’t have her, and since you obviously want me badly enough to spend 8 years saving up to afford me, I suppose) I might as well settle for an average woman.” <— his own words. So you’ve got yourself a handsome husband but he doesn’t love you, he’s hardly ever home, when he is he only ever talks about work and he occasionally throws some money your way and expects you to be happy. I suppose 5 isn’t too young to learn that sometimes the most attractive thing about daddy is his bank account.
And so on, and so forth. Do the ESRB people actually play these games before rating them? There’s no way this game should have gotten an E with barely any content warnings at all.
I’m not complaining, mind you. The brutal, gritty aspect of the game is one of the things I like about it compared to the overly-sanitized Harvest Moon/Rune Factory games with their miracle potions and pescatarian diets and married couples never entering the same bed together nonsense. Shepherd’s Crossing and its sequel have some features I wish were in HM/RF and several more that HM/RF are only just getting round to adding (fertilizer, crop rotation, raising bees, llamas, alpacas, etc). I’m already planning my next playthrough. See you same time next year.
From what I heard, the ERSB works on an “honour” system. You submit what you think are the most “objectionable” aspects of the game, they give your game the most cursory glance to make sure you aren’t secretly slipping some kind of hardcore lesbian pr0n past them and just go “Ok, seems to be in order, whatever.”
I don’t think anyone’s going to write “You kill a lot of animals in the context of being a farmer” in such a list. Alcohol references is just about the only thing they would be concerned about. But you don’t write it down on the list and they don’t play enough of the game to see it (highly likely), it won’t be on the content rating.
So yeah, they don’t exactly dig through the games or anything. Otherwise the Hot Coffee scandal wouldn’t have happened. I guess if they had to throughly test all the shovelware games on the planet they would probably go nuts.
Yeah, you’re probably right. There’s no way they could play through every hour of every game submitted looking for objectionable content. They probably rely on consumers contacting them if they find anything amiss, but with an obscure game like this one, chances of that happening are slim. I wonder what other E-rated games are hiding death, incest and castration beneath a cheery-looking cover…
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I married Giles and it was just as cold i could cry. But otherwise i loved all the things that were different from HM and made it more realistic. After all, maybe even the relationships were realistic… how many loveless, however working marriages there are? Oh yes, Giles didn’t even like the name of our son. He didn’t care much, even. Ray was my second option but it’s hardly different.
Haru right away tells you she hates you during the wedding or so. O.o
Maybe if there weren’t HM games, we would just be happy with this, because we are spoiled by heartwarming, loving exclamations from the spouse every morning.
I knowww, once I got over being disappointed by Ray I was like “This is kind of realistic.” I mean what else do you expect from a marriage system where you essentially pay someone to marry you? And for much of world history and even in many cultures today marriage essentially works that way, so it’s an interesting system from that angle. But still, they could stand to be a teensy bit nicer, couldn’t they?
Hi! Do you still own the game? I would like to purchase it if possible.
Only in Japanese. If I had known it would go out of print, I would have stockpiled 100 English copies years ago.
Does the Japanese version have English text? Or do you understand Japanese?
No English in the Japanese version. I understand enough Japanese to play video games, so it’s not a problem for me.
I really shouldn’t say this but… if it’s too hard to find a legit English copy, you should think about emulating or straight up pirating it. The prices I see on Amazon these days are unrealistic.
“not for kids”: Farmers breed kids for the very goal of their farming, as kids. Maybe your sibling isn’t for kids.
girl, i.e. hard -> girl; i.e. touh
should -> ouht
not murder if it’s legal
Age ratings ouht be repealed.
Pictures are by definition ghrafic.
Yes, pigs are animals, like you. Morals and ethics are the same word, in two languages.
which -> whom
, -> ;
Umm, come again? I don’t understand any of that.