Harvest Moon DS & Quest mechanics

Recently I’ve been playing Harvest Moon DS again. Why? Is it because I am a glutton for punishment?  Is it that it has lots of addicting mechanics? I am not sure. Probably because there is just so much content in the game I haven’t seen yet.

I’ve written about Harvest Moon DS before.  I was unfair then, having just got off of a play through of Harvest Moon 64 I was jaded, but I do think the game piles on needlessly complicated tasks to pad things out. The most egregious example is the quest to rescue the harvest sprites.

At the beginning of the game the harvest sprites and the harvest Goddess disappear, and through doing a variety of random or repetitive tasks, you must recue sixty of the sprites to return the Harvest Goddess to the valley. Until you do this you cannot access large parts of the game.

Quests are an indispensable part of RPG mechanics. Ideally the game gives you a goal, some in game motivation for the goal, and a reward for the player at the end. This reward could be a cut scene, a special item, or if the quest is central part of the game, plot advancement.  But there are several kinds of quests, fun quests with easy to moderate difficulty, or hard, tedious quests meant to satisfy completionist urges.

The great thing about the classic Harvest Moon games is that they are filled with both kinds of quests. As you go about building your farm and starting a life in the country side there are all sorts of weird characters, funny cut scenes and special items you can unlock by completely various tasks.  Some of these quests are obvious. Some you have to think about or just look up, some are just impossible thanks to shoddy programing or localization; something very common in Harvest Moon DS, and 64.  But the problem with the Harvest sprite quest is that it’s both tedious and central to the plot. You have to unlock the sprites or the game wont advance. And the sprites are sealed behind repetitive activities like selling three hundred bottles of milk, or upgrading a tool to max.  What if I don’t want to raise animals? What if I want to turn all my milk into cheese so I can sell at a higher price? Then good luck unlocking a good chunk of the harvest sprites, because your other options are buried behind even more difficult and tedious accomplishments.

This is a pity because there is a lot you can do in this game. It chalked full of content, but before you can access a lot of it it you have to grind, and not just the random mindless grinding of a classic RPG which could be charming it its own way. The easiest way to unlock the harvest sprites is to look at which ones you have, and look up online which you are closest to unlocking, then plan your gameplay around the mechanic.  It should be the other way around, and I think it’s clear they were going for that. Most sprites are unlocked through normal gameplay elements like watering crops or selling stuff. But the numbers involved and the nature of the quests makes this end up backwards. You end up playing the game to fulfill the quest, not fulfilling the quest by playing the game.

So what makes a quest mechanic good? A good quest mechanic is one you want to complete, not just one you have to. A good quest mechanic is fun. Of course this is highly subjective, some people get joy out of fulfilling any quest no matter how out of the way or tedious. That’s fine and I think it is good that so many games have stuff for those people who either love  getting 100% completion or just can’t get enough of an individual game. Nor am I one of those people who believes a game should necessarily be easy or purely about story progression. True, some games are designed that way, and they should minimize mechanics that get in the way of that. There are all sorts of games, but I do question the wisdom of putting a long, tedious quest at the game’s core.  I am sure there is a market for that, but when I pick up an RPG I expect some degree of complicated quests, but I expect the long drawn out ones to be secondary to the gameplay. 

-Gedaemon