Ushi No Tane Forum

Is why they made Lumina a marriage candidate, but not Flora? Would any of you guys been interested in being able to marry Flora in the AWL console games?

Maybe the developers did it that way because of the rival system? In AWL, Celia has Marlin, Nami has Gustafa, and Muffy more or less has Griffin, though he's more like a father to her in this game. In AnWL, both Marlin and Gustafa still keep their rival girls, and Rock's rival ends up being Lumina. Maybe that's why Lumina is an addition to the Special Edition? She might have also been a fan favorite over in Japan at the time.

If Flora would have been added in as a candidate, I would have definately considered marrying her. Y'know, saving her from Carter and her stalker Daryl.

Because Japanese players liked the Loli. Probably.

Flora is personally my favorite single lady in Forget-me-not.

That always irked me, and still irks me that Lumina was chosen. Hell, she even grows up a chapter earlier than in AWL to make it look like you didn't just marry a child.

14 years later, and still not ok that I could never marry Flora in these versions of the game.

I would have married Flora if I could. I wish we had gotten more characters in general tbh.

That always bothered me too. I really feel like it puts the player in the position of taking advantage of her, especially considering how obviously lonely she is. The fact that they made her a marriage candidate without aging her up is in the same category as Marvelous' embarrassing portrayals of POC, imo.

Even before Special Edition, I wondered why she wasn't a bachelorette in AWL. So what they did with Special Edition is ever more odd to me. Like, I get adding Lumina because her character already had a crush on yours and that's cute even though it's kinda creepy now that I'm older. But you'd think they would've added Flora too. As far as I can tell, she's a pretty young woman. She doesn't look any older and certainly not younger than the other bachelorettes, so it's not like age could've been an issue. She's the only single lady that fits in with the beauty of the other girls that you can't marry. I don't understand.

I guess we can say AWL!Flora is simply not into you.



At least DS!Flora exists. (And also DS!Lumina skips the child phase, thankfully).

I like to theorize that a lot of things weren't added to the original game due to size constraints. The boy version of AWL took up like 48 blocks on a Gamecube memory card while most other games were between 2-15 blocks.

^ Yeah, its not so much the things that were missing in AWL that are strange, its the way they were implemented later.

They were simply not meant to be initially or left out due to time constraints.

There's gc games that take way more space in the memory card.

Getaris wrote:They were simply not meant to be initially or left out due to time constraints.

There's gc games that take way more space in the memory card.

There aren't THAT many gc games that take that much space. Keep in mind that at the time, memory cards contained 256 blocks (I think the first one I got had a paltry 59 blocks. Barely enough space to fit either AWL or MM). It wasn't until later that nintendo released a ~1020 block and then third parties released memory cars with boat loads of space. Nintendo gamecube games were very conservative with save data...unless you were a sports game with a character creator. Those just didn't care how small your memory card was.

Having extra bachelorettes with more endings and extra dialogue would be nice but not practical at the time. Of course they could do it now since they would be able to condense the data better + memory cards having way more space. 5 bachelorettes would be a magic number for a Harvest Moon game especially since each bachelorette's son would have traits that perfectly coincide with a specific career path in the game:
Celia: Farmer/Rancher
Muffy: Sports
Nami: Art
Lumina: Music
Flora: Scholar

Having another bachelorette or two would make little to no difference in the save data size deartment. It's just not what save data is for.

Games with a focus on customization tend to have larger save files (example, The Sim's Bustin Out requires 161 blocks to play), but it's not like the system actually stores resources or stuff like that into them- just what's needed to let the game know where you're at.

For example, a game like Resident Evil Remake has a relatively small save file size per game save, since all it needs to rememeber is: Where you saved, your status, what items do you have, and what've you done up to this point. In the case of the later, it's likely the game simply turns small flags on and off to rememeber if you already killed the giant snake or if a certain door is open. Other than that, there's no need to reserve a lot of space in the files. It also creates a new file for each new game, individually, which keeps the total size manageable to fit your needs.

In the case of this game, I can see a big chunk of the save file being reserved for all the variables related to plant mutations (and all the other things you can name) and the children growth system, also the current time, date, relationships, event flags, your humongous inventory, status, farm upgrades, crops in the seed maker, everything related to the crops and trees you currently have growing, etc. Multiplied by two, since each save file created by the game actually has space for two diaries. Seasoned with a pinch of bad optimization, being their first gamecube game.

Adding a new character, even a bachelorette, would simply add a a few bytes to the save data (to keep track of your affection rating and event flags). In the end, most of the data required is likely already reserved by the game as it is.

Anyway TL;DR: Save file size is most likely not relevant in this case.

^ This is kind of unrelated but you seem to know a lot about hardware so can you explain why its so hard to look at the actual files/etc. of gamecube games? I've been told that looking at the data of games from other systems is much easier.

I don't actually know the specifics, but it seems Nintendo went through a "clunky and hard to program for" phase during the N64 and GC eras. I could see that being part of the reason.

I'd assume their propietary disc format and their antipiracy paranoia also helped.