New Harvest Moon Games for 2011

Well, without the games, there'd be no story so while I'm sitting here munching on dinner, I thought I'd give some highlights for upcoming games! Also, I'll have another profile up soon, they're really time consuming x.x

Tale of Two Towns

 Tale of Two Towns was just released on the DS, slated to also be released on the 3DS.

It looks interesting enough, the concept of being able to live in different towns with different citizens is kind of cool. And the alpaca is TOO cute ^^

That said, some things I've noticed researching, not having played it quite yet is that once again festivals have taken a bit of a dive. Every season there's a cooking festival...? And someone demands you bring a dish to every festival to enter? x.x It's like Magical Melody where the festival even happening most of the time was solely dependent on you. A small complaint, no matter. I haven't really been personally entertained by them since 64/BTN XD

It's probably only me but I feel largely uninspired by the bachelors/bachelorettes. Of course I'm going to use a couple within the fanfiction series. Lia has actually already appeared somewhat as Chihaya's (Chase) baby sister. Which reminds me of one of the more confusing factors that came with this one...now, it makes A LITTLE sense that when thee games get translated from Japanese, Kotomi might not be as accessible to younger players as Candace. I raised a brow though when Sheila became 'Selena'. Odd, they're...both pretty 'English'. But Tale of Two Towns threw me for a loop... Lia became Laney? Michael became Mikhail? And the one that was really puzzling was Kiriku (obviously Kirk) became Kana?? Small confusion, not much to do with gameplay but odd...

Though back to that uninteresting thing, I feel that Harvest Moon has used these archetypes a little TOO much now. I know it's slightly hard to come up with new ones but Cam is the tsundere (Gray, Chase, Kurt), Georgia is the bristly girl (Karen, Luna/Selena), and Reina is the female tsundere (Nami, Karen, Dia). Just shockingly there's no nerdy glassy bookworm girls this time (I wonder if that's Mikhail's role this time...). Really it feels the last diverse entry was Skye (Steiner)...I mean, a weird phantom thief flirt? That's definitely a little out of the norm for the crowd...

Ah, and after reading hundreds gripe about not being able to marry is Alisa, she is finally to be wedded. However, I read on fogu that somehow, though she's agreed to marriage, she isn't going to have kids? Like, what? So she's finally a wife but there's no way I'm having any kids? Come on, people, cut players some slack here. I guess by next game she'll be open to that...

As I plan to grab a DS soon, I'm going to try to pick this one up as well. I haven't played a new Harvest Moon since Animal Parade x.x But I'll review it when I do.

Rune Factory: Tides of Destiny is slated to be released on both Wii and PS3, making it the first Rune Factory title to go to a different system than Nintendo.

Oh, I love the concept of Rune Factory... fighting and farming, what can go wrong? :P But like Tale of Two Towns, I have a bone to pick...it's only one bone so this will be short.

List of Bachelorettes
Riri (Lily?)
Odette
Iris (?)
Electra
Sarah
Helena
Mikoto
Merupurin
Sonia (Is she marriageable?)
Pandora

VS

List of Bachelors
James
Joe
Bismark (WTH?)
Aden/Azel (*See Sonia)

10 girls vs potentially 4 guys? Why? Like, what could have possibly gone through the developer's heads? Finally girls get to be married and we get the choice of FOUR guys? It's remnant of Another Wonderful Life where I thought, oh, we'd get three brand spanking new bachelors reminiscent of the bachelorettes in A Wonderful Life. But of course we get the leprechaun, Elvis, and Dumble Dee.

I KNOW they can do it. Animal Parade and all titles with female players since renewed that mentioned failure. All those hot guys they had in the past series (Kross, Barrett, Danny, Eric, Zavier) and they could only give us four weirdos? None of them are appealing whatsoever to me, Joe just looks old, Bismark is like a male Mary, and why does James have a flower in his hat?! What is going on?! And all the girls look awesome! I believe I read somewhere that they didn't want to "make long playing players uncomfortable". Okay, so...don't play a girl then?  All you've done is isolate people who would WANT to play for that aspect!

*Sigh*Rune Factory 4 apparently may repair this matter but still, it would have been nice on a console... other than that complaint, it looks very promising and I WILL despite my grumblings get it. Characters that will appear in the fanfiction series thus far seems to be Sarah...hmm...