new Harvest Moon: Grand Bazaar games?, Harvest Moon Release Date Options

[Harvest]

Harvest Moon series, Harvest Moon: Grand Bazaar the Nintendo DS? Zoo Games? Release Date: July 2010 (IMG:style_emoticons/default/lalagrin.gif)

*Sigh* "Natsume games..." (IMG:style_emoticons/default/lalacry.gif)

[Mizukithepanda]

Alright, let’s get cracking on that list…

• Honestly, I have no idea. This game isn't structured like Animal Parade in the slightest, so basing your opinion off of that will get you nowhere.
• Well, the days run quite a bit like they did in Harvest Moon 64. You can only save when you go to bed and once you do go to bed it fast-forwards to the next day, no matter what time it is. (Yes, even just after midnight.) The clock is similar to what was present in AWL, running on a “one game minute to one real life second” type system. Oddly enough, it doesn’t make the days half as long as you’d think. The progression from Morning to Night is rather believable and the weather system is well done. Other than the basics, there’s no true “structure” to your days. You do whatever you want whenever you want – people are out and about nearly all hours of the day, and the shops don’t close until 11:30 pm, so you don’t have to worry about missing out on food from the café or buying emergency rations/medicine for your livestock.
• Crops are pretty standard, honestly. There’s only one seed per packet, but the seeds are cheap in comparison to how much money you make in game once you get going. They have a star-rating system with .5 stars being the lowest quality and 5 stars being the highest. They also have a diminishing rate – your crops will go bad the longer you leave them in storage or in your pack. This isn’t relegated only to crops though; pretty much anything perishable (like cheese, butter, and flowers) will degrade and go bad if you leave it for a long time. There’s also one other measure that it’s dictated by, though to be honest, I don’t understand it, so I can’t explain it very well. When you try to cook meals, some food products will show up in a red box and others in blue. This has to do with some kind of intrinsic value, and though it has no effect on how much your crops are worth (that I know of, at least…) it does affect what you can and can’t cook. Like, if you make a cheese cake, you have to have cheese, milk, and eggs – all in a blue box. If you have milk and eggs in a blue box, but cheese in a red box, you won’t be able to make cheesecake – if that makes any sense. I don’t really know what purpose this serves, to be quite frank. Maybe the English version will bring that to light or something. The last thing I want to mention about crops is the sheer variety available. There are tons of crops you can grow – and not just vegetables and fruits either. There’s a series of grains (namely wheat and rice) and even tea bushes. It gets pretty insane once you open up the stalls that sell the good stuff.
• Leveling up with people actually isn’t too hard. They’ll only accept one gift per day as per usual in HM games these days, (Long gone are the days when you could spam the people with gifts like in HM64. ;-;) but you can talk to them all you like and raise heart levels that way. As long as you talk to them and remember to give them gifts that they really like, their heart rates will shoot up pretty fast – it’s nowhere near as hard as it is in Animal Parade.
• The energy bar is… hm… I don’t want to say that you get loads of stamina or anything, but it doesn’t diminish too quickly, and there are quite a few ways to replenish it fully so that you can keep going. Just be careful not to diminish it completely, because you’ll faint and wake up the next day without having saved. That tends to suck, especially if you were camping out waiting for a rival or love interest scene.

I never played HM:DS because it was a Mineral Town game, and I have a personal vendetta against games that take place there, so I can’t really say, but I can tell you that I enjoyed this game immensely.

I was a little surprised you didn’t ask about the Bazaar or the Windmills since they’re fairly integral to the gameplay, but... *shrugs*