Rune Factory: A Fantasy Harvest Moon(DS)
Doing chores the game? This is actually the first harvest moon related game I've ever played. I found it to be pretty relaxing, but the repeatition does wear on after awhile. The early game was largely concerned with earning money and gathering materials for house improvements, with forays into the dungeon with whatever stamina remained after my garden was tended to. After upgrading the house and unlocking the crafting stations things really picked up and there were a lot more options of what to focus on, and I really found it a shame that crafting was not available in some form earlier on. Like maybe you could borrow a crafting station in the town with a limited selection of the recipes with the skill capped at a reasonable level. The final two dungeons holding materials for the really restricts crafting progression as well. The other awkward part of the game was having a dungeon that was only unlocked during winter, I was lucky enough to progress to that point before winter hit, actually a lot before. This meant I had to spend over two weeks of game time without being able to make any meaningful progress story wise and was relegated to gathering materials, and fighting monsters. This additional time to grind meant the next dungeons became rather easy. Winter itself posed another problem in that your field is unusable, so only the plots inside dungeons may be farmed at that time. The combat was pretty basic and not at all complicated, but was enough to do the job and had a satisfying enough feel to it. There were quite a lot of activities to do, but many of them were fairly optional unless you were planning to court a specific girl that relied on those activities to raise her affection. Overall an enjoyable experience.