about twenty different plates in order to get the "best" ending. And trying not to tear

your hair out when one facet of your grand agricultural-slash-romantic plan falls apart

because you didn't get X item at Y day under Z conditions. Still, it's been Natsume's prime

cash cow (COW, get it?!?) since the 16-bit days, making one wonder, just where the hell

are all these abandoned farms, anyway? Every single time, it's an abandoned farm handed

down from your grandfather. With a contingent of gnomes there to critique your progress,

and a Harvest Goddess to gripe ironically about her goddessness.

Harvest Moon: Hero of Leaf Valley is an enhanced port of the PS2's Harvest Moon: Save the Homeland,

featuring a similar ultimatum: Round up 50,000 simoleons in two years, else the entire village

is getting razed to build an amusement park. (Which is kinda down there on the list of

"Sinister plans," I mean any situation where funnel cake is involved can't be that bad,

can it?) If you can't do this, there's something wrong with you on a basic level; even if you

leave the farm completely fallow and just do two years' worth of part-time jobs, you

can easily drum up enough cash. But that's just one way, JUST ONE WAY, to go about it.

In truth, there are 16 other endings that you can get depending on who you befriend

and which events you see... and, fortunately, there's a NewGame+ option that streamlines

the process of seeing all of these by allowing you to carry over your various upgrades and

developments.

Now, I enjoy Harvest Moon, and I like the multitask-centric kind of gameplay that it

brings with it... but honestly, I found playing this particular version to be kind of a chore.

First of all, the load times are unbearable, especially given how small each particular

chunk of Leaf Valley actually is. You want to get from your farm to the coastline for

some fishing? Prepare to spend about 40% of your time walking, and 60% staring at a blank

screen while the audio abruptly cuts out. And that's a shame, because the music is one

of the better parts of this presentation, regardless of how much it seems to bite on

Epona's Song from Ocarina of Time. The controls, similarly, are finicky to the point of frustration,

with your hero often being a pixel or two away from the "correct" spot to take an action,

or occasionally jumping over a fence for the heck of it, or picking up exactly the wrong

thing at exactly the wrong time. A number of interesting mini-games help to balance

out the experience, like the chain-reaction mining challenge and the requisite fishing

sim, and of course there's a village full of bachelorettes to woo. But it'll take plenty

of patience - and a tolerance for load screens - to convince that cute maid you're the one

for her. Patience and fish.