Harvest Moon: Tree of Tranquility

For Christmas my wife and I decided to spend our Best Buy gift cards on the Harvest Moon game. For those of you unfamiliar with the series, the game revolves around your character as you farm your ranch, raise livestock, get married, and have children. Its basically simulated farm life with some corny environmentalism thrown in as plot. As if working your farm by yourself isn't enough work.

This version has all the familiar elements from the previous games in the series. Cows and chickens, corn and tomatoes, picking stuff of the mountain to give as gifts to woo your intended. In this version there is a greater variety of crops and livestock to choose from. There are winter grains like buckwheat and you can raise an ostrich to ride around town.

However, the downsides to this version are much more profound. The first thing you notice is that the voice sound effects sound like adults in Charlie Brown cartoons and are just as intelligible. "Waa waa waa waa." You notice this because every time you start the game the muffeled trumpet sound attempts to say the games name and every time your character pets an animal it says, "there there." Which I guess is an artifact of poor translation from the Japanese version.

The most aggrivating part of the game is the first hour. Because it takes an hour to get through the introduction. The game forces you to wander around town and have an extended conversation involving gift giving with every citizen of the game before even beginning the toutorial. Like most games, the toutorial is entirely unnessary. Of course while trapped in the insultingly unnessary toutorial, the game's writers decided it was also necessary to force you to interact with the games most unplesant character who spends the toutorial insulting you even as you easily accomplish the tedious tasks he sets before you.

Once you get through the god awful plot and asanine toutorial the game is actually quite fun. Like all the games in the Harvest Moon series, its enjoyable to pretend to be farming your own ranch and the motion controls on the Wii enhance the feel of the game. Its got flow.