Long standing Question

SNES, HM64, BTN, STH, A Wonderful Life, Another Wonderful Life, AWL:SE, Magical Melody, Puzzle de HM, Tree of Tranquility, Animal Parade, Frantic Farming, Hero of Leaf Valley, My Little Shop, Seeds of Memories, Lil' Farmers, Light of Hope, Popolocrois: SoS, and Doraemon: SoS.
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Ashbug22
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Hi guys! Long time Ushi No Tane reader, first time poster. Actually made an account to ask this because I have not been able to find the answer. Its a pretty general overall game series question so I'm not sure where to post it.

Why haven't we seen a lot of classic harvest moon characters in a long time such as Popuri, Karen, Cliff, Kai, etc? They used to bring back these characters a lot and personally I loved it. I love newer games too but I do miss this continuity and familiar faces. This has been a pattern before the Story of seasons name change so I wonder why?
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Welcome, then :) Sorta, since you've already been here a while, lol. This topic should probably go into 'All other Harvest Moon'.

There's really no way to find a literal answer to that unless you could access the game developers themselves. All we can do is give opinions or invent theories. It may be because the dev team has changed so much since the earlier games...there's probably very few people left from the first team still ON a Bokujou Monogatari dev team, these days.

We still get a few returnees sometimes. Like Kamil and Licorice in Story of Seasons (1). (Though there were no returnees in Trio, that I can think of. Well...technically I guess Woofio and Stephanie were returnees, but to my mind they only sort of count.)

Personally, I don't like returning characters. I want mostly new ones...I don't like that about Natsume's current Harvest Moon games...that they bring the same characters back over and over. I didn't like them to begin with, lol, so to have to deal with them all repeatedly every time just destroys my interest in buying the games at all. Opinions are probably quite varied. Some people would want to see old characters back, and others would not. Marvelous has got to cater to their market as best they can if they want to make money and continue to exist, and if they never change anything, they'd only be pleasing the same group of people and not expanding their fan base.

That's not to say they couldn't have a game that brings a bunch of older characters back, of course; that's just my opinion. Could be interesting if they made a new game that revisited some older characters and/or locations. But maybe it's complicated, with all the ownership changes and team changes. I really don't know.
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Welcome to the forum! :) In my opinion it's more an issue of the general age of the fan base than the popularity of the characters. The Flowerbud Village/Mineral Town crew have been gone so long that I don't see them making a comeback. A lot of newer fans to the series have never touched games that far back either, for better or worse.

What they MIGHT do - since it's been done before - would be to have 'descendants' of the old characters show up. I'd much prefer that route, since it ends up to be more of an easter egg for fans than lazy writing. It's definitely less lazy, anyway. :lol:
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I wouldn’t mind returning characters, especially since I never played the older games before SI.
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Kikki wrote:SNIP

Personally, I don't like returning characters. I want mostly new ones...I don't like that about Natsume's current Harvest Moon games...that they bring the same characters back over and over. I didn't like them to begin with, lol, so to have to deal with them all repeatedly every time just destroys my interest in buying the games at all. Opinions are probably quite varied. Some people would want to see old characters back, and others would not. Marvelous has got to cater to their market as best they can if they want to make money and continue to exist, and if they never change anything, they'd only be pleasing the same group of people and not expanding their fan base.

SNIP
I personally feel like there's a difference between bringing back characters from a decade ago at some point and continually reusing characters too though. I almost feel like if they've been out of circulation long enough, bringing in an old character at some point wouldn't effect the expanding of their fan base because the newer fans may not even know anything about the older characters. They would basically be like new characters to some of the new fan base. I hope that makes sense?

Now catering to new fans vs old as far as character types, that's a whole other animal. I'm not sure whether or not there are older characters that go with the way they're doing characters now. I have to admit I haven't put enough thought into that to really figure if it's possible to get them to mesh well. But that's different than is reusing bad or good (or maybe even both) in and of itself.

I know they need to expand, but at the same time I feel like completely going for new fans isn't exactly a good way to go about it too. A loyal fanbase is needed to an extent, because everyone needs people in their corner even when the chips are down. There were games that were certainly pretty much always, from what I saw at least, described as if you're not already a fan of the franchise you might as well skip this game regarding Bokujō Monogatari. Too many people buy too heavily based on brand loyalty imo, but it is what it is. I mean it's not like CoD or sports games levels, but if I learned anything from the start of the controversy/drama with Natsume making games it's that apparently many people get loyal to a name and they stick with it to pretty high degrees.

They can change things (and goodness knows they have, a lot), but also using older things from time to time can be good too. As long as they don't lean too heavy on repeats and let it get stale. Change can be good, for sure! I'm not saying it's not. I just think that there's anything wrong with a little same, provided it isn't to the point they become stagnant.

(Maybe it is I who am just wrong. I'm a simple person, if I like something/it looks fun I want it. If it no longer interests me I may be sad about that, I can and do get attached for sure, but I don't waste time and money on it. I've been burned enough times by games that seemed fun but weren't that I've taken to looking into most game purchases at least somewhat. If it's done well, change can be good. If it's done well, some same can be good. It all depends on how it's done imo.)
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It's not a matter of 'wrong' either way, imo. It's a matter of opinion. Preference. And I don't at all think that 'completely going for new fans' is a good idea...you ideally need to be aiming to keep your existing fans while appealing to new ones as well. But you can't go a long way in pleasing even existing fans by bringing back older characters, imo, because each person has different characters they like/love/hate/are indifferent to. So you can only ever please a percentage of your existing fans by using returnees. New characters, however, always get a fresh chance with everyone, because no one has a pre-formed opinion of them. It's not a guarantee...you'll almost always not like at least a few new characters, too...but at least you start out with the chance of liking every one of them, which is not so if the cast is based on returnees you didn't like to begin with. (I'm looking at you, Sam.)
Spoiler:
If the player hasn't played the older games and has no idea who the older character IS, then it's as if they're new, so in that case to me it's kind of moot. But since the OP wants returning characters they already know and (presumably) like to return, I'm looking at it from that perspective...of seeing returning characters you already know, which I really feel is sub-optimal because it limits the game to those who liked those characters and alienates those who didn't. But even in the case where you don't like them, if the returning characters are kept to a few, like Kamil and Licorice in SoS(1), then even if you hated those characters, it should be reasonably easy to just ignore them, and would not be a problem. (I don't know what the magic number is, for how many returnees would be too many to see in one game before it'd be impossible to ignore if you didn't like it.)

Being that the OP says that it's something they don't do any more, I was assuming they didn't mean anything like when Kamil and Licorice were brought back, that they wanted something a little closer to what Natsume does by bringing back quite a lot of older characters, or reusing a portion of the same ones repeatedly, which is something I think would make me stop playing Bokujou Monogatari since it did make me give up on Natsume's HM. Which would be very sad, for me.

There's also this, and it probably applies to a smaller group of people. I don't want my *favourite* characters to be brought back, either. Sanjay would be my primary example, of course. Best bachelor ever. But my Echo Town farmer, Cricket, made a great life with him there, in that town, in that story, in that file I still have and look in on once in a while, and they were living Happily Ever After...and to me it would feel awful to see him reappear in a new game. It'd be like he just up and left her and their son for a new town and a new farmer.
It's just how I feel about it. I don't think it's a matter of being right or wrong. (Well, unless we could literally ask the devs and they say 'yep, that's right, that's exactly why we're not doing it!', lol...then I guess you could literally be right about the reason, at least.) The OP asked why Marvelous isn't doing it even though they used to, and I feel that there will be others like me (I don't know how many) and that these could be some of the reasons why they've opted against dealing heavily in returning characters. I also feel that it is simply because they're not doing all that much of what they used to do. The dev team has changed basically completely from the earliest games...they have new ways of doing things. (Not to say they're better just because they're new.)

Wow, been a while since I made one of my novel-like responses. Sorry guys. I'll try to put some of it behind a cut before I hit 'submit'.
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Post  Posted:

Like Kikki said, there’s not really an actual answer for this.

I’ll put in my thoughts anyway though. I wouldn’t mind maybe seeing one or two of those characters pop back up, or the see the 64 versions of all of them, but if you’re wanting yet another game with all of the Mineral Town versions of them with them as candidates yet again... eh. There’s only so many times you can do the same thing. Definitely need the 64 ones again though since there was never a girl version for that, and cause they left out Princess Vanilla the first time. I’ll never stop talking about it until it happens. I’m sorry.

We stopped seeing those characters a while before the name change though, didn’t we? Animal Parade and Sunshine Islands would’ve been the lasts, I think. But they still kept having other characters return in each game, including after the name change.
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I mean, in Sunshine Islands they brought back Cliff, Popuri, Karen and Trent. However, I remember at the time, a lot of people were upset (to put it very lightly) that they weren’t marriage candidates. Especially since they had an appearance upgrade...
I personally was a little bitter that I couldn’t marry Cliff but I got over it. I’m sure Marvelous/Natsume got a lot of compliments about it though :?
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Kross lover/fan wrote:I mean, in Sunshine Islands they brought back Cliff, Popuri, Karen and Trent. However, I remember at the time, a lot of people were upset (to put it very lightly) that they weren’t marriage candidates. Especially since they had an appearance upgrade...
I personally was a little bitter that I couldn’t marry Cliff but I got over it. I’m sure Marvelous/Natsume got a lot of compliments about it though :?
You couldn’t married them because they’re already married to their respective rivals.
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Shan O 123 wrote:
Kross lover/fan wrote:I mean, in Sunshine Islands they brought back Cliff, Popuri, Karen and Trent. However, I remember at the time, a lot of people were upset (to put it very lightly) that they weren’t marriage candidates. Especially since they had an appearance upgrade...
I personally was a little bitter that I couldn’t marry Cliff but I got over it. I’m sure Marvelous/Natsume got a lot of compliments about it though :?
You couldn’t married them because they’re already married to their respective rivals.
Oh yeah, I know. They said so in the game that they were married. Didn’t make me any less bitter for a while lol. To people it was like a tease from Marvelous. Here are good looking/awesome characters from the past that we’ve updated but guess what!? You can’t have them!!! We added them for basically nothing other than to have them in the game!!

If I remember correctly, they didn’t even have any events and I don’t think(?) they showed up at any festivals...I’m pretty sure you could’nt make friends with them(???) so yeah ^^’

Edit: nvm, you could make friends with them but for at least Cliff, he only stays for one season each year so it was kinda pointless :shifty:
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Kross lover/fan wrote:
Shan O 123 wrote:
Kross lover/fan wrote:I mean, in Sunshine Islands they brought back Cliff, Popuri, Karen and Trent. However, I remember at the time, a lot of people were upset (to put it very lightly) that they weren’t marriage candidates. Especially since they had an appearance upgrade...
I personally was a little bitter that I couldn’t marry Cliff but I got over it. I’m sure Marvelous/Natsume got a lot of compliments about it though :?
You couldn’t married them because they’re already married to their respective rivals.
Oh yeah, I know. They said so in the game that they were married. Didn’t make me any less bitter for a while lol. To people it was like a tease from Marvelous. Here are good looking/awesome characters from the past that we’ve updated but guess what!? You can’t have them!!! We added them for basically nothing other than to have them in the game!!

If I remember correctly, they didn’t even have any events and I don’t think(?) they showed up at any festivals...I’m pretty sure you could’nt make friends with them(???) so yeah ^^’

Edit: nvm, you could make friends with them but for at least Cliff, he only stays for one season each year so it was kinda pointless :shifty:
They all stay for one season per year.
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Shan O 123 wrote:
Kross lover/fan wrote:I mean, in Sunshine Islands they brought back Cliff, Popuri, Karen and Trent. However, I remember at the time, a lot of people were upset (to put it very lightly) that they weren’t marriage candidates. Especially since they had an appearance upgrade...
I personally was a little bitter that I couldn’t marry Cliff but I got over it. I’m sure Marvelous/Natsume got a lot of compliments about it though :?
You couldn’t married them because they’re already married to their respective rivals.
*coughMarvelousDidn'tHaveToMarryThemOffThoughcough*

:lol:

(I totally didn't want to marry one of them nope. :lol:)
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ChaosAzerothCat wrote:
Shan O 123 wrote:
Kross lover/fan wrote:I mean, in Sunshine Islands they brought back Cliff, Popuri, Karen and Trent. However, I remember at the time, a lot of people were upset (to put it very lightly) that they weren’t marriage candidates. Especially since they had an appearance upgrade...
I personally was a little bitter that I couldn’t marry Cliff but I got over it. I’m sure Marvelous/Natsume got a lot of compliments about it though :?
You couldn’t married them because they’re already married to their respective rivals.
*coughMarvelousDidn'tHaveToMarryThemOffThoughcough*

:lol:

(I totally didn't want to marry one of them nope. :lol:)
Hmmmmm.......I’m thinking otherwise.
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Thanks guys for your responses and welcomes :) You all brought up a lot of good points. I was wondering if someone had ever read something from the developers as to why they don't bring old characters back anymore, especially classic ones. But I have not been able to find any interviews or anything about it.

As far as opinions on the topic go, I personally love bringing back old characters. I feel they grow richer in character development each time. It can definitely be over done if you continue to recycle them but I think a new game intermingling various generations of HM/SoS characters would be super cool. I would love to see the inter generational character interaction.
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If they want to do that, fine. If they don't, that's fine too. Just please don't ever bring back the likes of Rock ever again.

Edit: Oops my bad. I didn't pay attention to the date.
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