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just-j-really · 3 months

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Unsoulmates AU, part 6!

(Masterpost) (AO3)

"Have you found your person yet?" Morpheus asks, while Hob wrestles with their dinner dishes.

Hob had dragged Morpheus back to his flat to force some food into him after Morpheus had admitted that, with the opening date for Will's play drawing closer, he can't remember the last time he had a full meal. He'd sort of been expecting Morpheus to leave as soon as he'd eaten, since he'd only agreed to food in the first place because Hob had promised to reheat some leftovers and let him go.

He had, in fact, suggested several times that Morpheus consider things like going home and getting some sleep, and Morpheus had replied that sleep could wait until the problem with act two was fixed and-

The point is Hob isn't really sure why Morpheus is still sitting in his kitchen, asking him questions Hob's already answered, instead of doing either of those things, and it takes every ounce of self-control he has to derail himself from saying I think I did. I think I did, even if you find way too much amusement in my lack of spoon-washing ability.

What he says instead is, "Do you think Soulmates account for dishes?"

"What?" Morpheus asks, taking his seeming change of subject entirely in stride.

"They're supposed to be your Perfect Other Half, right?" Hob says, with only a little bit of sarcasm. "So does that mean my soulmate just loves doing dishes? To balance me out? Because that doesn't seem-" and then chokes on the rest of the sentence, because Morpheus has appeared at his elbow and taken the plate he'd been washing directly out of his hands.

"Oh, you don't- I wasn't asking-" Hob manages to sputter, once he's gotten over the shock. In that time, Morpheus has dropped the plate four times, splattered water all over his nice coat, and, crucially, made even less progress re: dishes than Hob was making.

"You can dry," Morpheus informs him, and that's that.

"Have you found your person yet?" Morpheus asks, through the door to Hob's flat. Hob had texted him- something, earlier, to let him know he was too sick to cook tonight, sorry. He's not sure what words he'd used, in hindsight. He's not sure they were English. He'd taken a nap immediately afterwards and woken up to find his fever finally gone down and Morpheus at his door with takeout.

Hob's not letting him in. He's not risking spreading this bullshit.

"You find 'em for me," Hob says, sliding to a seat against the door. It's nice, not to be standing. He might take a nap here.

Morpheus makes. A noise. A raspy, grating noise, like the sound that the concept of rusted metal would make if it were sentient, had some sort of lung disease, and was being tortured.

Hob is back on his feet and flinging the door open before he can think, coming face-to-face with Morpheus, who has one hand clamped over his mouth to stifle his-

Laughter, Hob realizes. With the context of the way Morpheus' eyes are sparkling and his hand is doing nothing to hide a wry smile, that horrific noise was definitely laughter. The weird little snorting sound he's currently doing an extremely unsuccessful job of muffling is him giggling.

It's hideous, and unrestrained, and adorable, and Hob immediately decides that he would cross and burn any number of bridges in order to hear him laugh like that again.

"I'll take the food for now, though," he says, voice hoarse in a way that has nothing to do with illness.

For some reason this sets off Morpheus laughing again, which means that despite the ache in all Hob's limbs and the fact that standing so quickly made the room start wobbling and his stomach churning, today officially gets marked as one of the best he's had all year.

"Have you found your person yet?" Morpheus asks, opening night of his and Will's play, the moment Hob pushes through the crowd in the lobby close enough to speak to him.

"You're asking me that now?" Hob replies. His eyes are still itchy from crying and he thinks he's going to need another week or so to be able to think clearly, after Morpheus methodically, delicately pulled his soul apart and rewove it into something better over the course of four acts, and he doesn't have the words to explain any of that so instead he just sweeps Morpheus up in a hug that lifts his feet from the ground.

Morpheus makes a startled little noise and clings to Hob's shoulders with both arms. "You're incredible," Hob says. He allows himself to hold Morpheus for one more moment, not long enough to matter to anyone but him, before gently setting him down. "Absolutely incredible. I don't- that was amazing. How the fuck are you this talented," he says. "I think you broke me."

In all the time he's been rambling, Morpheus has kept his arms around Hob's neck, perfectly still, like he's afraid he'll fall if he lets go even though his feet are firmly back on the floor. So Hob tugs him a little closer, and Morpheus sighs a little and leans against his chest, and Hob gets so distracted trying to preserve every detail of this moment in his memory that he forgets he was trying to explain to Morpheus how beautiful his play was-

And now they're just. Standing in a corner. Hugging.

Hob's life is perfect.

"Sorry," Hob says, eventually. "I should let you talk to people." The crowd around them is beginning to thin out, and as much as he wants to Morpheus all to himself he knows he should let him go mingle.

To his surprise, Morpheus shrugs. "That can wait."

It's a shot of sugary delight directly into Hob's bloodstream, and he can't restrain the smile that spreads across his face, over-enthusiastic to the point of hurting his cheeks a little. Morpheus wants to spend time with him! Specifically! Over reaping the rewards of the project that's consumed his heart and soul for as long as Hob's known him! Life is so wonderful!

Hob pulls out of the hug, just enough to scan the room. He's not familiar with this theater, but there has to be somewhere nearby they could slip off to, for a bit. Maybe talk a little. Maybe-

Maybe. Maybe Morpheus still has an arm looped around his shoulders, even though they're no longer hugging. Maybe Hob's arm is still around Morpheus' waist, and Morpheus has done nothing to shrug it off. Maybe, when Hob wraps that arm a little tighter, Morpheus only leans into him, lets his head drop onto Hob's shoulder. Even though there's a crowd around them, and anyone could see him nuzzling up against Hob in a way most people only do with their soulmates.

Maybe, Hob realizes, that crowd is so firmly clustered around Will not a single one of them would notice if he and Morpheus were actually, currently fucking. They're looking with Will with a sort of fervor that suggests he's going to start healing the sick with a touch or something. It doesn't seem like he's making any particular effort to direct them over to Morpheus, either, and sure Hob's been clinging to Morpheus for the past several minutes but Will's never seen that as a problem before.

"Wow," Hob says, not bothering to disguise his distaste, "Does he normally do this?"

"What?" Morpheus asks, sounding genuinely confused.

"This," Hob says, nodding at Will and His Adoring Public. They're still standing close enough that he barely needs to move his chin for Morpheus to understand what he means.

"It's his work," Morpheus says, his voice distant. "He deserves the credit."

Which is. Fair, Hob supposes. Probably. He could maybe even convince himself of that if Morpheus' expression weren't so resigned.

So he turns his head to Morpheus, close enough that no one else will be able to hear him, and says, "You deserve just as much. That bit where they hold hands in the last scene, after she dies? That made me cry. And I know that was all you." It was a tiny, subtle bit of stage directing that had the entire play's worth of meaning packed into it, of course that was Morpheus'.

Morpheus goes very, very still. The look on his face is less shocked than entirely disbelieving, like Hob had just recited some lost verse of poetry that archaeologists would sell their souls to rediscover.

"Don't deny it," Hob says, softly. "You broke my heart. Take responsibility," he adds, keeping his tone light enough that Morpheus can accept it as teasing even if what he means is Take my heart.

A small, pleased smile slips across Morpheus' face, and he melts back against Hob's side, lets his arm drop to Hob's waist. "I'm. In fucking awe of how talented you are," Hob says quietly. "And everybody else should be, too. You should have to wear sunglasses in public all the time to avoid getting mobbed by fans. There should be statues of you, and parades, and-"

"Yes, yes, alright," Morpheus says, elbowing him. He somehow manages to bring them even closer together with the gesture, so he's leaning more against Hob's chest than his side. "That part isn't important," he adds. "The play itself is. People saw it and it moved them, inspired them. That's what matters." His tone is the textbook example of 'haughty artist, far above mortal concerns.' It compliments his smile- satisfied, a little flustered- beautifully. What matters to Hob, at any rate, is that the confidence finally doesn't seem like a front.

"I still think you should get a statue," he murmurs, voice low, "But if you really don't mind missing out on all this, you wanna get out of here?"

#dreamling #unsoulmates au #we're back! again!#thank you to Jules for letting me throw questions at you at all hours <3 #my fic #Im aware this is a weird spot to end it but there is. a lot. to the next part and it was getting unwieldy

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stemmmm · 8 months

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Close to a year and four rewrites later, I present to you...

Stem's Thoughts on the Game Design of Harvest Moon on SNES

I’m not going to lie, if you don’t like farming sims, you won’t like this one. At their core, every farming sim (at least in the rpg genre) is nearly identical, and that’s because of this game. In a way, I might dare to say that Harvest Moon for the SNES is the perfect farming sim because it has every one of the usual elements in their most simplified form and it just works straight from the get-go. It works so well in fact, that after this game came out in 1996, four more entries to the series were released before the year 2000.

If you are someone who does like farming sims, I can’t recommend this game enough. It’s simple and to the point, with a fast pace and enough random events and points of intrigue that the game kept me relatively engaged for my whole playthrough.

Also, by nature of this being the first game and therefore hard to cover concisely and by nature of taking so long to write this... it's long as hell! Enjoy! :) <3

I can’t say my appreciation of this game doesn’t come with a few caveats. I’ve intermittently played HM games all my life, starting with the GameBoy port (GB1) all the way to Pioneers of Olive Town, so while I don’t know exactly how the series has evolved, I’ve seen it at some of its earliest and at its latest. My vague childhood memories of GB1 (a game I didn’t own and didn’t play much of) were that it was pretty sparse and bland, so knowing that this original game was allegedly the same thing but with a little more content, I was expecting the bare minimum. I was prepared to never even be able to leave my farm, but the first thing the game did was shuttle me off to the nearby town and blocked the exit until I talked to everyone there.

(Maps of the town, mountain, and farm via The Spriters Resource)

You learn everything you need to know about the game right here at the beginning; Firstly, that this town is small as all hell and has hardly anyone in it aside from the five girls you can marry and their immediate family members. The next thing you’ll learn is that there’s a fence on your farm, and you need to be taking care of that. Of the few repetitive lines of dialogue any given person in town has to share with you on any given day, a fair amount are devoted to reminding you to fix your fence, to make sure it’s in good repair. There was just a big storm so watch out! Remember to check it every day! Are you chopping enough wood? Because you’ll need it for that fence!

I’m being dramatic of course, you aren’t reminded about it that much, though the thin variation of dialogue means it comes up a lot. The emphasis on your fence does exist, and it isn’t for nothing: while it doesn’t matter as much if all you do is grow crops– if you keep animals, the game tells you that the ideal thing to do for yours and the animal’s happiness is to put the animals outside to graze. Animal feed bought from the livestock shop will keep them fed, but it's nothing compared to fresh grass grown on your farm. You can’t even buy animals without a certain amount of grass planted! And sure, you can cut the grass to store for later, but it’s at its best straight out of the ground. However, the way the game is programmed, the animals only eat when the day rolls over, so putting animals outside for the day and taking them in at night isn’t an option, and on top of that, there’s things that come out at night that can hurt your animals. This is where your fence comes in.

The Utility of Fences

At the entrance to your farm is a cluster of buildings: your house, a small lumber shed, a barn, coop, and silo, a tool shed, and an old, dried up well. Just barely surrounding all of these is a little wooden fence that looks more like a row of upright logs than anything else. Despite this farm having presumably been abandoned, the fence is in perfect repair. You’ll quickly discover that the fence as it is won’t work out; there’s hardly space to plant anything within it, and with the well dried up, you’re forced to hop it to get to a water source to fill up your watering can. It’s pretty clear that you’ll need to expand your fence, and it’s easy to do with all of the tree stumps littering the massive field that it’s blocking off.

On top of needing to expand the range of your fence, the individual planks eventually will rot away and leave useless stumps. They show up more frequently after rain or a large storm. The posts don’t rot away completely so they have to be manually removed, but replacing them is as simple as smashing the old post with a hammer or ax and popping a new post in its place. It becomes a very natural part of your daily routine to run a lap around the farm’s perimeter before you go to bed to make sure everything looks safe and secure. It’s a good way to ensure your animals are put away and debris is cleared out, too! It slotted very nicely into my daily schedule until a certain point.

With how much time you have to spend hopping over the logs to get to the rest of the area too large to fence in, you might be tempted to leave one out of place for easier traversal. When night comes, it’s clear why that would be a mistake. Sometimes when you go to bed, you’ll hear your dog barking. It’s a small detail, one that took me a long time to notice because I didn’t always play with the sound on. There are wild dogs that prowl around the wilderness surrounding your farm, and only at night do they dare to come close. Your dog, if left outside, isn't able to do anything other than warn you of their presence if they show up. There’s nothing to notice during the daytime if it happens, unless you happened to leave one of your animals outside. There was one night that I left my chickens outside, having thought my fence was in perfect order and repair. I went to bed and heard the dog barking, followed by a horrible crunch. When I went out in the morning, I saw where my chicken had been before, it had been replaced by a pile of feathers. On the north side of my farm was a rotted fence post I’d failed to fix.

The Reality of Fences

After losing my chicken, a cluster of pixels on my screen it may have been, I didn’t feel comfortable leaving my animals outside. I didn’t want to take a risk again, the sound and sight of feathers was upsetting enough. On a more logical note, the chickens didn’t even lay eggs if left outside so there was no value in it. Cows were a pain to put back inside the barn too, because of some silliness with the game’s collision. As much of a disappointment as it was to not have my animals roam around, it was just easier. At the time, I was focusing on upgrading my house anyways, so I didn’t have time to take care of my animals outside where time would pass when I could use that time gathering wood, and everything I had was being saved up for the house so I didn’t have any extra materials to repair my fence with. My fence was all rotting away. Because it was inconvenient for getting to my crops, I started smashing all the old posts as they went, too. That’s when I noticed something: the wild dog wasn’t coming anymore.

I didn’t pay much attention to it until I was looking up a completely different mechanic and discovered a forum explaining how the fences were broken. Rotted posts attracted the wild dog, they said. It didn’t matter if you had gaps in your fence, or even a fence at all–in fact no fence was the best kind to have because the mere existence of posts that could rot was a liability.

I was hesitant at first to test this concept, after all there wasn’t much I could gain from it. My chickens wouldn’t lay outside, and my cows would be too challenging to get back in if the forecast called for rain. The thing that got me to finally try it was when I was trying to hatch more chickens. My coop felt like a nightmare to navigate due to its current population. I wanted less animals inside that I had to feed, so I threw a couple chicks outside–they weren’t laying yet anyways. Lo and behold, the dog didn’t come. More days passed and more animals were left outside, and it never came. My fence had rotted until there was nothing left at all. No dogs could ever come to my farm again. And I realized that the game’s own insistence on its mechanics was all a lie.

How You’re Told To Play - How The Game Lies

Of course, my animals didn’t stay outside. For a minute it was fun having a crowd of cows milling about while I tended to my crops, but letting them wander free and uninhibited made it impossible to find and milk all of them without any trouble, and there were the rainy days to watch out for. After the novelty wore off, they went back inside and stayed there. The thing is, that didn’t make a single bit of difference in how much they liked me compared to how they were living in the barn. On top of that, they didn’t seem to care whether I was feeding them grass or store-bought food either, though I mostly stuck to the grasses since they were cheaper and easier to get. Nothing about how I was told to care for animals really mattered past feeding them every day, petting it and maybe brushing it, if it was a cow.

It gets worse. The most basic aspect of the game is the fact that time passes. The story takes place over 2 and a half years, running through each day until the end, and these days last from 6AM to 6PM according to the game’s own internal time setting. After 6PM, all of the shops aside from the bar will close and you lose the ability to sell anything as you’re told it would rot in the shipping bin overnight, so there’s nothing to do but sleep until the next day. Issue with this is that when the days stop at 6PM… they just stop. Time doesn’t flow anymore. The game doesn’t give you any kind of clock to know the exact time it is until after you’ve upgraded your house, so all you have to go by before that is the color of the environment and whether or not your character has played an animation to eat something (you’re automatically fed when you wake up, at noon, and at night). I discovered this because I was curious if I could actually see the wild dog by staying out, and left the game running for probably 20 minutes in real life only for nothing to happen. Because of the time freeze, the time after 6PM actually becomes really valuable for farm logistics. You can’t sell anything, no, but you can pull up all the weeds on the farm, water your crops, fix your fences, feed and care for animals if you hadn’t already, and harvest wood for fences and house upgrades which would have taken a lot of valuable time to get during shipping-hours. The only thing that gets in the way of doing all that is you running out of energy.

Your energy is what allows you to use your farming equipment like your ax or watering can. Running out of it doesn’t mean you fall unconscious or anything, but your character will play an animation of them stumbling over and will fail to use any tools. The most obvious fix to this is to simply go to bed, as sleeping gives you a full recharge. You can also, however, recharge it by going to the hot spring on the mountain, or by eating food bought at the restaurant in town or foraged for in the forest. You can’t tell easily how much is refilled, as there’s no visual indicator like a health bar, but you’re able to eat more than once, and jumping into the hot spring seems to count whether you did it or not more than how much time you spend in there, so you can hop in and out a couple of times and call it good.

Individually, time freezing at 6PM and energy being endlessly replenishable aren’t bad things. Even together, they’re not the worst. Having free time to focus on profitless chores is nice, and I think it’s important to be able to replenish your energy in case you have a limited amount of time to do things like for example, cut all of your grass before winter kills it. What makes an exploit out of these is the fact that the resources in the forest will never run out. Every time you re-enter the forest, all forage items and tree stumps are respawned. The infinite amount of forage makes for infinite energy refills, and could also make for an incredible money exploit if you didn’t have a very limited amount of time to ship things. You don’t have a limited amount of time to cut up tree stumps though. If you wanted to, you could run up to the forest after 6PM, chop every stump, then simply reload the area, and everything’s back. You can get all of the wood you would ever need to fully upgrade your house in one night. It’s a bit of a grind to do all at once, but it’s a grind you’d be doing over time anyways. It’s not the worst exploit in the world, since you still need money to pay for the house upgrade, but arguably because of how you have to focus your energy elsewhere for most of the game, the wood is the harder thing to get. Additionally, when the game has very little to do in both fall and winter due to the lack of crops, this exploit takes away just about any reason to play those two seasons other than to take care of animals. It’s an optional exploit of course–as all exploits are–but once you learn about it, it’s hard to resist the desire to get the grind out of the way all at once and mess up the pacing of the game.

The Charm of the Game

Learning that the fences were completely broken as a mechanic was a huge disappointment for me. From the moment I got a grasp on how the game was supposed to work, I wanted to eventually surround my whole field with fencing and keep my animals outside so I would have some life on my farm while I worked. I didn’t just want this, I was excited for it! This was something I’d never done in a farming sim that didn’t already manage putting animals in and out for you like Stardew Valley or newer Story of Seasons games do. My routine is always the same: I go into the barn and coop to tend to each of my animals, I take care of my crops outside, then run straight to town to talk to everyone, and go to bed. The change in routine that would come from taking care of the animals outside and patrolling the fence every night felt fresh to me. It made me feel that even though this was the first game of its kind, it was different and required new things of me. But in the end, I played it exactly the same.

Harvest Moon is still very different from all of the games that followed it, though. In many ways, it’s because it has less “stuff” in it– both in terms of items and things you have to do. But I wouldn’t say that it feels incomplete. Harvest Moon runs over the course of 2 and a half years before your work is evaluated. Until that happens, you have the ability to farm four different crops, you can raise both cows and chickens, you can upgrade your house to have more features, upgrade your working tools, build relationships with the townspeople to a small extent, go to town festivals that happen each year, and you can get married to one of the five girls living in town with whom you can have up to two children. Everything that you would come to expect as a fan of games like this is already here from the very first iteration. The most notable lack this game has, and one that seems to be completely unique to this game, is that there aren’t any crops in the fall or winter, which means that unless you have animals, there’s a whole half of the year that you don’t have anything to do. The game is clearly aware of this though, because in an average playthrough, this is where you’ll start to run into the story events.

There isn’t much of an overarching story in the game, past the general concept that you’ve run away from home to work on an abandoned farm. The conclusion rests on how good of a job you actually do. In between those two points are smaller events, usually tied to when you get tool upgrades or special ones for each of the romantic interests. The first event you’re likely to run into happens on the very last day of summer, where one of the woodsmen comes to your house in the morning to ask if you’re okay because he heard a huge crash at night and you should check your farm. What I found was that a tree in my field had fallen over, and its remaining stump had a big empty hole in it. When I inspected the stump, I was suddenly underground in a cave filled with loud and industrious music, and I was faced with two, little green people–Harvest Sprites, though I don’t know if they’re called that yet here. One asked me if my scythe worked well, and when I said yes, told me that they had made it and that I should check my shed tomorrow for a better one. Other tool upgrades are obtained in similar fashion; one comes from feeding a starving sprite a mushroom and another comes from another hole in the farm opening up to reveal another part of the cave system that has a couple of hints on how to unlock other things.

The events for romantic interests happen at less scripted times, as they’re tied to how strong your relationship is with each girl. Each girl only has one event, and it only triggers when your relationship is high enough that you would ask her to marry you. The events usually take up a whole day, and don’t necessarily add much to each character. Ellen’s revolves around how she’s no good at keeping pets– something established on your second day at the farm when you get your dog from her, Eve’s hammers in her fraught relationship with her grandpa, and Ann’s is about losing the chicken weathervane, or “weathercock” which sits on the roof of her workshop and goes missing every time there’s a storm. Conversely, Nina and Maria’s scenes bring up entirely new events that bring up a number of questions while providing no answers. Nina disappears while looking for a medicinal plant because her mother is apparently sick, and Maria vanishes for days until you find her hiding away with the woodsmen for some reason. All of these events, whether they share new information or not, manage to add some greatly appreciated depth to each character by giving them more room to speak and be sincere than their short and repetitive day-to-day dialogues do.

The dialogue in this game is simple, to the point, and sparse– probably because there was only so much memory that could be reserved for approximately 15 people who all have multiple lines of dialogue, and only so much money to pay someone to write more. There is simple dialogue that doesn’t tell you much more than “hello, how are you” would, more dialogue that I’d label as tutorial text, and a few lines that I truthfully couldn’t understand well because of the sub-par translation this game received for english. The dialogue that exists to inform the world really manages to create a unique vibe though. Nina’s dialogue, almost always about plants, goes into forays about how they’re creatures with wills to live, too. Ellen’s uncle who runs the ranch shop tells you that it’s much better to feed your animals fresh grass if you try to buy any from his store, and if you decline to purchase he laughs as if he’s won something. There’s even dialogue referencing the silent player! Multiple lines exist to comment on him not paying attention, and inspection prompts have people telling you not to touch something rather than being an item description. It was the last thing I expected, to get the same level of personality out of the main character as I did from each of the girls, albeit very subtly. He went from a kind of nothing, self-insert into being what I perceive to be a hyperactive boy, akin to a border collie who was let out into a field of sheep for the first time–the exact kind of person crazy enough to take on an abandoned farm and succeed.

It’s these short little character details that bring life into the game. Each day, you’ll really only see one line of dialogue from each character, be it new or old, with that dialogue usually only changing if there’s a change in season or festival coming up. The repetitive, pretty mindless routine of the game can turn into a sort of meditation if you let it, where you spend your time working thinking about the folks in town and what they had to say to you the previous day. The developers took this concept in stride and gave the side characters loads of dialogue about life, about God and religion, and about… very basic morals, but morals nonetheless. It’s a children’s game after all. When you take the thoughts, questions and prompts the characters give you back to the farm to do your long and tedious routine, you have to ask yourself– what are you working so hard for? For the feeling of accomplishment? Recognition from your peers? For the sake of some higher power, if you worship one? For me personally, it was to write this essay, but it was also for a good grade on the high score screen at the end, so to be honest a lot of this stuff was lost on me until just now when I was reviewing the game to get screenshots.

Setting The Standard - Why You Should Play HM SNES

You may read all of this and still think, well, it doesn’t sound like the game has much in it. And you would be right, it’s a very small game, but it’s also extremely quick. On average, my days only lasted about three minutes of real life time. Everything flew by, and I think I finished the game in 20 hours or less. I barely got a chance to notice that there wasn’t much going on because every second of my day was spent busy doing something, and when I wasn’t busy, the break was appreciated. I didn’t start to run out of things to do until I was finished with the second year, and when I looked up what I needed to do to get a decent ending, I was already most of the way there. It was easy to push through those last two seasons to get to the end, and it was so, so worth it.

As I mentioned earlier, the game ends with a high score screen, meaning it has to track all of your accomplishments. These include, but are not limited to: the number of things you ship, number of each crop you grow, number of animals you have and how much they like you, how upgraded your house is, who you married, how much all of the girls in town like you if you didn't get married, how many kids you have (which basically equates to how long you were married), your happiness score (increased by going to festivals and decreased by having animals die), and how many times you’ve pet your dog. In addition to these being tallied up and presented to you, you get special cutscenes not just for each one of these accomplishments, but additional ones for if you managed to do even better! I got a cutscene for having a cow, followed by one for having lots of cows, followed by yet another for having cows that loved me! Watching them play one after the other felt like taking a victory lap even without getting the best possible result. Seeing all of my numbers come up at the end made me want to try again to actually get those other cutscenes, not to get to see them, they’re so easy to find on Youtube, but because the game made it feel like an accomplishment! If I weren’t following this game up by immediately playing its GameBoy port, I absolutely would have started a new file right away. I’ve been playing the Harvest Moon series since I was a little kid and this was the first time I’d actually managed to beat one of these games. I struggle to think the finale of any game following this will feel as good as this one did.

I started writing this whole thing about the fences because it was an easy and silly entry point to get into my core issue with the game, and so I could have an opportunity to dig into game mechanics and the way the knowledge you have of them will completely alter your playstyle, because that’s all fun and interesting for me to talk about. Another reason why I focused on that was because it was near impossible for me to pick any kind of focus point when talking about this game. After all, I’m trying to study a whole series of games that spans multiple decades, and this is not only the first game in that series, but a game that created the whole genre of farming sims and defined that genre so thoroughly that you can see its DNA in every single game that followed.

I didn’t expect much to come out of my experience with this game. My expectations for it before I even picked it up were that it was going to be basically featureless, as informed by my experience with one of the first games I ever played as a child, Harvest Moon GB, which I will get into next. This game was not that at all. I think that everything it did manage to get working right came together just about perfectly. Harvest Moon is exactly what it wanted to be, and where it wasn’t, it lied about how it worked to try and make you play the correct way anyways. When I believed that lie, my time playing was even more enjoyable. Maybe if farming worked just a little bit more like how you’re told it’s supposed to, and if there was just a little bit more story, those would cover the things I felt wanting for the most. But maybe a little flexibility and ambiguity is a good thing. Maybe actually maintaining a fence is just too hard, and maybe if the girls were more fleshed out, I wouldn’t be able to enjoy filling in their gaps in my head.

There are many more things I could say and wanted to say about this game, but this has grown far too long already so I'm cutting myself off here. I'm sure my later entries aren't going to get near this length. If you managed to get to this point, thank you so much for reading!

#harvest moon #story of seasons #harvest moon snes #hm snes #game review #m.txt #hm posting #i think i hit the image cap also? it wouldn't let me put in more even though i dont think there are that many. maybe it was a different cap #im happy to answer questions about things i didnt cover here too lol and i have notes from my playthrough if anyone is interested in those #those notes are the only reason i was able to keep all of this straight given how long it took me to write #anyways finally hitting post after like 3 days because i keep forgetting until weird hours

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myrkulitescourge · 5 months

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imo karlach’s soul coin usage seems like it should have been a little more significant than it was.

she only ever really stops to consider the magnitude of burning through a person’s soul for power during an origin playthrough—otherwise she rationalizes to the player that they’re doomed anyway, and if using them gives her an edge in combat, why not use them for good instead of leaving them to be used by evil? the dialogue with lann tarv in act 2, where he tells the story of each soul he's handing over to her, tries to humanize each soul coin, and still she doesn’t really budge and disapproves pretty heavily if she's told no in regards to using them.

it just seems like something that could have caused some kind of conflict between her and wyll, given he sold his soul to a devil in dire circumstances and takes issue with the player for sleeping with mizora, because she 1) is mizora, and 2) similarly expends tormented souls during her romance scene, even if for a different purpose. but it just... never really comes up?

i love karlach. but that seems like it should have gone Somewhere, from a writing standpoint? karlach values wyll as a person but is willing to use currency forged from souls like his for the sake of a temporary power up. she knows the soul is consumed when she uses them. that whole exchange with lann tarv is there to emphasize that every soul coin she destroys was a person once. but it all kind of loses narrative purpose if this combination of factors doesn't mean anything? karlach doesn't change at all in her willingness to use soul coins, no matter what the player says or how much she cares for wyll.

idk. missed opportunity that wyll doesn't have any dialogue about this, of all things.

#destroying souls is otherwise unambiguously portrayed as A Pretty Bad Thing To Do in bg3. so it just seems weird to go #yeah using this destroys a soul but it makes me stronger and it feels GREAT!#and stick to that no matter what without really questioning it much #ethel's vicious mockery line about her selling every soul but her own just doesn't hit right if it flat out doesn't. matter at all.#plus. idk. something something soul coins apparently are difficult for non-evil characters to even have in their possession #so using them and fully destroying the souls within seems kind of. idk. significant from a character standpoint #disclaimer: not character hate obvi. i love karlach and her relationship with wyll is very good.#but idk. conflict is interesting! and that seems like somewhere it should have happened if you have both in the party #karlach sans wyll might never question using soul coins but karlach with wyll probably should have?#in the same way wyll's character changes somewhat whether he chooses to kill karlach or spare her #as it stands this is like how using the tadpoles makes a grand total of one roll in the game harder. there's no bite. no consequence. idk #not every character has to change to be good but idk. idk!#it all seems set up to make her reconsider at SOME point #and that she just doesn’t is in itself a pretty significant moral compromise on her part #that is just not. recognized or discussed basically ever #karlach #karlach cliffgate #bg3 #baldur’s gate 3

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dixidin · 22 days

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I WIN (I had a dream about Deadpool & Wolverine)

#hands and knees on the ground #I win.....#if I had a nickel for every time I had a dream about one of my hyperfixations #I'd have six nickels #which isn't a lot but it's weird that it's happened six times!!#2 for genshin. 3 for marble hornets. and now 1 for deadpool & wolverine #anywho the dream was kinda similar to the scene where deadpool was trying to find the best wolverine varient #but like. it wasn't the wolverine that we know and love #basically deadpool got into trouble with some other folks in this bar in the forest #and this like. cowboy lumberjack wolverine was all like “get in” and drove off with deadpool in his truck before he got got #but the funniest part about it was wolverine saying “ no. I'm drunk wolverine!”#??? LIKE WHAT😭#because deadpool was asking him questions and thought he was another varient??#idk. it was kinda crazy. but on the bright side. i got a deadpool & wolverine dream!!#anywho someone make a fanfic rn #deadpool #deadpool marvel #deadpool movie #deadpool 3 #deadpool and wolverine #deadpool & wolverine #wolverine & deadpool #wolverine #poolverine #wade wilson #logan howlett

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bacchuschucklefuck · 2 months

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since more of like the class swap etc started going up every once in a while there will be a question in my inbox that would take me literally multiple comics' worth of art to answer adequately lol. and I don't wanna do that under an ask I want that to have its own space! so if I don't answer ur question know that it's probably that^ above there and not that I think ur question sucks

#not art #I know I got a weird way of going about this stuff but that's me babeyy and it's my house <3 #example of this that already happened on the blog is when someone asked abt pretty much just All of class swap baron #and I was like. well I'm gonna like draw that and make comics and stuff lol #I don't think I can draw like a hard line around what I'll reserve for writing about and what I'll answer in an ask etc #bc like I'm cool with talking abt the general concept and arcs I have in mind for the bad kids/player characters #and abt like the process of figuring it out and bouncing ideas off of folks #but there's a point above that where if u get to it's just. I might as well send u a lore bible or recreate the whole show for u ykwim #so yeah this is just to let u know that Im not like spiting u personally if ur question doesnt get answered #(would be a weird thing for me to do regardless tbh!)#honestly pat urself on the back lol u've hit a jackpot on subjects I Want to get to in the form of art and/or writing #I'm not an idea guy! I'm a guy who makes comics and stuff. that's how I'm approaching this (and everything else really) u get me #cool! cool. I sleep now hopefully. have a good night lads

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lannisterdaddyissues · 2 months

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god why am i so fucking stupid. having adhd is truly a curse and i hate bearing it

#not to vent on main but. fml actually!#in my health assessment lab we had this case study assignment to do and i freaking. misunderstood all of it so bad #idk why but for some reason i thought we were supposed to make up a patient ourselves for it #…we were not #no :) we were not :) there’s a freaking. TEMPLATE for the exact patient we were supposed to do it on in the module #that i opened once and then forgot about because adhd just works like that #and now im literally . kmsing because we fucking . we fucking presented these orally in class #and i was only half paying attention bc i was (incorrectly) documenting my (made-up) patient information on the record #and i thought it was weird that like 2 or 3 people seemed to have VERY similar patients but did not question it further #…which is to say. i may be stupid.#and now i feel like dying because im gonna have to email my professor and TELL HER how stupid i am #and hope that she takes enough pity on me and my cursed brain to let me do it over properly #because my lab grade is now barely a 77 and i need a 75 to pass. and our final assessment is tomorrow.#i genuinely cannot live like this anymore im serious #i need a fucking brain transplant #anyway tl;dr guys please pray for me please please please im actually disintegrating rn #to delete later

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rist-ix · 4 months

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https://www.tumblr.com/rist-ix/749015401700229120 not you reblogging this when you ship bloom with the man who murdered her family 😭

Bloom's into ppl who slay! Hope this helps :3

#alright snark and ship wars aside i get where you’re coming from tho #if you're genuinely interested in my thought process here i would love to elaborate #which is exactly what I’ll do!#first of all! the post you linked is about headcanons #which my brain kinda wants to put into a whole different category than ships — fandom ships in particular! — but i can leave that aside #because there IS an argument to be made that relationships are an extension of characterization and personality traits #if you wanna go that route i would wanna explain that Bloom's and/or Valtor's interest in the other is in fact based on canon #(even though I don’t really think ships need to be established in the source material. make shit up that’s what fandom is for #1) the Andros episode speaks for itself. Valtor specifically tells the Trix to back off because HE wants to be the one to fight bloom #2) the episode before that he asks questions about her (and only her; even though he has more powerful enemies to worry about)#demonstrating curiosity about and interest in her #3) that same episode (or the one before; can’t remember) is their infamous first meeting #where time LITERALLY slows down as the pass each other on the stairs #they get IMPACT FRAMES #the whole color palette changes!!!#idk about u but I eat that shit up. love the drama of it all no one does it like them #I’m gonna skip all the instances where Valtor is spying on Bloom through his little scrying spell because oh god who has the time #let’s go straight to Bloom #if I had a week I would not be able to collect all the moments where she growls his name in pure fury and single-minded determination #she gets a little bit obsessed with him over the course of the season and I personally think that’s very sexy of her #Bloom is known for her tunnel vision when it comes to her past and origins and Valtor's existence fits PERFECTLY into that #it ties in neatly with her overarching story of the past 2 seasons #literally PERFECT foils #which always makes for the juiciest stories #4) she singles him out for a duel in the museum episode #5) she can literally feel his presence #6) the mere mention of his name sends her into her weird faux enchantix #of course there’s no romance in canon but there’s TENSION AND CHEMISTRY which is all u really need for a ship #all their animosity and bad blood is what makes it so INTERESTING to wonder how they COULD work. it’s the spice that makes for good fanfic!

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crystallizsch · 4 months

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hi ian i come bearing angst fuel for the yuusha as twsted elsa (maybe an idea for her possible overblot idk she kinda reads to me as someone whod preemptively isolate in the case she feels...blotty)

(also seeing that art of her playing violin totally didnt fuck me up im still nursing my bruised heart 🥴🥴💕💕)

https://youtu.be/NDldNaEZTt8?si=Wm71pgTltuJLjFvk

^^this is from the frozen musical where they gave a song to elsa to explore her emotional turmoil and it just fleshed out her character so much more than the orig movie (ok i havent seen frozen 2 oops) but just this section here:

Is everyone in danger as long as I'm alive?

Was I a monster from the start?

How did I end up with this frozen heart?

Bringing destruction to the stage

Caught in a war that I was never meant to wage

anyways lmao i jus think the song is neat i think yuushas neat (i wanna see more of her ahehehe i love seeing infodumps abt ur yuus)

-diodellet

(throwback to this “what if yuu had magic” ask where i had a ✨realization✨ and this more recent yuusha lore drop that i gave zero elaboration on 🙃)

very rough ob yuu design??? idk i came up with it on the spot ;;; and it’s kinda based on disney’s concept art of elsa when she was supposed to be the villain.

evil ice queen vibes :3

also i know the ob monster is supposed to be based on the villain— which is elsa in this case— but lowkey. an ice monster is way cooler.

also also i just realized after i drew this i couldve done a grim/yuu tandem overblot ough 🤧🤧 (next time I'll do that instead if i ever go back to this concept)

(read more below because it got SO long)

AAH anyways hi hi dio!!! when i saw your ask i went —

— with this entire post

AAGH HOW MANY MORE UNINTENTIONAL CONNECTIONS ARE GOING TO BE BETWEEN FROZEN AND YUUSHA

i guess watching the movie everyday when it came out when you’re like 9 does something to your brain chemistry (and still haunts you at least a decade later) 💀

but anyways the angst ;;; overblot yuu ;;;;; my brain is rotting and the worms have taken over

also i didn’t even know that there was a frozen broadway musical so im gonna have to check it out later 🏃💨💨💨

(also dont worry frozen 2 is a nice watch for the most part but the way they concluded the characters did not feel 100% satisfying to me 😭 BUT i love some of the songs tho ;;; kristoff’s goofy 80s ballad song is one of them specifically, i need everyone to listen to it)

hfgnnfhfgv anyways thank you so much i’m chugging that angst fuel as i expand more on a possible ob yuusha with another infodump 💪💪💪

⚠️⚠️⚠️ ALSO IM SORRY BUT mentions of taking one’s own life so please proceed with caution ⚠️⚠️⚠️

i had to reread what my initial thoughts about it bc it was months ago??? and after rereading im just like, huh what was i on— (just that feeling when you just cringe at your old posts ;; but idk i think the insanity/cringe sometimes can loop back into being a genius and the cycle just continues)

anyways i’ve been on and off writing yuusha’s bio and overblot yuu was just at the back of my mind chilling but i didn’t really do anything with it.

but now that i have the opportunity,,,, im gonna go on the magicless route this time bc i feel like I've said all what i thought if it was an overblot due to her own magic.

so uh from what i gather overblots are a mix of overuse of magic + intense negative emotion.

since it’s magicless yuu, i guess the one of the general headcanons around the fandom is that they’ve been too exposed to overblots and then intense negative emotions suddenly just triggered their overblot.

uh anyways onto the elsa parts

Is everyone in danger as long as I'm alive? Was I a monster from the start? How did I end up with this frozen heart? Bringing destruction to the stage Caught in a war that I was never meant to wage

THE LYRICS ARE SO GOOD ;;; i really love how some broadway interpretations expand on the source material

and yeah you're right 🤧🤧🤧— yuusha would try to hide and escape, especially as she overblots bc she would try to avoid hurting people (and like elsa, it'd only hurt others more trying to escape bc of probably how she leaves destruction in her wake trying to make others stay away from her 😔)

(this is a small tangent but i remember thinking about an overblot kalim and i imagine him to be similar, like he would not hurt anyone intentionally in his overblot.)

anyways so the way it would go is that i imagine her friends got fatally injured either because a) she feels that she’s too “useless” without magic to help and wasn’t able to do anything OR b) her attempts at helping to try and prove that she can help without magic made everything worse.

and then she just goes into a guilty spiral then boom — overblot.

ALSO in the song, the way elsa briefly contemplated taking her own life but then realizing there’s no guarantee that would solve anything hnghgh (<- another unintentional parallel to my yuusha lore because that’s actually how she ended up in twst except she did NOT have the latter realization)

there’s this “yuu is dead” theory i’m just using and that the black carriage actually just caught yuusha’s soul after she took her own life from all the burden.

also some bonus angst context for that violin post :3

yuusha back in her homeworld is raised and known to be a gifted musician. people can feel the life and soul in her music but when people interact with her, they are usually met with an ice-cold (heh) personality.

the dead family member was the one who taught her music and the only one who was kind to her.

there’s always an expectation from her family to perform well and to keep up appearances as to not be a humiliation since anything she does can reflect on her entire family. (also hi, slight yuusha/jamil parallels maybe???)

the way she presents herself also stemmed from an incident as a child when she went apeshit on another kid bc she was defending a friend.

so from then on she was taught taught to conceal don’t feel those emotions — which just unfortunately extended to any positive ones, not just negative ones like rage.

so when she is brought to twst, there’s no memory of her being forced to hold back her emotions so she’s just unapologetically affectionate and open with everyone bc that’s how she really is.

but every now and then, memories of her breaking down haunt her in her dreams or as subtle reminders in the waking world.

then yuusha just goes on her day like she just wasn't reminded of her past.

(unnecessarily tragic lore my beloved, but anyway—)

another extremely brief tangent and bonus -> the two songs i had on loop while drawing pre-twst yuusha

lindsey stirling my beloved i love her music

the songs are such a vibe

her instrumentals in “lose you now” especially makes me feel some sort of way 😖

#AHH THIS IS /SO/ LONG #THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS WHEN IM GIVEN THE CHANCE TO RAMBLE #but thank you for the ask dio!! 🤧🤧#it makes me so happy to hear you like yuusha 😭💕💕#this also took a bit because i needed to like #actually turn all these thoughts into actual coherent words #and for them to actually. make sense together.#idk im proofreading this myself during the gamer hours of midnight hfdjslkf #i sure /hope/ they do make sense for the most part because this is pure massive brain vomit #[—✦ chatting #-✧ my art #-✧ oc rambles #(💜) yuusha #pretwst💜#-✦—]#at this point too i’m sticking to the twst elsa concept #it just felt weird admitting it bc i have a history with this movie and its fandom in general #kids would ask you “whos your favorite disney princess it cant be elsa” bc everyone would pick her so i'd have to pick another </3 #she was too famous and therefore too obvious and basic #not to mention “let it go” was EVERYWHERE and it did become annoying at one point 😭#the fandom around frozen back then was v questionable too ngl and i was also in that hole for a bit so it's just /ack/#but rewatching the movie i realize how elsa kinda speaks to me hgjkdsjfaljsd #i could lowkey highkey rant more about her but anyways #imma be an elsa defender and apologist for as long as i am able

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