![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
on harvest moon 64 and touching grass
Sep. 30th, 2025 04:42 pmAbout a month ago, I purchased a black USB Nintendo 64 controller to use with my PC because I had gotten it in my head that I wanted to wallow in some nostalgia by playing The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time again, but about a week later, by the time the N64 controller had arrived in the mail, my hyperactive brain was already on a whole other thing entirely, meaning I had sort of lost the urge to play Ocarina, so at that point I had an N64 controller with nothing to use it for, so the controller was placed in a dusty cabinet and just sort of languished there with all the other disused USB controllers, until sunk-cost fallacy caught up with me and I wanted to use the N64 controller again, but this time I wanted to play something different, something I had never played before, and that’s when, after reviewing the admittedly small library of N64 games and sorting out the ones that did not fit my particular gaming fetishes at the time, those being like role-playing elements and a good soundtrack and open-endedness and Japanese and player choice beyond just the ability to turn the game off, I eventually settled on Harvest Moon 64.
I had played Harvest Moon-like games before, particularly Rune Factory and Stardew Valley, but never got very far in them due to their penchant for stressing me the hell out, despite the fact that those games are positioned as like relaxing and chill, which, at least for me personally, is just not the case, so I went into Harvest Moon 64 with something like eager trepidatiousness.
And after a day or so of mental preparation, I started playing Harvest Moon 64 on a CRT television set using an emulator, using my new but somewhat dusty USB N64 controller, which made me realize that the N64 controller actually gets a bad rap within the gaming community, because although nascent and experimental, it’s actually incredibly ergonomic, a complete joy to hold, absolutely no cramping or cricks or wrist pressure of any kind while holding the thing, and that's not nostalgia talking, that's just the facts. And the N64 controller is especially nice when playing a game like Harvest Moon 64, which has the gameplay complexity of like a smooth rock or something, so you don't have to perform painful finger calisthenics or be a freakishly mutated three-handed person to reach all the buttons. Which is all to say that, so far, I'm having a pretty good time, but, let me tell you, playing Harvest Moon 64 is a very weird experience, because the game kind of forces you to come face to face with this strange kind of paradoxical irony that’s not present in many other video games, which is something I’ll dive into here shortly.
All that being said, I don't dislike Harvest Moon 64. I actually find it pleasantly addictive and cozy. The game is very quaint and relaxing and low IQ almost, which may sound like an insult but is actually a high compliment, because one of the things I dislike most about modern Harvest Moon-inspired farming games is the fact that there is just so much stuff to do and not enough time to do all that stuff, even though most of these games are open-ended and don’t penalize you for not doing everything all in one day, yet still when playing these types of games I feel weirdly compelled to cram as much stuff as possible into a single game day, which leads to all sorts of obsessive-compulsive-like stresses and frustrations, as if the tasks just keep piling up and I just don't have the capacity to organize or manage them, whereas Harvest Moon 64, being only the fourth game in the Harvest Moon series, which is technically called Story of Seasons if you want to get all nerdy and purist about it, is incredibly barebones and empty almost, which kind of removes the stress of too-many-options, because when you only have to worry about clearing your farm of debris, tilling soil, planting and watering seeds, harvesting crops, rearing animals, talking to townsfolk, participating in the occasional festival, and eventually getting married and having kids with the digital farm girl of your dreams, and you only have like 7 minutes at a time to do any of this stuff, because that's literally how long an in-game day is in Harvest Moon 64, 7 minutes, you’re sort of forced to pick one or two things to do per day and not really care about the rest because there’s literally no way in hell you’re cramming everything into those 7 minutes, and the stuff you’re doing in those 7 minutes is so braindead simple that it ends up feeling cathartic, in a way, like all the stress of modern life just sort of melts away as you’re sitting there holding the deformed monstrosity known as the N64 controller with two hands and moving your little chibi backwards-hat-wearing farmer guy around by tilting the oddly placed analog control stick with your thumb in satisfying little half circles before repetitively making him, the chibi backwards-hat-wearing farmer guy, crush rocks or water crops or whatever by pushing the fat green B button over and over, which, again, is incredibly low IQ and simple, almost anti-complex, as if the game itself is averse to being complex in any way shape or form, and that lack of gameplay complexity, combined with the game’s low-poly 3D environments and big-headed chibi-style 2D sprites and muted pastel color palette, all evoking this sort of I’ve-been-here-before-even-if-I’ve-never-actually-been-here-before feeling of nostalgia that some Nintendo 64 games just seem to have in spades, makes for a gameplay experience in which hours seem to drift away somehow as if you ingested some sort of digital benzo through your eyeballs.
What I’m trying to say is, Harvest Moon 64 is a very simple, very charming game, and its simplicity is not a drawback, in fact this simplicity is one of the game’s greatest strengths, and, like any great game, its gameplay reinforces the core themes of the game’s narrative, which is something like, “modern life is garbage, embrace the simple life, go touch grass.”
And that's where the paradoxical irony comes into play.
Harvest Moon 64 evokes a sort of wistful longing for a simpler life, a rural life, a life of spending all day outdoors, tilling the soil and planting the seeds and rearing the livestock and milking the cows and fishing the fish, a life in which the morning chirps of birds and the evening songs of crickets and the nighttime hoots of owls are fully appreciated in all their wondrous majestic glory, not just random background noise you hear sometimes when getting in the car for work in the morning or checking the mailbox in the evening or taking the trash out to the side of the road every Wednesday night. And Harvest Moon 64 does not merely replicate this back-to-basics, touch-grass lifestyle, it glorifies it, it implies that this sort of lifestyle is meaningful and fulfilling, it suggests that perhaps this kind of lifestyle is in fact superior to the lifestyle of someone who would, say, sit in front of a CRT television set for hours playing Harvest Moon 64, almost as if the game itself looks down upon the person playing it, which results in an almost surreal paradoxical gameplay experience that leaves me questioning if I should even be playing Harvest Moon 64 to begin with, or if I should be playing any video game for that matter. Like, if I enjoy planting crops and rearing livestock and fishing in ponds and touching grass in a video game, which I obviously do because here I am doing it, wouldn't it logically follow that I would also enjoy doing those things outside, in the real world, and if that's the case, shouldn't I then just be doing those things outside in the real world, instead of vegetatively sitting in front of a television set controlling aesthetically arranged pixels with an incredibly ergonomic controller? Wouldn't I get more enjoyment out of the real thing, like the actual putting-the-controller-down, going-outside, touching-grass thing?
So, needless to say at this point, but playing Harvest Moon 64 is a very weird and conflicting experience for me, which is odd because the game doesn’t actually shove this touch-grass narrative down your throat at all. In fact, Harvest Moon 64 is more concerned with being a simple video game than making any sort of point whatsoever, because Harvest Moon 64 is not deep, like, at all. It has no intention of getting narratively deep with you. The deepest the game gets is this one line of text on this one gravestone in Flowerbud Village that reads, “Deep thoughts are written here,” implying that, yes, someone somewhere in this fictional world had deep thoughts at some point, enough to write something deep here on this gravestone, but that person is not you, you're only here to plant crops and raise animals and marry a country girl and live a peaceful life in a simulated Japanese countryside. The game doesn’t even bother to tell you what kind of deep thoughts are written on its gravestones, that's how little Harvest Moon 64 cares about getting deep with you. It's as if the game is standing at the edge of a philosophical kiddie pool but refusing to even dip its toe in the water, instead just vaguely gesturing at the pool, saying something like, “Yes, there is something deep here, but who cares? It's not important. Go plant some turnips and pet your horse.” The game is so far away from being pretentious that I bet it doesn't even know what the word “pretentious” means. In fact, the most complicated word I've seen used in the game so far is like “howdy.”
Yet, if Harvest Moon 64 isn't deep or trying making a point or whatever, why does it feel like the game is patronizing me in some way? Why does it feel like the game is telling me to turn it off and go touch grass?
Could it be that I’m actually projecting my own insecurities onto the game? Could it be that Harvest Moon 64 is actually just a mirror, a mirror reflecting my own bullshit back at me? Could it be that it's not the game that’s patronizing me, but me that's patronizing me?
Maybe, somewhere deep inside, there's an unfulfilled atavistic urge to touch grass trying to break through, a sort of mitochondrial shame produced by staring at screens and being so far removed from the simpler, pastoral lifestyle of my great great ancestors? Maybe somewhere deep down in the ancestral gray matter I instinctively know that I'd be happier if I just turned off all the screens and touched some grass?
Now that I think about it, maybe the only depth Harvest Moon 64 has is the existential baggage I bring with me when I turn the game on.
So, with all that said, I think I’m going to take a walk in the park.
I had played Harvest Moon-like games before, particularly Rune Factory and Stardew Valley, but never got very far in them due to their penchant for stressing me the hell out, despite the fact that those games are positioned as like relaxing and chill, which, at least for me personally, is just not the case, so I went into Harvest Moon 64 with something like eager trepidatiousness.
And after a day or so of mental preparation, I started playing Harvest Moon 64 on a CRT television set using an emulator, using my new but somewhat dusty USB N64 controller, which made me realize that the N64 controller actually gets a bad rap within the gaming community, because although nascent and experimental, it’s actually incredibly ergonomic, a complete joy to hold, absolutely no cramping or cricks or wrist pressure of any kind while holding the thing, and that's not nostalgia talking, that's just the facts. And the N64 controller is especially nice when playing a game like Harvest Moon 64, which has the gameplay complexity of like a smooth rock or something, so you don't have to perform painful finger calisthenics or be a freakishly mutated three-handed person to reach all the buttons. Which is all to say that, so far, I'm having a pretty good time, but, let me tell you, playing Harvest Moon 64 is a very weird experience, because the game kind of forces you to come face to face with this strange kind of paradoxical irony that’s not present in many other video games, which is something I’ll dive into here shortly.
All that being said, I don't dislike Harvest Moon 64. I actually find it pleasantly addictive and cozy. The game is very quaint and relaxing and low IQ almost, which may sound like an insult but is actually a high compliment, because one of the things I dislike most about modern Harvest Moon-inspired farming games is the fact that there is just so much stuff to do and not enough time to do all that stuff, even though most of these games are open-ended and don’t penalize you for not doing everything all in one day, yet still when playing these types of games I feel weirdly compelled to cram as much stuff as possible into a single game day, which leads to all sorts of obsessive-compulsive-like stresses and frustrations, as if the tasks just keep piling up and I just don't have the capacity to organize or manage them, whereas Harvest Moon 64, being only the fourth game in the Harvest Moon series, which is technically called Story of Seasons if you want to get all nerdy and purist about it, is incredibly barebones and empty almost, which kind of removes the stress of too-many-options, because when you only have to worry about clearing your farm of debris, tilling soil, planting and watering seeds, harvesting crops, rearing animals, talking to townsfolk, participating in the occasional festival, and eventually getting married and having kids with the digital farm girl of your dreams, and you only have like 7 minutes at a time to do any of this stuff, because that's literally how long an in-game day is in Harvest Moon 64, 7 minutes, you’re sort of forced to pick one or two things to do per day and not really care about the rest because there’s literally no way in hell you’re cramming everything into those 7 minutes, and the stuff you’re doing in those 7 minutes is so braindead simple that it ends up feeling cathartic, in a way, like all the stress of modern life just sort of melts away as you’re sitting there holding the deformed monstrosity known as the N64 controller with two hands and moving your little chibi backwards-hat-wearing farmer guy around by tilting the oddly placed analog control stick with your thumb in satisfying little half circles before repetitively making him, the chibi backwards-hat-wearing farmer guy, crush rocks or water crops or whatever by pushing the fat green B button over and over, which, again, is incredibly low IQ and simple, almost anti-complex, as if the game itself is averse to being complex in any way shape or form, and that lack of gameplay complexity, combined with the game’s low-poly 3D environments and big-headed chibi-style 2D sprites and muted pastel color palette, all evoking this sort of I’ve-been-here-before-even-if-I’ve-never-actually-been-here-before feeling of nostalgia that some Nintendo 64 games just seem to have in spades, makes for a gameplay experience in which hours seem to drift away somehow as if you ingested some sort of digital benzo through your eyeballs.
What I’m trying to say is, Harvest Moon 64 is a very simple, very charming game, and its simplicity is not a drawback, in fact this simplicity is one of the game’s greatest strengths, and, like any great game, its gameplay reinforces the core themes of the game’s narrative, which is something like, “modern life is garbage, embrace the simple life, go touch grass.”
And that's where the paradoxical irony comes into play.
Harvest Moon 64 evokes a sort of wistful longing for a simpler life, a rural life, a life of spending all day outdoors, tilling the soil and planting the seeds and rearing the livestock and milking the cows and fishing the fish, a life in which the morning chirps of birds and the evening songs of crickets and the nighttime hoots of owls are fully appreciated in all their wondrous majestic glory, not just random background noise you hear sometimes when getting in the car for work in the morning or checking the mailbox in the evening or taking the trash out to the side of the road every Wednesday night. And Harvest Moon 64 does not merely replicate this back-to-basics, touch-grass lifestyle, it glorifies it, it implies that this sort of lifestyle is meaningful and fulfilling, it suggests that perhaps this kind of lifestyle is in fact superior to the lifestyle of someone who would, say, sit in front of a CRT television set for hours playing Harvest Moon 64, almost as if the game itself looks down upon the person playing it, which results in an almost surreal paradoxical gameplay experience that leaves me questioning if I should even be playing Harvest Moon 64 to begin with, or if I should be playing any video game for that matter. Like, if I enjoy planting crops and rearing livestock and fishing in ponds and touching grass in a video game, which I obviously do because here I am doing it, wouldn't it logically follow that I would also enjoy doing those things outside, in the real world, and if that's the case, shouldn't I then just be doing those things outside in the real world, instead of vegetatively sitting in front of a television set controlling aesthetically arranged pixels with an incredibly ergonomic controller? Wouldn't I get more enjoyment out of the real thing, like the actual putting-the-controller-down, going-outside, touching-grass thing?
So, needless to say at this point, but playing Harvest Moon 64 is a very weird and conflicting experience for me, which is odd because the game doesn’t actually shove this touch-grass narrative down your throat at all. In fact, Harvest Moon 64 is more concerned with being a simple video game than making any sort of point whatsoever, because Harvest Moon 64 is not deep, like, at all. It has no intention of getting narratively deep with you. The deepest the game gets is this one line of text on this one gravestone in Flowerbud Village that reads, “Deep thoughts are written here,” implying that, yes, someone somewhere in this fictional world had deep thoughts at some point, enough to write something deep here on this gravestone, but that person is not you, you're only here to plant crops and raise animals and marry a country girl and live a peaceful life in a simulated Japanese countryside. The game doesn’t even bother to tell you what kind of deep thoughts are written on its gravestones, that's how little Harvest Moon 64 cares about getting deep with you. It's as if the game is standing at the edge of a philosophical kiddie pool but refusing to even dip its toe in the water, instead just vaguely gesturing at the pool, saying something like, “Yes, there is something deep here, but who cares? It's not important. Go plant some turnips and pet your horse.” The game is so far away from being pretentious that I bet it doesn't even know what the word “pretentious” means. In fact, the most complicated word I've seen used in the game so far is like “howdy.”
Yet, if Harvest Moon 64 isn't deep or trying making a point or whatever, why does it feel like the game is patronizing me in some way? Why does it feel like the game is telling me to turn it off and go touch grass?
Could it be that I’m actually projecting my own insecurities onto the game? Could it be that Harvest Moon 64 is actually just a mirror, a mirror reflecting my own bullshit back at me? Could it be that it's not the game that’s patronizing me, but me that's patronizing me?
Maybe, somewhere deep inside, there's an unfulfilled atavistic urge to touch grass trying to break through, a sort of mitochondrial shame produced by staring at screens and being so far removed from the simpler, pastoral lifestyle of my great great ancestors? Maybe somewhere deep down in the ancestral gray matter I instinctively know that I'd be happier if I just turned off all the screens and touched some grass?
Now that I think about it, maybe the only depth Harvest Moon 64 has is the existential baggage I bring with me when I turn the game on.
So, with all that said, I think I’m going to take a walk in the park.
