Why Harvest Moon is Better than Real Life

I was playing Harvest Moon: Tree of Tranquility today (I promise to do a review for it soon on Genki), and I was thinking, it really is a wonderful life, pun intended. The big question now is why.

I'm on the winter season of my first year, and coincidentally it's also winter here in the Northwoods of Minnesota. As I worked the farm, went to give gifts to the girl at Brownie Ranch, fished, and mined, I was thinking about how great everything is in this game. Whenever the snow falls, no matter how feircely, you can still see the roads. You also never have to shovel your way to the barn or coop, and your grass still grows green, the tips of the blades forcing their way through even the thickest blanket of snow.

You can always find herbs on the ground, your watering trough never freezes and the lakes never freeze (although it would be neat to have to buy and set up a fish house, but ice fishing would be boring in comparison), and you never have to worry about your livestock getting too cold, or, in the summer, too hot.

On that same note, your coop and barn are always clean! No poop to scrape up, no muddy hoof prints, and no stray chicken feathers to mess up that beautiful clean floor.

It's also amazingly easy to turn wool and silk into yarn, milk into butter, etc. All you have to do is buy a maker, pop the animal product into it, and it's done! It also takes a mere two seconds to dye your yarn if you choose to do so. How amazing! Waffle Island is going to lead the way to a new Industrial Revolution.

Finding a spouse is also easy. Just pick any girl (or guy) and give her junk you find laying around, stuff out of the mines, etc. She's easy to please, and it doesn't really matter if she's not your type. Moreover, once you're married, she'll never talk your ear off, throw various cooking utensils at you, or go on insane shopping sprees to spend all your hard-earned cash. Instead, she'll be the perfect housewife. Just keep giving her junk you find laying around.

Well, this was a pointless post. I bet I could keep going on it, too!