My Story of Seasons!
My cousin has always loved animals, so it was no surprise when she brought home some video games that were all about farming. Of her Gamestop haul, both Harvest Moon: More Friends of Mineral Town and Harvest Moon: DS looked promising, but we started with MFOMT because it had a female protagonist. My cousin let me watch over her shoulder while she played on her DS, narrating her actions as she ran around foraging in the mountains and talking to the townsfolk. I'll never forget my feelings of awe and intrigue as she left behind the pale, springlike colours of her farm and entered the lush, deep green forest area to the south. I'd never even heard of a bamboo shoot before, but I was ecstatic when she picked one up and carried it over her head.
The sound effects were charming, the characters friendly, the artwork adorable... and, naturally, anything my cool older cousin had, I had to have, too. It would be some months before I got my own DS Lite, and even more months until I was gifted a copy of Harvest Moon: DS, but in all that time my fascination never faded. I explored my isometric version of Forget-Me-Not Valley while my brother played in his polygonal one, boasting that A Wonderful Life was the superior game because he started with a barn and coop already built. I admit, for a while I felt like a peasant with my big, empty farm full of weeds... But the Nintendo DS is a handheld console-- I could always get up and play somewhere else!
Because I desperately wanted to play as a girl, but DS Cute had yet to be released outside of Japan, I pretended that Pete was a tomboy like me.This complicated things because I still wanted to romance the girls-- I had my eyes on the sweet and reliable Celia-- but worried that my imaginary homosexual romance "wasn't allowed." What if somebody found out?! In the end, the internalised homophobia won, and so HMDS fell out of favour as I went to play other things, like Animal Crossing: Wild World and Drawn to Life.
(To be continued...)