Exquisite Replica

I've been playing Harvest Moon this weekend. I can only play the SNES version; it's buggy, low-budget, and sparsely simplistic, but it's original. Every game after that feels like a copy, and then a copy of the previous copy, slowly in its atavism regressing past its own origin - the ur-shovelware.

Most games cloak their grind with monster-slaying, or car racing, or other unusual activities that one would assume to be innately fun. Thing is, Harvest Moon is labor, in the most elemental sense of the word. To get money out of a harvest, you must:

• Clear the field of rocks and stumps
• Till the land
• Buy seeds
• Plant the seeds
• Water the crops for 7-10 days
• Throw each potato/ear of corn/turnip/etc. into the delivery box

Which, all told, takes at least a couple hours. In Harvest Moon, you work the crops so you can start raising livestock, which lets you make money in the winter so you can enlarge your house and get married to one of the townie girls and have a kid.

Honest to god, after three days straight with the game, I can't figure what the carrot on the end of its stick is. Marriage, maybe? The dialogue is all sub-English, so achieving wedded bliss is about as satisfying as beating an NES game to glean a hearty "CONGLATURATION!!" and a pixelated portrait of a misshapen princess.

I don't think I've ever played a game of Harvest Moon to its completion. Maybe it's because of the motivation problem, but it's one of those games I enjoy taking a run at without feeling a need for completion.