Very good performance, and the graphics are quite unique but you get used to them, and now I like them. There aren't that many changes to the game from the Game Boy version, which you could say is good or bad. I'm not sure I could put too much trust in these developers to make too many big changes. I only say that because some of the changes they did make are pretty bad. A lot of these changes seem fine on the surface, but you only really start noticing the problems after playing for a long time. There are 4 big changes to talk about, and they are all kind of connected. 1. No cooking without using a collected recipe. I honestly have no idea why they made this change other than maybe if they thought cooking was too complicated before. But it was such a cool aspect of the old game, and it was fun to experiment and find the best way to cook each thing. Also 10 of the recipes in this game are given out by a character named Lou who only appears after you give 75 offerings to the Harvest Goddess (1 per day). Giving offerings is sort of a hidden mechanic, but is very important. In my opinion some of the rewards should be moved out of it, like Lou could just already be there from the start of the game. 2. New animals. Not entirely new though, more like variations of existing animals. There are now 3 different types of wool, 4 different types of milk, and still 1 egg even though there are 2 chicken colors. This would be fine, however there are literally zero cooking recipes that use these new products, and you can't convert them to milk, cheese or butter. The different milk types do ship for slightly more than the original, but overall it feels not very useful to have these animals at all. On top of that, if you are a completionist and trying to ship one of everything, these new animals only serve to make the game much much longer. 3. Animals start with a maximum of 5 hearts out of a possible 10. How do you increase the maximum? You must breed them. This is kind of annoying but fine for chickens or rabbits, but when it comes to the other animals, it's a different story. Cows/sheep/alpacas have a pregnancy period of 20 days, and then after that they take another 20 days to become an adult. You must breed them 5 times for every single type of animal, that's 6 types, or 8 including chickens and rabbits. This means that it is impossible to start winning cow or sheep festivals until at least year 3, and that is if you are extremely fast. More realistically it'll be year 4 before you can win and start producing gold products. Notice I said "start" winning. With there being 4 types of cows, it'll take another 3 years to win once with every type. If you want to ship one of everything, you also have to be very careful you don't accidentally have your animals outside too much before they all are producing gold, or else when you do win a festival they might skip right over gold and go right to platinum products. 4. Animals can no longer be hurt by your tools, or get sick, or die of old age. I can fully understand removing the ability to hurt animals, as you would usually only do it on accident anyways. However, this game has cooking recipes which require specific sizes of animal products. If you have all animals at 10 hearts, are at maximum capacity, and you need small milk, your only choice is to sell an animal, buy a new one, and then after you have enough of the small milk, sell that animal and breed another. But just wait it gets worse, because you need a lot of small and medium milks, and you probably won't want to rely on the harvest sprites to take care of your animals for you since they brush them and might get their hearts up too fast. But even just milking or shearing gets their hearts up, so you might be screwed regardless. There is absolutely no way to lower their hearts. Furthermore, with animals never being able to get sick or die, it really makes animals feel less real and more like a machine; you input fodder, output milk. You can feel secure in knowing that after you have all animals at max hearts, you never have to feed or interact with them ever again unless you want their product. This is so bad for what is supposed to be a simulation of animal farming. There is one other small change that I'd like to complain about, and that is being able to own more than one pet. Obviously, being able to have more than one, on its own is totally fine, or even a good thing. It's more the surrounding systems that are the problem. You need to have a ridiculously high 8 hearts with your newest pet before you can get the next. This isn't that bad, more of a slight annoyance, but if I had to guess, I think the main reason the devs did this is so that you don't have to play the disc throwing mini-game too much at a time. That and just to extend play time. But the hearts go up quite slowly on pets, and the guy who sells pets and pet treats only does so once per season, and all the pets are season exclusive. It's easy to forget because of how infrequent it is. It just makes the whole experience needlessly frustrating. There is absolutely no reason he couldn't be selling every week. And on the topic of mini-games, this game has a bunch of them, and honestly they are pretty good, but you are expected to play way too much of the same thing repeatedly. Even in the original version, you could play one of three mini-games with all seven of the harvest sprites every day. This version of the game does nothing to alleviate this problem. This version also removes rival marriages, apparently because people felt too time pressured or stressed. Well it would have been nice to at least have the option. There is also same sex marriage which is fine but also means it isn't really possible to just be friends with everyone. Even if you don't give them the new item in this game that gets you officially "dating" you'll still receive chocolate or invites on festival days, which is clearly romantic in nature. That's not even mentioning the heart events or dialogue. Now, this game quite well programmed, very few bugs, but there are some other basic things that lack a bit of polish that you'd think would be fixed, like how the horse is so massive that it's hard to dismount anywhere, and when you do dismount it, you are placed inside of its hitbox and cannot move parallel to the horse, only away from it. Or how there's the one leaf pile in autumn that is too low and clipping into the ground, constantly flickering (Z-fighting). Or like how they reduced the cost of the town house, but forgot to change the amount in the description of it on the world map. Also I find it strange that there wasn't any new house customization added, like wall colors. That would have been an easy good change. Anyway I still recommend this game, but be prepared to grind your face off even more than the original.
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