It's time for our... adventure (?) ... to begin! There's no option menu or anything, but after we start the game, we're asked a few questions to customize our experience.

A couple of explanations of how this is gonna work:

• Since this is a DS game but sometimes one screen is unimportant or redundant, I'll be cropping some of the screenshots to include only one screen.
• Since I'm playing the Japanese version of the game, I'm going to refer to not only this game but related games by their Japanese names. I'll say the corresponding English name or title first, but then will continue to use the Japanese names only from there on out.
• I'm not going to be doing any save-scumming. Refer to the masterpost for exactly what that means.
• Because of the open nature of the game, the diaries may become fairly non-linear, especially in the beginning, as I'll focus more on related events for a single entry rather than the order events unfold in the game for me.

The first set of questions determines the player character's appearance. Basically, we're choosing between two different protagonists. There's Pony, the brunette with a twin ponytail, or Claire, a blonde with long straight hair. We can get different outfits (read: palette swaps of the same outfit) and stuff for the character, so it's basically just the hair and face that we're deciding on. Each of these characters appeared before, with Claire being the protagonist of Harvest Moon for Girl (Back to Nature for Girl) and Friends of Mineral Town for Girl (More Friends of Mineral Town), while Pony is the heroine from Wonderful Life for Girl (Another Wonderful Life).

I took a poll on my Facebook page to ask which heroine I should choose, and the results were overwhelmingly in favor of Pony. I think there was like, one vote for Claire, lol. The first time I played this game, I played as Claire, though, so this will be a good opportunity to attempt a full playthrough with Pony. It's purely aesthetic, though.

The questions we're asked are very obviously leading to the two choices, like asking whether we like blonde hair or not, our opinions on ponytails... even whether we play Game Boy Advance (Claire) or GameCube (Pony) more. The final question just asks which of the two characters we like better. I picked the answers that lead to Pony, obviously.

We're then asked to enter a lot of names. We get to name ourselves (so I went with Thaao, of course!), the farm (which I named Michishige), our dog, and our cat (which I named Pit and Hades respectively after my pet cockroaches that died last year). We also get to choose when our birthday will occur. The game's calendar is divided into four thirty-day seasons. My traditional birthday in these games is Fall 25, because in Ranch Story 2 (Harvest Moon 64), you weren't able to choose the day, only the month, so I would choose Fall and the day would be automatically assigned to the 25. My real birthday falls on the 24th, and is in the fall, so it's close enough. But because that original game always had the 25th, I've always gone on to use that date.

Once we finish up all our questions, the actual story begins. We're in bed, and the Goddess is standing over us among her friends, the Colobocles, who are little elf-like creatures that live in trees and stuff. They're called Harvest Sprites in the English version. She's complaining about how we won't do any work on the farm, even though she promised our parents that we would work on the farm. She figures that people who don't want to do something simply won't do it, and gives up immediately.

Then we hear a thunderous voice from out of nowhere, upset that the Goddess would give up without even trying like that. This voice is God, though of course, in the English version this was changed to be "Harvest King." He's mad that a Goddess would be so lazy, but they just end up getting in an argument. She ends up calling him an old baldy, to which he gets mad and turns her to stone. Just like that.

The Colobocles are understandably upset, and start telling him this is why people call him names like old baldy anyway, and they start chanting "baldy!" at him. Furiously, he banishes them all (including the petrified Goddess) to another dimension. Then he realizes he may have lost his cool a little bit... but figures he can probably spin this in his favor somehow.

We wake up the next morning to a witch in our house. Actually, she doesn't have a name, or maybe her name really is just Witch. But that's what we're going to call her.

Anyway, she wakes us up and tells us she's brought a letter from God and tells us to read it. It starts out, "Hello. This is God." He goes on to tell us that because we were a lazy bum who didn't want to work on the farm, the Goddess and Colobocles were punished in our stead, and the only way to rescue them now is by doing the work that the Goddess had promised our parents we would do. Witch says that she'll be lonely without the Goddess, too, and so we realize what we must do. We must save the Goddess and the Colobocles!

Then we strike a pose and there's confetti or something for some reason.

And yeah, this whole game is like this. The series has always had its share of silly stuff, but it kept trying to go in different directions based on who had the most influence over each title. I think this title was the pinnacle of the 'silly' titles, where the developers realized the game was funny to start with and just went all-out with it. Other games try to be serious despite the premise being ridiculous, and other games ignore the story completely to focus solely on gameplay or something else (like ... one minor aspect of the gameplay lol).

We head outside to get started and are immediately faced with this funny-looking man. Yes, he has a fantastic mustache, but he also has a clown nose and his head looks like a potato so I really struggle to find him attractive. The stache alone? Most certainly. Him as a whole? Ehhhhhhh, I'm just here for the fuzzy face. Anyway, this guy is the mayor of Mineral Town, a nearby town that's slightly more developed than our Forgotten Valley where we live. Like, they have a library and a proper hospital and stuff. We have a couple farms and a bar. Maybe that's why we're Forgotten...? The name of the Valley is almost the opposite in the English version, where it's called Forget-Me-Not. Which I realize is a plant. Don't comment on that!! Think literally!!

Anyway, Thomas tells us that the worker in charge of our shipping was changed, so now he's taking over because he lost at Rock-Paper-Scissors at the Mayors' Meeting thing. He seems pretty annoyed that he has to come out here and mess with the shipping, but he's friendly overall.

And now we're pretty much left to do whatever the heck we want. We start the game with a rucksack and a few tools inside -- a hammer, axe, hoe, sickle, and watering can. We also have a magic necklace that can let us see what's going on around the Valley even if we're not standing there. We have a pedometer that will count how many steps we've taken while we have it in our inventory. And lastly we have two bags of turnip seeds.

We don't have any particular direction or anything, other than "save the Goddess," which we can apparently do by "working," so we're free to do whatever we want to do. On the bottom screen, we have a variety of sub-menus we can play with, one being the map of the Valley itself, so I'll go ahead and introduce you to the place we live.

Near the center (and a little to the west) of the northern part of the Valley is our farm. We live here and work here (well, we're going to start working now, I guess). There's not much else here for now, but we'll be able to build it up as we go. We can leave the farm to the south which takes us to the main roads of the Valley.

If we head west, the road will turn north toward a fancy villa, which is by far the largest house in town. A rich woman lives here with her granddaughter and a butler.

Heading east from the farm, we reach a river. Before crossing it, we can head north to the pond where the Goddess used to live before she was banished, and next to this pond is the Colobocles' tree where they live.

If we instead cross the bridge over the river, we arrive at another farm which is much larger than ours with windmills and stuff. South of that farm is mostly just land overrun with weeds and stuff and the house of an elderly couple who live a bit away from everyone else. North of the second farm is a road to an excavation site where a researcher and his assistant live nearby in a tent by a waterfall. East of the farm is the road that leaves the Valley. There's likely a bus stop out there that can take people places, and the closest place is Mineral Town.

The rest of the valley west of the river and south of our farm and the villa is populated with various houses where the villagers live and work. For actual amenities, we have an inn and a bar. The rest of the places are a hodgepodge of strange people who all ended up in Forgotten Valley for some reason.

The first place we'll really look at here is, of course, our own farm!

Most of the farm is just dirt right now with weeds and sticks and rocks everywhere. But along the south there is a small pond, an unused stable, our house, the shipping bin, and one other house. In the other house lives Takakura, who... I guess is our partner? All of the characters in this game actually come from the Mineral Town and Wonderful Life games, which take place in Mineral Town and Forgotten Valley themselves. In Wonderful Life, Takakura was your father's partner and they ran the farm together, but after your father passes, you come to the farm and work with Takakura instead.

In that game, Takakura went back and forth between other towns and the Valley every day, selling the items you produced on the farm and making orders for things like construction jobs or buying animals for you. In this game, however, he does... nothing. Thomas takes care of the shipment, and you call up other services on the phone to take care of everything else. So he just kinda... lives in this house. Not that I mind living alongside this cutie with giant eyebrows, mind you. But I kinda liked it when he had a bit more of an active role in the gameplay.

When we head to the little pond on our farm and examine it... we rescue our first Colobocle! Don't worry, there are 101 of them in total and most of them are nowhere near this easy to rescue. But we have to start somewhere! This guy's name is Carafe. He thanks us for rescuing him and then disappears with magic sparkles all around. We can't really do much with the Colobocles just now, though.

You'll notice in the top screen in the screenshot, there's a blue section where a Carafe's face is close-up on the screen. These little 'action' things happen frequently throughout the game, reminiscent of some dramatic moment in an anime or something. It's pretty funny. Below that, on the bottom screen, we see a sepia-colored picture of the farm itself. There's often a picture like this on the bottom screen, but it's usually covered up by other stuff. So it's always nice when we get to see it on its own and appreciate it for what it is. Usually we can see it as a cutscene is happening before anyone starts talking.

So let's get a little bit of this "work" stuff done and talk about some of the basic game systems. We're already on our way with a Colobocle rescued! We have three "slots" to which we can equip items. The first slot is our "tool" slot, where we can put items like the hoe or axe. Pressing the Y button will use whatever tool is in the tool slot. The next slot is the "held item" slot. If we approach an item that we can pick up and press the A button to pick it up, we'll hold it above our head and it will appear in this slot. We can also take items from our bag and start holding them by putting them in this slot. And then the last slot is the "accessory" slot. This slot allows us to equip items that have passive effects; for example, if we equip our pedometer here, our total step count for the game will appear in the bottom-left corner of the top screen. I actually equip the pedometer at the beginning of the game just to make a little more room in the rucksack, as your space is limited.

We're going to start out by growing some crops. Our farm is made up of a series of squares in a grid that we can utilize in various ways. For now, we're going to plant crops using the tools we were given in the beginning.

We equip the hoe in the tool slot and use it to start tilling the soil on the farm next to the pond.

Then we equip the turnip seeds in the tool slot and stand in the middle of the tilled soil to toss them in the air. In this game, seed bags will sew onto the square you're standing on and the eight surrounding squares.

Lastly, we water the newly-planted seeds with the watering can. Before we can water them, we have to fill the can at the little pond where we met Carafe.

And this is the basics for growing crops, one of many ways we can do work and raise money. We'll need money to expand our farm, upgrade our tools, and buy valuable items, all of which we'll need to do to rescue the various Colobocles.

However, we can't just do unlimited work as much as we want. We're limited by our own capabilities, in the form of hidden stats called Stamina and Fatigue. Normally, every time we use a tool, we lose a bit of Stamina. Once our Stamina runs out, we'll start gaining Fatigue instead. If our Fatigue maxes out, we will pass out, leaving us helpless for the rest of the day, and inhibiting how much work we can do the next day. We can restore our Stamina and Fatigue by eating food, having drinks, bathing, or most importantly, going to bed.

The game uses a real-time system in which every few seconds in real life, 10 minutes will pass on the game clock. Characters in the game have daily routines and will move around based on the time, stores will open and close, and the time we get into bed at night determines how much Stamina and Fatigue we restore by sleeping. If we go to bed too late, we might not restore our energies fully, and we may end up waking up late on the next day, too!

There are other factors that affect Fatigue and Stamina, too. Doing things that cause you to get hurt like falling down a hole in a cave will cause you to lose Stamina. Doing work outside when it's late at night or during bad whether will cause you to accumulate Fatigue even while you still have Stamina (and if you're out of Stamina, you'll gain extra Fatigue!)

With the real-time system, the limited inventory space, and the energy management system, the main gameplay of this game consists of constant resource management. You can think of it almost as a real-time strategy game as much as it is a life simulation game. If you are inattentive or consistently have poor judgment when it comes to managing yourself, you can find it extremely difficult to progress in the game, or you'll progress at a very slow rate.

Money is another important resource that must be managed, since we'll be using it to make most of our progress on the farm. In our house is a telephone where we can order various services, most of which come from Mineral Town. Actually, they might all come from Mineral Town now that I think about it. Anyway, in the screenshot above, we're calling Carly who helps run the general store in Mineral Town. From her we can order things like groceries, seeds to plant on the farm, and some items we can use like a basket or a bigger rucksack.

This is also where we see our first Weird Name Thing. As I mentioned before with Takakura, the locations and characters in this game come directly from the Mineral Town and Wonderful Life games. But it wouldn't make a lot of sense if the games took place simultaneously -- Wonderful Life takes place over the player's entire lifetime, with the town growing old with you, and there's no way that all the events of Colobocle Station could happen before that, for example. So they had to make an excuse how these characters and locations can exist in both games.

Apparently, Colobocle Station takes place 100 years (or is it 1,000? I don't remember; this isn't really important lol) after the events of Wonderful Life and Mineral Town, with everyone having posterity that for some reason look and act exactly like their ancestors, even living in the same locations and everything, having the same family structures... I mean, it's basically like everyone was cloned and placed into an artificially-preserved environment from 100 years past. The only difference is that they have different names. Well, most of them -- even Takakura's 100-years-later great-great-grandson clone is also named Takakura.

But for most of the characters, they got new names. Carly, for example, is the 100-years-later version of Karen.

In the English version of the game, however, they thought it would be weird for all these characters that are basically the same characters from other games to have different names, so they renamed everyone back to the original games. So Carly is called Karen in all three of the games in English.

So from now on when I mention that someone has two names, the name I'm using normally is the name from this game, while the alternate name is their name in the other two games and in the English version of this game. Makes sense? No? Good. Let's go.

One of the first things we do in the game is call up Carly and order some potato seeds. We start the game with a little bit of money to get us started. The general store is open from 9AM to ... I think 5PM, and it's closed on Wednesdays as well. If we call during off days, the call won't go through at all. If we call a bit before they open or close, Carly will answer the phone and tell us to call back later. What's also nifty about the general store is that as soon as we buy items from them, despite them being an entire town over and us just talking on the phone, they appear in our inventory immediately! Maybe God does it to help us rescue the Colobocles... XD

The only other things left to talk about on the farm are the mailbox, where we'll get letters sometimes, and the shipping bin, where we can sell various items. We have a letter from Chicken Lilia's recommending a product called the Touch Glove that lets us get even more lovey-dovey with our animals so that we can grow a bond faster. What's nice is that this shop name pun sort of works in both languages -- the owner's name of the poultry farm and shop is Lilia, and the Japanese word for "chicken" ends in "li," so they make a portmanteau of the two words にわとりりあ, while in English, "lil" is a shortened form of "little," so the name sounds like "Chicken Little."

As for the shipping bin, it's just a box next to Takakura's house in the screenshot above. We can toss items in there (though once an item goes in, there's no taking it back out!) and at 5PM each day, Thomas will stop by and take the goods out, leaving payment for them in their place.

As for places outside the farm, today we're going to visit the excavation site at the northeast corner of the Valley.

The excavation site houses artifacts from an ancient civilization, attracting the work of Professor Cain, who spends every day digging here. We can dig here, too, using our hoe! Though we only really flip up stuff from the surface, which is little bits of lost money and, for some reason, a bunch of accessories like bracelets and broaches.

This is where save-scumming can make a huge difference in the game. The accessories you find in the dig site can be sold for a pretty decent amount of money, but you'll use up a lot of energy trying to find them. Items are randomly distributed throughout the site's grid floor when you enter the site, so you can save your game upon entering, dig everywhere, remember the locations of goodies, and then load your save and dig them up from those spots. Early in the game, this is an amazing source of income. We'll still come here and dig around hoping to get some accessories, but it's not going to be nearly as easy without save-scumming since we'll run out of Stamina quickly.

There are also two people here regularly that we're able to talk to -- Professor Cain (also known as Carter) and his assistant Fran (also known as Flora).

!!! LOVE INTEREST ALERT !!!

And here we meet our first potential love interest, Professor Cain! Characters have no given age in this game, but Cain's clone, Carter, in Wonderful Life was billed as being 41 years old at the start of the game. And I want to say that I very, very much appreciate getting older love interests in this game. In all other games, the love interests usually range around 16-30 years old, and their appearances make them look anywhere between 8 and 15 years old. Not everyone who plays this game is a child who wants to date children, so it's refreshing to be able to date someone older.

Now would probably be a good time to mention that we're not, canonically, meeting these characters for the first time. We apparently have lived here in the Valley for a while, so everyone already knows us, unlike most Ranch Story/Harvest Moon games where you're a newcomer to the place where your farm is and have to meet everyone for the first time. So we're already assumed to know a little bit about each person, though since we mostly just stayed in our house refuse to work or socialize, we're not very close with anyone.

As explained, Cain is a researcher of past civilizations who has come to Forgotten Valley because he has a theory that there's a lot to be discovered over in this little corner. He lives in a tent just outside the dig site by a waterfall, where he likes to stand in the morning to "gather energy" from the sun."

He doesn't seem to be particularly close to anyone else in the Valley, though his assistant Fran seems to understand him quite well. I guess it shouldn't be too much of a surprise, since they live together in the same small tent and work together for most of the day.

On the other hand, though, Cain doesn't seem to know much about Fran, probably because he's always so preoccupied with his research that he doesn't take time to show interest in others too much outside of what's relevant to the excavation.

Cain is really missing out, though, because Fran is very cute! She talks slowly and seems kind of spacey and aloof, but that's just her personality. She seems to not only work hard to help Cain with his research, but with everything. Since he's constantly thinking about his work and nothing else, she makes sure he's eating and sleeping properly and otherwise taking care of himself. She's not particularly good at it, but she cooks for the two of them to make sure they always have healthy meals to eat.

In the original Colobocle Station where you played as a male protagonist, Fran was a love interest that you could marry and start a family with. Sadly, even with tons of games doing the opposite including rival games like Stardew Valley, neither the Harvest Moon nor Ranch Story games offer same-sex relationships. Well, actually, Colobocle Station for Girl does kind of, but we'll get to that later.

For now, though, we're going to take a break and pick up with more next time.

Before we go, I do want to point out a cute little aspect about the game that I like a lot: the wild animals!

They don't do anything other than walk around, and you can't befriend them or interact with them in any way, but you'll sometimes run across wild animals like the lizard in the screenshot above throughout the Valley. It's super cute and albeit unnecessary adds a nice dash of flavor and atmosphere to the game. This game takes place in a setting that's a bit more rural than other Ranch Story games, so having animals appear all over the place really helps fill out that environment.

Next time, we'll talk a bit more about the socialization systems of the game, learn a little bit more about Fran and Cain, and meet some new characters, too! Stay tuned!

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