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#anyway some of these characters just feel like rf4 ones but Slightly different
socksandbuttons · 1 year
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I also just wanna say scarletts rivalry wasnt utilzed to its best ability
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lazysideblog · 5 years
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Couple asks + bonus Dylas
Hi all, I’ve been feeling kinda spammy by answering all asks one by one each weekend, so I’ve put them all together here. Also replying some unpopular opinions I’ve got later, some of which I could not answer by replying because character limit! I might keep doing this to avoid spamming you all!
(Longish post, so you’ll get a little Dylas I’ve doodled on my sketchbook while testing some colored pencils by the end of it!)
@miraimiisu said: im reading your amazing rf4 accomplishments and im like "holy heck thats a LOT of dedication" im proud of u
Ah thanks sweet! I was really obsessed with this game back then, and obsessive me knows no limit (for good or bad, unfortunately so I’ve learned...) But yeah, feels good that you’re proud, makes me feel proud too!
For those wondering, they’re probably referring this post, with some screenshots such as:
Everyone’s 100 friendship points dialogue (and here’s how I did it)
Every pet name response choice for every bachelor
9,999,999 gifts for the boys (and girls here)
What happens when you buy the 198,000,000g house
Here’s the max money cap too, just out of curiosity
@butterballin said: I don't suppose you covered the bachelorette pet name reactions? Also the reactions to the marriage pet names as I think those have new options for everyone?
No, I haven’t taken screenshots of the bachelorettes married pet names, feel free to do it if you feel like, that’s way too much work for me to go through that again so soon haha. I think I have a couple from my Dolce save, in which I’ve chosen to call her master (and she likes it pffft) and also made her call me master too, cause why the fuck not. Those are links, you can check it out. 
Also, for the bachelors I only have the reaction for the marriage pet names, now I’m kinda wondering what they say with each choice when you start dating... I know Doug’s a little shit who won’t let you pick goofy names, for instance. Wondering about the others, I never called Dylas anything other than Big D. Oh well, guess I’ll add that to the do to list for the remaster run! 👀
Anonymous said: Unpopular rf4 opinion: ..........I don’t like Leon and Forte together. I don’t think Forte finds his teasing funny or flirtatious at all and I feel like the ship is very one-sided.
Yeah I see at you mean. I don’t remember shipping them back then, since I’ve always thought Meg was way more into Forte than Leon, but I do understand where the shipping is coming. He does mention he finds her interesting I think, but I think he feels the same with Dylas, cause both are so easily flustered and easy to mess with, I guess Leon can’t help himself. I do think Leon and Forte are too different though, and I agree with you she must definitely not enjoy the teasing and the pranks he plays on her using Kiel. Forte is too stern and since she’s a knight, it’s hard for her to put her guard down, and I don’t think teasing is what would do the trick. Leon too has his guards up, and the teasing is how he cope--he needs someone he can open up instead of using his defense mechanisms, so yeah, double defense on this ship hahaa, what could go wrong? 
Digressing a bit here, I do think Leon and Dylas could make a good pair. I mean, they both have a lot in common, being both hot bishies guardians for Venti, who are now sort of displaced in a town who doesn’t look like what it used to, with no way of knowing what happened to the people they’ve left behind. I find adorable when Leon comforts Dylas about this issue, and I would like to see what they could be with some work on both sides to make it work. 
@rapidfur said: Shara is not that bad; a lot of people complain about her being forced as the main love interest and being boring, but her kind and sweet personality is nice, and she didn’t feel too shoved in my face? The intro featuring her as your lover even if ur not married to her kinda sucks, but she gets a lot of undeserved hate. >:/
Yeah, I guess Shara wasn’t all that bad after all, she was sweet and friendly and caring and had a cute design. Maybe people don’t like her as much cause there are a lot of wacky girls you can marry, and in comparison she’s undoubtedly the plainest, which doesn’t need to be a bad thing. But I’m on the side that feels strongly she is forced, I can say that because after seeing the new intro in which Micah run past all the girls to fall in the arms of Shara, I felt like maybe she was the one I was supposed to marry for the story to make sense. Even though I was going for Raven, I thought I could marry her in another save file, after marrying Shara, the canon girl. I have no idea why I thought that would be a good idea, sounds dumb now, but this is what I did. Little did I know that marriage in this game involved Aquaticus kidnapping your bride only to have you go through hell to save her before actually marrying pfft. I guess I felt bitter that after all that, I had to be married to a girl I didn’t even chose in the first place, then I stopped playing after a while. Never married Raven and I low key felt guilty for the longest time, also a bit resentful at the game for that Shara intro. 
But anyways, none of this is Shara’s fault to begin with, so I see your point where she gets lots of underserved hate. I just think that the hatred would not happen in the first place were not for that intro.
@summersquashpatch said: I posted the picture and tried to tag you but I'm not sure it worked...
I answered you twice, but the ask is still in my inbox, can you confirm me if you got an answer or two or if tumblr ate them all up? I did see the pic, thanks for showing!
Sorry for long post again, have a small, slightly smudged Dylas!
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flute-fields · 5 years
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Ooh nooo I did put animal crossing! I feel so dumb now I meant harvest moon. Sorry about that!
that’s fine! considering your mom wants one for her DS, i’m going to list the DS games available for Harvest Moon and offer my two cents on them since the DS games are the ones i have the most experience with lol so you’re in luck
to add another note, keep in mind that Harvest Moon has rebranded as Story of Seasons, so SoS is the same HM we all know and love; Natsume took the Harvest Moon title and released a bunch of horrible games to catch peoples’ interest with the familiar title, so the title shifts in this list. i only used the name Harvest Moon when discussing the games out of familiarity/force of habit; later on down this list, the title changes. i’m also adding the 3DS games.
i’ll link you to the games as well so you can go over them yourself/she can check them out herself to see what she’d prefer. i wrote a lot but not nearly enough to cover the controls/functions/story line/overall goal/townspeople in each game.
1) Harvest Moon DS/Harvest Moon DS Cute. considering one of your mom’s favorite HM games are AnWL, i think she’ll like this the best; the game is set in Forget-Me-Not-Valley with a huge amount of characters from AnWL! in DS, you can only play as Jack/Pete. in DS Cute, you can choose to play as either Claire or Pony/Jill. DS/DS Cute is probably one of my favorite title games because it’s so similar to AWL/AnWL, so i think she’d really enjoy this one. i don’t have much to say on the story/goal of the game since it’s basically AWL/AnWL for a DS. out of all the games i go over here, i think she’ll like this one the best.
2) Harvest Moon: Island of Happiness/Harvest Moon: Sunshine Islands. these two are very similar to Tree of Tranquility/Animal Parade because they’re essentially the same game with major differences. in IoH, the player character is washed up on a new island during a horrible shipwreck after a violent storm/lightning strike and sea and never makes whatever their original destination was; those who survived the crash make a new life on the island they washed up on (it sounds bleak but i promise it’s not).
however, in SI, the MC sails to SI for a new life and all of the villagers have an established life there. the two games have different goals and slightly tweaked characters, but are functionally relatively the same, with SI adding in more marriage candidates. this series is also one of my favorites, but one thing to add is that the art is very chibi-fied. not sure if your mom will mind it, but it kind of bugged me at times. i personally prefer SI.
3) Harvest Moon: Grand Bazaar. this was one of my first HM games, and it’s very cute and charming; the art, however, is more cutesy than the previous titles, so at times it kind of feels like everyone is a baby lol. the game is a little different from usual - there’s no shipping bin, because the goal is to sell everything you produce at a bazaar that’s held once a week (or at a shop in town if you don’t want to wait that long). you don’t mine in this game either, since you buy ore in shops or find them in rocks during winter. overall, it’s a cute game, but maybe not the most memorable? i remember enjoying it a lot, but i can’t remember that much about it. >_> it’s one of the more cutesy games as opposed to the little bits of realism/somberness in AWL/AnWL
i’m skipping Puzzle de Harvest Moon/Harvest Moon: Frantic Farming because neither of them are farming simulators, they’re puzzle/matching games
4) Harvest Moon: Tale of Two Towns. one of my favorite games! you play as a farmer starting in one of two towns situated on either side of a mountain, with a blocked tunnel connecting them. your goal is to bring the two towns together again through cooking festivals, which will unblock the tunnel; until then, you travel between the towns by climbing the mountain, which is great for foraging but eats up some time in your day. one town is focused on farming crops, the other is focused on farming livestock; you can do both in either town, but your farm will be devoted more to main export of either town. for example, in Konohana has a lot of fields for crops and a small barn. it’s the opposite in Bluebell.
your residency in one town isn’t permanent, though; i think at the end of every season you can choose if you want to move to the other town and you can keep doing that indefinitely. another addition to the game is dating, where you go on dates with marriage candidates rather than just leveling hearts and proposing! it brings a tiny bit more realism into the romance lol. this game is available for 3DS as well.
5) the Rune Factory games. i haven’t played a lot of RF (only 4 lol ._.) but they’re all titled as fantasy Harvest Moons, meaning you have a farm and farming is a major focus, but there’s also magic and elves and fighting monsters in dungeons to get good loot! RF title games for the DS are Rune Factory: A Fantasy Harvest Moon, Rune Factory 2: A Fantasy Harvest Moon, and Rune Factory 3: A Fantasy Harvest Moon. Rune Factory 4 is a 3DS title and the only one i’ve played but i liked it a lot and intend to play the other titles!
i don’t have too much to say on the series since i haven’t played a lot, but i really enjoyed RF4! the games are much more story driven than Harvest Moon, which i found really fun since it felt like i had more of a goal than just “farm for the town”. i will add though that i loved all of the bachelorettes(minus Amber)/bachelors up until gearing toward proposing, because a lot of their Marriage Events suddenly had like...weird stuff? i won’t spoil anything but suddenly things like possessiveness/jealousy/weird unhealthy relationship stuff came up and i was like WHOA WHAT WHERE IS THIS COMING FROM O_O because it was all SO drastically different from everything else up to that point. i didn’t romance any of the bachelors but it was there for the bachelorettes so idk if it’s the same.
there are more HM games, but these next ones are for 3DS. i’m not sure if your mom has a 3DS (i know u said DS but i call my 3DS a DS all the time so idk if it’s the same thing for you or not >_>), so i’m adding these next titles because i’m on a roll, but keep that in mind! i will also add that, with your mom’s preference in her favorite games, she’d probably enjoy the games i listed above waaaaaay more than these next ones, since that’s how i feel too.
1) Harvest Moon 3D: A New Beginning. this is the title where things feel... very different. i didn’t really enjoy it that much, if i’m being honest, because it brought in a weird focus away from farming where you reorganize the town and build new buildings and stuff. it felt a lot like the sims, minus making characters. this is the first title where you can customize the player character though! which i love! since your mom’s favorite games are AnWL and Animal Parade and MY favorite games are AnWL and Animal Parade and i didn’t enjoy this game much, she probably won’t either. the tutorial stage is also really, REALLY, horrifically long -- it stretches over a week in-game time of just basically doing nothing. most of the characters are REAL charming though imo, and they lose the cutesy chibi art which i was really happy about. the art and characters made me stick through the gameplay since i enjoyed them. they also brought in older characters and renewed their designs; i loooooved Witch Princess and Amir in this game so much i was so stoked to unlock them. but overall yeah one of my least favorite titles in the series since it brought so much focus away from farming to me and while characters/romance are nice, a huge draw TO the HM games is the farming
2) Story of Seasons. first game to be hit with the rebrand from Harvest Moon! any game after this was released (FEB 27 2014 in Japan) with the title of Harvest Moon is NOT Harvest Moon anymore! it’s Natsume up to their dirty tricks of using a great brand and stealing the name to release bad games.
anyway, SoS was... pleasant! i enjoyed it. it didn’t stick with me like the older games, though. but i loooved the art and the town, and the villagers were charming. you compete with other farmers in town for certain fields located in different places, all of which are best suited for certain kinds of crops. i liked the rival aspect, but it is very different from older HM titles. you can also select the difficulty to play in either Veteran mode or Seedling mode; i recommend Seedling mode, both because prices aren’t as high and because HM (to me) is a game to relax and have fun farming, and Veteran mode is just stressful.
3) Story of Seasons: Trio of Towns. i love this one. (well, for the most part). this is the first game that introduces your family! you start off as a young adult still living at home with your mother, father, and younger sister, and decide to move out and become a farmer. your father is furious at this idea but you are eventually set to live in the same town as your Uncle Frank, who is a farmer, to measure your farming ability. if by the end of three years, you haven’t proven to your father than you have what it takes to be a farmer, you’re leaving the town forever. the bleakness reminded me a lot of AnWL, for some reason; i loved the aspect of your father being strict and hard on you since it felt a little bit more somber than the super cute, super peppy titles in the series of recent years.
that’s where the bleakness ends, tho. i will say that, despite loving this game and the characters, i really, REALLY hate the three-town system. you start off on your farm to three crossroads that lead to three different towns that all unlock by summer in your first year. and yes, it’s fun! the different towns yield different crops and resources. but it doesn’t feel at all like Harvest Moon to me. it feels way bigger and with way more things to do. it also makes days a LOT longer, since you run from all of the towns to complete errands in part-time jobs. it needs more of your focus than other games. i haven’t finished the game yet, and while i love it, i love it separately from other HM titles. it doesn’t hook me in the way the older titles did, which i think is because of the modernity of it with three different towns and being bigger and and having such consistently bright colors as opposed to one small town and muted color scheme of, for example, AWL. it feels, like ANB, very different from the vibe Harvest Moon usually gives you. idk how to describe it. i feel like this game exists in a separate niche.
i like how your family feels more real in it, though; they periodically send you letters and visit you. it really feels like you had a life before coming to the town(s), rather than starting off as a blank slate at the beginning of the game.
anyway i hope that helped! lmk if you need any clarification or want to go over other things or want any other recommendations. i hope ur mom finds a game she likes! ^_^
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tumblunni · 7 years
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Bunni’s Rune Factory Sequel Thoughts/Wishes/OCs N Stuff!
Just my misc ideas for stuff I’d love to see in the series, and maybe some ocs hmm hmm~!
* Maybe have a town that’s more upgradeable or changeable as the story progresses? I expected something like that with the princess points in RF4, that you could support the various businesses and see the shops get new fancier sprites and stuff! And maybe have characters who start off just being unemployed npcs and then can start new businesses as the game goes on? Like if dylas could have been the fish salesman instead of it being a nameless npc. And maybe even after big events in the story the town could have stuff get destroyed, to show how dangerous the villains are? And then you could rebuild but it wouldnt be the same as it once was. * More activities for your pets to do! I like that they can help with farming but maybe they could unlock more tasks to automate as the game goes on? or maybe just have more customization for their farming, like you can choose what seeds they automatically plant, or set a rota for them to rest and swap fields. Maybe give them stats so certain ones could specialize in watering/planting/smashing rocks/etc? * Maybe have more random farm events like rune rain and typhoons? possible idea: period bandit raids or attacks by monsters. You set monsters as guards and if they win then they can farm dungeon items from the enemies, giving you a good way to gain them without having to revisit the same place ad nauseum. Or maybe have a random inspector event where you have a chance of winning a best farm award or something? And maybe when characters randomly visit your house they could actually do something instead of just standing there. Maybe they could comment on your crops? like, say yay if you have something they like, or give random tips, or small bonuses like casting a gigantifier effect on a random crop or restoring some health. Or depending on the character and their relationship with you, maybe they could do negative effects? Also i wish one of the endgame bonus awards could be the ability to turn these random events off entirely if you want, instead of just delaying it. * The possibility of maybe having a negative relationship bar as well as a positive one! So characters could maybe become rivals instead of just friends or indifferent, with nothing else. And maybe you could even have some points in both and have a friendly rivalry? * Characters having more potential interactions with each other outside of just you. I think it’d be nice if when you marry someone then the batchelor/ettes you dont pick could have random event chances where they marry each other. And maybe the player could influence who they end up with, depending on how you interact with the two of them? Play matchmaker! Help them find their happy ending even though you rejected them. Consolation for guilt! * Also can we maybe start having friendship options for each character’s main plot? Let me be able to resolve their sad backstory even if I dont date them, the only difference when I date them should be that I date them. Not that arthur never reconciles with his estranged mother unless we just happen to bump uglies :P * Adding LGBTQ marriage options would be hella amazing in every way, jesus christ please can we have this. Or like.. if we cant, then can we have like... less gay?? I dunno, i just feel like I’m sadder about not having gay marriage when the characters are CONSTANTLY teasing that some of them MIGHT have same sex romances yet nobody is allowed to ever do it. Stop rubbing it in. Its somehow more painful than not having any LGBTQ representation at all, just having this sort of ‘its not representation and it never will be but we’re gonna make it look like it just to torment you’. * i dunno, I feel like probably knowing the company we’re more likely to get a gay npc couple or something in the next game and still have to wait ages for an actual romanceable candidate. Theyre not exactly ahead of the times on the subject. BUT WE CAN HOPE!!! * I want Porcoline to cameo in the next game, or us to hear about how the porco restaurant family is doing. I got the most attatched to them! And I hope the De Saint Coquille family continues to cameo in every main rune factory game, though I think it’d be hard to top this incarnation of them! OH, it’d be amazingly awesome if the next De Saint Coquilles could be the direct descendants of Porco’s family and he cameos as a grandpa?? It could work if the sequel gives a canon love interest to lest/frey, like how raven cameo’d in rf4 and her dialogue heavily implies she ended up with micah. So if frey ended up with arthur or dylas or lest ended up with margaret, then they could be a new part of the de saint coquille family in this sequel cameo. or just be ambiguously referenced so that the player can decide which of the three marriages happened. Oh, or another idea is maybe you meet a branch of the de saint coquilles that’re all elves, if maybe the next game could be set in the elven kingdom? And they could reference being descended from porcoline who did a lot of work on human-elven diplomacy back in the day. Also maybe we could get another female character filling the usual role of the food-loving head of the family with the silly art style? I’ve heard that there was one female de saint coquille in one of the spinoff wii games i havent played but it’d be cool to see another. * Can we have two-seater monsters to ride? So you could go on dates atop an elephant! * Maybe be able to select one monster as your official pet? And it can live inside the house and have a lil food bowl and do more interactions with it, and have friends talk about it when they visit and maybe they can feed it snacks? And it could help raise friendship with different people depending on their preferences for different monsters. I just really like the monsters and I want to make them feel like a part of the family! * A possible very unlikely idea- maybe that monster could become human in a secret postgame quest, and be like your second child? I miss being able to have multiple children like in rf3, but I didnt like how children all looked identical and had basically zero personality in that game. This could be a good way to have two distinct kids! It’d be too tricky to give each monster a unique gijinka form like RF4′s guardians though, so just make it that they become a 100% human character with one set appearance and maybe a couple different colourschemes. maybe it could be that your close monster friend dies sacrificing itself to save you from like... an evil homunculus experimental weapon or something. And then they’re revived using the same magic that created that creature, their soul possesses it and they get to be this artificial human, and they get to have one preset appearance with a good excuse for why! And it could just be super cute and awesome to have them be so excited to finally talk to you and tell you how much they love you! And they could have funny sweet interactions getting used to human things, and their big sibling could help them. And they could be really good at helping with chores in the monster barn, just imagine them hugging all their old monster friends and they trust them completely and they can lead them off in a line like baby ducklings~! And maybe they can have random dialogue saying like ‘hey this monster wanted me to tell you they love you, mama!’ * It would be really cool if we could get a game with a customiseable protagonist, or even just the ability to choose between a few preset options for different races. or just a protagonist of the different races in general, like we’ve had a bazillion humans so cant we have an elf or dwarf? Micah being a were-monster was the entire appeal of that game, I think having another unusual protagonist would recapture that hype! But I really like the idea of having a customizeable protag who could be any of the main three races. I mean not much would have to change depending on who you pick, it’d be relatively less trouble to add in. Maybe just some occasional slightly different scenes to show the different perspectives? or they start with some boosts to different initial stats, or maybe have different aesthetics for the house you get? oooh, or maybe different aesthetics for all the outfits they can get! Like how theyre different for the genders in rf4, but they could have like a human/dwarf/elf cultural flair to each thing. I’d also love if there were more outfits than just pyjamas/bathing suit/8 different colours for default outfit. * I think I’ve mentioned this before but I had a cool idea for if a RF game had a ghost protagonist, now we know ghosts exist in this universe. You could play as both the male and female characters simultaneously, and just select which is the ghost and which is human! So there’d still be two routes with incentive to replay the game, but whichever character you dont pick gets to be the sidekick character with their own different personality and you can get them married to various sub-batchelors maybe? like, the assistant charrie’s romances are different from the ones you can get if you picked them as protagonist. Anyway. the setup would be that the ghost has to haunt a human in order to affect the real world, so thats why you have two characters. The more normal idea would be that protagonist is the human who’s haunted by an assistant/butler type ghost, but I also like the idea that you play as the ghost and you boss around this human to do all the heavy lifting. Like, instead of starting off and getting amnesia somehow, you start off alive and then die and have to possess someone in order to fullfill your unfinished business of raising this farm. You’re the ghost of the person who owned this farm, and you were sleeping here underground waiting for the chosen one you could bond with so you could get back to farming, but you slept too long and the place has got all overgrown and you start again from zero. And then the protagonist could be clueless about everything cos a century has passed, not just cos theyre amnesiac again. * Other excuses that aren’t just amnesia again: protagonist has moved here from another country, protagonist was some sort of sheltered princess who’s never worked a day in their life, protagonist is simply someone who’s never run a farm before and honestly who cares if you start off as someone who already lived here for years? Just have it like youre a loner who’s made a resolution to start being more social now, or some other reason. * A possible idea for a backstory- you are formerly a swashbuckling pirate who just decided to settle down. I dunno why but I think that’d make for a nice unique protagonist perspective! * Also maybe if we do amnesia again we can do something with it? Can we actually have an event eventually about regaining our memories? I was expecting in RF4 there’d be a reveal that before your amnesia you used to be a sechs empire soldier, since all we know about you is that you’re the one who had the rune stones in the beginning of the game. Only other explanation I can think of for that is that there’s some sort of earthmate country somewhere that creates these stones, or you were a merchant who somehow was selling such a rare artifact? I dunno, I still think that the ‘oh god i used to be evil’ twist would have been really really good! * Maybe it could be possible to have other ways to ‘choose’ a character, and get them to become an npc in your house and wander around? I dunno about you guys but I really loved all the themes of ‘found family’ in RF4 and wished there was an equivelant of the marriage routes where I could adopt volkanon as my grandpa or something. Or maybe have a bunch of orphan npcs you can adopt, as an option for if you have a same sex marriage? I just wished I could have made some sort of symbolic gesture to them to say ‘hey, you are my favourite of the non-dateable npcs, thank you’. * Also I’d really like to see a romanceable ghost! I just really think that now they revealed that ghosts are a thing that can exist, I wanna see more about ghosts. Some sort of bigger role to a ghost! * Also yes series please continue having adorkable monster people to marry, that was the entire reason i picked RF4 as my first game to play, lol! I am a bit sad though that all the girls in RF4 arent very monstery at all and all the boys are more monstery. Its a shame cos in RF3 there’s two super monstery girls with the best designs and personalities! I wanna play that game next, I wanna go backwards in order XD
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tumblunni · 7 years
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and I’m just thinking about how much its a great template on how to make a small town feel like a real living world, and how to make you get to know characters organically, and such! there’s so much you can take influence from even in wildly different genres of game that dont share any of the same mechanics! So umm here’s my random post of thinking about things inspired by rune factory that I’d love to incorporate into my own games someday~! I think a lot of it could work best for my ‘cathedral tower’ game cos its about protecting a town of people, or my ‘zombie mum’ game cos it could have a lot of similar scavenging mechanics. HMMMM... This game just makes me so inspired!!!
* I really really REALLY like how you gain stat experience from doing various exploration activities around the world, and it translates into bonuses to your battle and/or farming skills. AND those battle and farming skills give bonuses to each other! Like.. walking, eating, taking a bath, throwing stuff, they all add small amounts to your hp or stamina bar. Which means you can farm more! And all the different types of farming and crafting activities, which you can do more of now, add vitality and accuracy and strength. And now you can battle more! And battling gives a very good growth curve of making you better at battling, there’s levels but there’s also great encouragement to try every weapon and magic in order to pump up your stats. Which is also great incentive to do crafting so you’ll actually be able to handle fighting with a low level weapon long enough to gain all the boosts. Which is a great incentive to farm and explore to get those ingredients in order to craft. Which is a great incentive to befriend the townsfolk, and level them up as your companions, and give them your leftover crafted items in order to equip them all good and make them more useful while raising friendship at the same time. aaaa everything links so well, its so well made! it means you can succeed in the game no matter which part of it you’re better at, and its easier to get into trying the stuff you maybe dont like as much. Except for the soil levelling system, thats annoyingly nonintuituive and non-tutorial’d compared to the rest...
* Anyway! Ideas for how it could be expanded even more to give you even more of a sense of progression! And also to make it less repetitive having to reexplore the same areas again and again looking for stuff that only spawns there. Eventually you’re gonna be stuck with a total lack of some early level item and you have to backtrack searching for where on earth it came from :P ANYWAY! The idea! Maybe you could level up your gathering skills with different forms of gathering? You kinda do have that with the mining/farming/etc, but it doesnt have any effect on what you gain, how fast you can gather, how much you gather, etc. It just gives you the battle stat boosts for gathering a lot. My idea was maybe like... if you have high level mining then maybe you have higher odds of finding rare rocks, getting more drops per rock, getting the rarer drops within the rare rocks, rocks respawning faster, etc. So it becomes less and less difficult the more powerful you get! And instead of lots of items being super limited to certain areas, technically every area contains the same rock items and its only your skill that determines what you get. With maybe just a little bit of a levelling curve, like if you enter a high level area earlier than you’re supposed to then its harder to mine a rock. Takes 50 swings instead of 5, or whatever. But this is also a reward for exploring there early, cos you get 50 chances to win a good item from that rock, instead of 5. (Provided you even have enough stamina to manage that!) And maybe high level rocks give more mining experience, or whatever. Aaaaand maybe there are indeed some area-exclusive drops, rather than necessarily everything scaling to your current level. But they wouldnt be as specific as in RF4, where I have to keep going back to this one haunted mansion thats the only damn place containing spiders so far! Like, have several areas at different levels throughout the game, so there’s always a new [item] hunting area thats relatively close to your level at all times. And maybe the higher level equivelant of like... the spider area, would give out bigger amounts of spider items and more exp and whatever. But you could still totally sit around grinding in the low level spider area and start getting higher level spidermeats if you do it enough, its just easier to grind at the later areas. So the level curve still works out! Man sorry this is a long confusing blabber cos i dunno how to explain this XD
* Alternative idea on how to make low level items still relatively available even when it becomes annoying to backtrack to those areas: Digimon World version! Alternative methods to acquire those items easily without gathering will appear as the game goes on. In DW1 the shops unlock in roughly this pattern. (Well, its a sandbox game so you can sequence break at some points and unlock shops in different orders, but yeah) Like around the time you’re 10 levels above [spider area], you get a merchant who sells those spider things. And by now you’ll be making a lot more profit so its way more feasable to just buy it all from them instead of backtracking to gather. Or maybe it could be part of a reward for befriending people? I thought in the cathedral game it would be good if you could set other characters to do work while you’re out adventuring, once youve earned their trust. So you could get an infinate source of those low level items through this method, and maybe get more appreciation for the characters when they’re being super helpful and all. And maybe you could set up various areas in your home base in order to change the low-level item that the npcs will farm. Like, set up a small pen full of tamed spiders that you can milk for cobwebs every day. And as the game goes on, you can upgrade your base and add more room for multiple item-farming areas at once.
* And also possibly have a small chance of characters randomly appearing each morning? Like, instead of necessarily having to backtrack around the town every single day to talk to everybody, once they’re a high enough friendship level they’ll randomly take the initiative themselves. And give you bonus gifts and sidequests and stuff, or maybe have a chance of doing a small favour for you. Like you wake up and a few squares of your farm are already watered or harvested, or one of your items has had its durability restored, or clues have been added on your map on how to find a new area. Or I dunno.. like... they cleaned your house or made you breakfast and you get a productivity boost from friendship joy. But yeah this randomness would be another way you could still receive old items without having to backtrack. Plus generally other anti-backtracking helpfulness! I think that as your level increases it should get easier to do your daily chores, so you have more time to do [insert whatever thing is currently plot important at this level]. Thats a big problem that makes it exhausting to continue playing farming games after a long time. Like.. the first time you run around the town giving people gifts its fun, but after doing a whole year of it it gets frustrating that it never gets easier or less required. Same for farming and backtrack-gathering, and even battling and exploring to some extent. if the way you do these things eventually started to get easier/change in how you do them, then they’d never get monotonous. Though that might just be a problem for me, I guess? I dunno if I’m weird but i find things more and more difficult the more I do them, routines are frustrating to me instead of easier. I have to find ways to always spice it up!
* Another idea of more ways to interact with characters beyond just giving gifts every day! Maybe have bonuses in certain areas every now and then? like, wake up one day and [character] is saying ‘the harvest in [area] is really good!’, and then if you go there you get a higher quantity of stuff, exp, and some cute friendship scenes with the charrie. Or maybe there’s too many [monster] in [area] and the harvest might actually become bad if you dont team up with [character] and exterminate them! And again, it’d become easier as you get higher levelled. At the beginning you’d pretty much be required to go for these events or else miss the chance, but later on if characters trust you a lot they could do it automatically on their own if you miss the event. So they continue gaining bonus exp even when you’re not travelling with them, you still gain (a slightly smaller amount of) the bonus item in your supply box, and really all you lost was a chance to raise more friendship points with them.
* Also maybe sometimes with regular quests/requests, a character could volunteer to help if they like you enough? Not for main story quests, with those you’d just have the character asking if they can join you for it. But with like... fred asks you for some chestnuts to make a cake for gerald, and mary calls you up to say ‘hey i heard about it, i had a big harvest of chestnuts today!’ And then you get friendship with all three of them, and save some time! And you can still refuse if you wanna do it yourself, that way you’d get bonus friendship with fred. cos like, he heard from mary that you said you wanted to handle the problem personally, and he was flattered. :3 (tho some characters would be different, maybe some would dislike it? i dunno)
* I really love that you can give cute hats to the batchelors and batchelorettes in RF4, and they wear them, and it is cute. This needs to be a thing in all games! I also like that the way its done is sorta easter eggy? Its not really explained as its own unique feaure, youre actually never told you can change party members’s equipment, which is a little bit annoying. But its also nice that its just like... “wow, the game’s much more open than I expected!” You can give gifts to characters and you wonder if you can give every single item, then HUH if you give them hats they actually wear them! And they can use all the same weapons you use! Awesome~ I also like that it seems like they have a chance of randomly wearing every hat you ever gave them? Whenever theyre in your party, they wear whatever equipment you last gave them, but when theyre wandering around the town they randomly wear their entire hat history. Thats so cute and makes them feel more alive! Itd be so neat if characters in these games could ‘remember’ stuff like that more often. Like I dunno... maybe the game logs down the first gift item you ever give each character, and then they bring it up during their final max-affection event. With different cute conversations depending on what it was! Like ‘omg wasnt it hilarious, I really hated it’ or ‘i cant believe you got my fave item on the first try!’ And then if its something of medium level like, maybe they say ‘i never really thought [item] was all that special, but ive become quite fond of it now it makes me remember you’. And i dunno, maybe at the ending the game could remember who you had in your party during every big story quest, and show a montage during the credits ^_^
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