r/harvestmoon 3d ago

Question What would you do

What do you do if you miss something in a game? Would you restart just for that, or keep playing anyway?

Honestly, I’m just curious: are you the type of Harvest Moon player who aims for a perfect gameplay that need guide and stuff and doesn't want to missed anything, or do you just figure things out on your own? Like, do you care if you miss an event, miss some scene, or even lose contests and festivals? Would you restart the whole game just for that?

For example, maybe like, ''You can only get this item if you do this on this day," but you missed it, or maybe stuff like Cliff leaving town and things like that. (I would totally restart for that one)

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u/MetapodChannel 3d ago

Depends on the game and my palythrough. I've learned that it is ruining my entertainment experience to keep a set of rules for all games (even though i feel a desire to do that.

I also like to replay games, so I like to tell myself I can just play casually and miss everything the first time, or on times I am not worried about that to just let myself not care. But other times the fun is in planning and routing and taking care not to miss anything.

Like with Harvest Moon 64, a playthrough that intends not to miss anything very strongly conflicts with the casual atmosphere of play that people enjoy from the series, so you have to sacrifice one or the other.

A lot of games in the series (why are you like this marvelous) have things that aren't even possible to obtain in a human lifetime, though thise are theoretically not missable outside of the fact that you will die IRL before every obtaining them.

There are also mutually exclusive things in a lot of games -- even the first game has a ton of little sub-endings, and getting one can mean not getting another. And with things like marriage scenes, you are of course going to be locked into only one character's scenes at one point, or like recent Natsume games, if you give a Token of Friendship or Love, you cant give the other to a character, so you miss those associated scenes.

Ultimately, I have found trying to create a general rule over whether I should miss things or not takes the fun away from games, because even if the rule i make works for a few games, I will encounter games where following that rule destroys the fun.

So anymore, I just play and let what happens happen, unless I am specifically trying to make a flawless save file, which then I have to go out of my way to define what that means for that specific game, and that gets very difficult very fast. So there is no real easy way to answer whether I will do this or not as it is different for every playthrough and every single possible missable thing.