Ushi No Tane Forum

With the European release date slowly drawing closer, I'm having second thoughts on however I should buy this game... With the first SoS game, I think my playtime totalled to about 25 hours, just having to run around and talk to everyone, feed the animals, water plants at several locations - I've loved the Harvest Moon series for being so relaxing to play, and I just winded up more stressed from playing. I know there's ways to slow down the time in ToT, but does that get accessible early enough, and is it easy enough to do? How was your experience of the tempo of this game?

Thanks xo

- Talking to others is way faster now since you can press L as you walk by and you'll automatically get the friendship points. FP doesn't decay from not talking to them, either.
- You can put in several animal food at once this time, so you're not having to feed them every five seconds. That feature wasn't in the first SoS, right?

Honestly, I never really used the food that slows down time. The whole game felt a lot more relaxed to me even without it.

I have gotten stressed on occasion but overall much better than the first SoS!

Ninja in the first SoS the food actually lasts about 5 days.....if you only have one animal. They share a feeding bin and if you have a full barn, you're ending up feeding them everyday.

As for this game I find it relaxing.

i had the same problem with the last game, so for this one i solved it by focusing mainly on trees, since they don't need to be watered. it's working like a charm, too: i have three fields of crops that need watering every day (which will eventually be reduced to two), and west, south, and cellar fields are all trees, and i've not once felt overwhelmed.

something important to keep in mind, though, is that you have to keep up with fertilizing your outdoor trees, especially in summer and winter, because otherwise storms will kill them. still though, even with that, as long as you find a routine that works for you, it's not too much work. i think it takes me a two or three hours to fertilize everything each day (i don't bother with the ones in the cellar), and i still have plenty of time to get everything else done in a day i want to

I find it more relaxing than both SoS and ANB... the story is pretty easy to complete, for the first time ever I enjoy fishing, it is full of festivals, the Love Events are much better.... the only features that kind of stress me out are the crops' qualities, which you have to raise one by one, and getting all festival prizes (14 years minimum.) So yeah, much more relaxing than SoS amd ANB (Tropical Country *shivers*) but of course not as much as, say, FoMT. I did not feel overwhelmed at all, especially after the Hoardathon that were the last two.

You can buy almost anything that exists, which is nice. The developers also removed the "shop quantity" concept from SOS1, so you can actually buy stacks of 99 things (like seeds or materials) instead of stores only offering like 2-5 bags of seeds a day, or only 5-40 materials a day.

There is one point at which you'll get stressed, but when you reach it...relax.

So, the game starts slow, with only one town available, and there's not much to do, it's really quiet then. It gets a bit livelier when another town becomes available, but for me it was still very manageable, even though you now also have the hammer and can do mining and by that point can fish, as well.

But then the THIRD town opens, and in my first playthrough, I started to feel very rushed.

But then I found out that friendship in Trio of Towns NEVER DEGRADES FROM LACK OF TALKING. You don't lose FP if you don't talk to someone for two weeks. You can only lose FP deliberately, by giving bad presents or littering and so on. So if you don't have time to go around and talk to everyone just don't. If you like talking to them and are wanting to raise friendship, try choosing just one town per day and talking to everyone there. You can do another town the next day.

If you only talk to as many people as you have the spare time to do, then I find the pace is good. And eating the slow-down foods does help a lot, too, as does the fast-running foods (which are more readily available so you can use them pretty near the start of the game...the slow-down foods take longer since they tend to be higher-level recipes.)

If you're really worried about it still, try asking for some slow-down foods over multiplayer so that you have a stock of them for days where you suddenly have more than usual to do.

The game doesn't really run on a time line and you don't lose anything by going slow since FP doesn't lower. I was so glad that they removed the lose-friendship-points-over-time-if-you-don't-talk feature has been taken out in Trio, it made it way more relaxing for me as that took more time than anything else.

I have not found it even the least bit stressful. I'm surprised anyone was but I guess reading these posts I can see why they might have been stressed. Personally, that just didn't affect me.

The only thing I can think of that might be stressful is the wine/jam maker but other than that: game's relaxing.

Sometimes I find the fertilizer thing a bit stressful tbh but it's not too bad and semi-easily avoidable really. It's just that there's so much sometimes I think in general, it's easy to get lost picking it back up especially.

Celestrian wrote: I have not found it even the least bit stressful. I'm surprised anyone was but I guess reading these posts I can see why they might have been stressed. Personally, that just didn't affect me.

I think the stress factor probably keys in to how much of a minmaxer you are. I'm someone who (with a bokumono game) if everyone else logged 50 play hours to get through year one, will have logged 90. I STUFF my days totally full to make them as efficient as possible. If you get too many things to do when you are naturally inclined to that sort of play style, you are definitely going to feel stress if there comes to be too many things for you to get done in the amount of time you think is reasonable or good to get them done in.

And it's not like I'm trying to do things faster than others...that's just the way I play. So it's not something I can just stop doing, either, since I never do it on purpose to begin with...I just feel compelled to do it, and am uncomfortable when I don't. So for anyone who has even some of those tendencies, any game with time passage and lots of things to do is going to provide some stress if you can't manage your time well.

But speaking as one of those people, Trio is very manageable. Not needing to bother talking to villagers except when I had time was a BIG help there, and once I was further into the game, the slow-down foods were wonderful. And even at the beginning, the fast-run foods sped things up quite a bit.

I've gotten a little stressed before, but that's just because I tend to hyper-fixate on the game and try to do everything within one day instead of spacing my activities out a little bit, lmao. So when I get stressed, it's usually my own fault.

If you're just playing casually, it's not stressful at all. Being able to make gratin come the first winter is super great as well, instead of having to wait til like year 4 in SoS to slow things down a bit. :S I never did quite make it that far.

I agree it's a self induced stress. For me it was caused by trying to get everything done right (also a minmaxer). Though I calm down after getting everything set up.

Middeer wrote:Being able to make gratin come the first winter is super great as well, instead of having to wait til like year 4 in SoS to slow things down a bit. :S I never did quite make it that far.

Ha ha, yeah, isn't that just the kicker? I DID make it to the end of Year 4 in SoS, and you don't need to slow time down then any more at all.
(Unless you're a very leisurely player, I guess.) That's one of the things I really have issues with in Bokumono games...that the features you desperately want/need in early or mid game, when things are wildly busy with so much to do, don't unlock until really late in the game when you're already DONE everything and have very little remaining to keep you busy. I resent features that don't unlock until you don't need them any more. (Argh, the unlimited rupees in Ocarina of Time, unlocked only at end game when there is nothing left to buy! And some of those skulltulas were so hard to get! *tears hair out*)

The only thing I felt was like that in Trio, though, was the cellar, and only a little, since you can unlock it while you've still got at least a few things you want to do...but mostly by the time I unlock it, I've already got a good stock of high-quality crops, so I don't need the protected any-season environment of the cellar nearly as much as I did when I was still working on town locks and farming tips. But it also wasn't as much of an issue in Trio, so no big deal.

Honestly, Halloween, I think you'll be fine, unless you're even worse than I am (which might be scientifically impossible except for residents of special asylums), since I was never stressed while playing Trio except at that one point when the three towns opened and I wasn't sure if I could keep getting everything done...and then I realized how it all worked, relaxed, and everything was fine.