HM ANB

I read my last post and I retract my statement. Early to bed early to rise, my foot. More like early to rise late to bed because school sucks. Yeah, I have no idea why I was so excited four, short weeks ago. I'm ready for summer vacation again.

Anyways, I got into A New Beginning again, hence the title. I just wanted to post a few thoughts about it.

First of all, I started a new file. I had played almost 4 seasons in my first file before restarting because I always screw over my first file to get a feel for the game before making better choices in the next one. So I was walking in the forest area near the big tree when I saw a butterfly off the beaten path. And after playing over 100 game days, I discovered a new area next to the big tree. I never noticed it. It wasn't a 'hidden area' or anything, I just walked past it 100+ times and never knew you could go there, which makes me concerned because I read over my RF4 pages again and it makes me afraid that I've missed something very important and very obvious.

Secondly, I was never really into ANB. It was okay until I saw the graphics for autumn and that kind of killed it for me. Autumn is my favorite season and I love the graphics for autumn in almost every game because it's just really beautiful. Notice the almost because autumn is nowhere near beautiful in ANB.

Another reason that I didn't really like it was because I felt so restricted. In most Harvest Moon games you can go wherever in the world you like, but in ANB, there's an invisible wall everywhere, which I hated until just recently. I was playing it last weekend because that's almost the only time I have to do non-school stuff and I realized that the invisible walls and lack of places to explore gives you time to do other stuff. What I remember most vividly about ToTT is that there were never enough hours in the day to do everything I needed. The mountain areas were massive and took way too long to get through. Whenever you need to go to the other town, you always have to pass through the mountain ( until the tunnel gets unblocked ) and I would always get distracted by all the stuff because... you know... money... and it'd take forever to get through. I get that the mountain was basically the focus of the game, but since ANB is more on the music notes and construction, it makes sense that the wilderness area isn't too large.

I still wouldn't call the restriction of space a blessing because it still makes me feel caged in, but I do understand that it's not all bad. I don't know if that's the actual reason why there are so many places you can see, but not go through, but that's my take on it.

And that's my opinion of ANB. I don't really have an opinion on the rest of it. I mean, it's not bad or good, just how the game works. But as a bottom line, ANB isn't my favorite Harvest Moon game. I don't know how other people feel about it, but I think that there's definitely room for improvement. I don't think that it's a complete disaster. I know that some people really hated Puzzle de Harvest Moon and by no means do I think ANB is like it, I just think that it could be better.