I've been a hardcore player of the Harvest Moon series for years, and recently discovered the original Shepeherd's Crossing for the PSP. While it was interesting and more realistic than Harvest Moon, I felt that it had a lot of issues that made me want to put the game down and replay an old Harvest Moon title.
The original Shepherd's Crossing had a lot of problems. You couldn't enter your house. You couldn't store any of your crops, food, tools, or supplies anywhere. You could only throw everything on the ground and hope you don't 'fence' yourself into a corner. Animals had no pens, and ran around; if you didn't want your meat eaters to devour your herbivores, you had to fight with the game's mechanics to set up a fence to separate your animals. This was pointless because you couldn't buy a gate to enter and leave the pen of your own free will, so this meant you had to dismantle a fence to get in to feed your animals, then put it back once you were finished. Making sure your animals didn't escape.
The main problem with the original game was the trading system. In order to 'buy' anything you needed, from livestock to crops, you had to trade a certain number of other crops or livestock in exchange for what you wanted. It had a system set up, much like a skill tree. No money was involved, and this made gameplay frustrating and tedious because you have to plan ahead on paper what you wanted. If along the way you messed up by not having enough cabbages or pasture seeds or young marmosets, you couldn't afford to 'buy' the higher ranked crops or livestock. In short, you have to restart your game if you really messed up.
But Shepherd's Crossing 2 is amazing! How can I describe the first six hours I managed to clock in before bedtime?
Trading System: Long gone! Now you have money, and you can purchase whatever you want as long as you make sure you don't go broke. You get $2k in Sal, 3 plots of land, and a house for free, and you're allowed to do what you wish from then on. As long as you follow the railroaded tutorial part of the story in which you eventually make friends with the other villagers to unlock higher ranked crops and livestock.
The Farm: Unlike the original game, you get a house which you can fill up with furniture, tools, and storage items like cupboards and barrels. You can also upgrade your house to expand your storage, among other things. Down the track you can purchase more land so you can grow more food and raise more animals.
The Village: You can visit the houses of your friends, which in turn raises your friendships with them so you can unlock (very easy to do: you talk to them regularly and share your dinners) better items. You can get your tools fixed for free from the carpenter and the blacksmith.
Features: You can now cook recipes, using your crops as well as ingredients like salt & pepper! As described before, you now get plots of land to grow your veggies on; complete with fertilizer you can grow in your compost bins. Your animals can roam free, but it's best to build a pen (very easily done) to keep them near the food trough so they don't go hungry or get attacked by wild animals.
One feature I loved to see is the stacking feature. You can now pile your crops into baskets (egg baskets, milk buckets, veggie baskets), your supplies into their appropriate stacks (hay bales, firewood pyramids, etc), compost bins, and animal feed goes into their appropriate troughs. No more miles and miles of cabbage leaves, hen feed and meat scraps littering your pastures!
Livestock & Crops: Helpfully included in the manual in a nice chart detailing the cost, the profit, the usage, and the seasons, as follows:
CROPS: Pasture grass, potatoes, turnips, buckwheat, bean, onion, sorghum, tomato, barley, carrot, cabbage.
ANIMALS: Chicken, goose, duck, rabbit, cavy, goat, sheep, boar, llama, donkey, cow. Animals come in both genders, in different colours pertaining to the species, and you can breed them as well as harvest them for consumables like meat, feathers, wool, and hides.
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