marsupials are nature's popples

Before I start anything here, let me please just say that whatever follows will probably not be funny. Please don't except something funny and then tell everyone it wasn't funny after all and you subsequently killed yourself. If you want to read this, I ask that you prepare now for a thoughtful, spiritual experience that is bound to change you, if you let it. Is there a smile in your heart? Than notify your face, and just stop it. There's too much pressure. I'm going to pee.

That done with, Rune Factory: A Fantasy Harvest Moon is the videogame I've been playing lately. - By lately, I mean since about October 23 this year. I know because I checked my blog. Wicked.

Anyway, Rune Factory: A Fantasy Harvest Moon? It's a shit wagon. It's almost the worst game I've ever played at any length. - It's transcended narrowly by some of the ticket-sprouting arcade games at CIRCUIT CIRCUS in Kid's Only Market, Granville Island. One of those games features 1990-style Ninja Turtles on the casing and the words PIZZA DROP on a smudged panel of Plexiglas. Behind the Plexiglas is something that almost resembles a pachinko machine. It's a yellow board with nails driven into it. When you put your 4 quarters into the slot below, which of course you do, Christmas lights (some dead) come on above the yellow board and flash. An alarm sounds. Nothing happens. Beneath the enigmatic PIZZA DROP lettering, you notice a hole cut into the Plexiglas roughly the size of a fist. You ponder the nature of PIZZA DROP until the lights go off again. Game over. - Rune Factory is so bad that I could easily do a month-long series of reviews. Each would introduce a new, major flaw of the game, and each would as scathing and bitter as only an internet videogame review can be when the reviewer herself can't stop playing the fucking game.

I won't list everything wrong with Rune Factory here. Firstly, nobody who reads this blog has played or will play Rune Factory, excepting Jacob who got it for free and played it for all of three seconds because it sucked so fiercely badly. Secondly, I really don't have the energy. But here is a brief description (non-judgemental, mind) of the game:

It's a farm simulation game so it simulates farming, but not really. It also attempts to be a fantasy rpg, because instead of farming you can enter caves and fight monsters to gain experience.

You kill monsters when you defeat them, but the game calls it "releasing them to the first forest" so that's fine, even though the game characters seem to treat the monsters as pets. You also use the skins/bones/teeth of the monsters, because otherwise it's wasting? But you can "tame" monsters if you want, and put them in a tiny barn closet, and bring them out occasionally to follow you around. For no reason. But don't let that put you off killing monsters, because you'll have to kill multitudes to progress in the game.

Also, you can get married. You do this by talking to a girl three thousand times. Once that pinnacle is reached, the game arbitrarily decides when the girl, (not woman, they're all about eight) is ready to marry you. At that point, instead of saying "gee, turnips are my favourite" (example) as whoever it is always does, no matter the time or situation, she will start talking about her feelings and the game will trap you into marrying her, so you'd better power off right away and if you haven't saved recently, hurl the DS hard at something soft, because really it isn't the system's fault. Nice system. Mommy loves you. Don't ask me what happens when and if you do get married. I imagine your child-bride stands in your house and says "gee, turnips are my favourite".

Was that brief? It was not. I'm sorry. I get so mad and lost and I can't help myself, it starts pouring out of my mouth like gasoline, if my mouth was a hose filled with gas. Drawing challenge! Anyway, you get the point. It's a bad game. Not fun. Shit wagon.

AND YET, I keep playing it. I keep wandering through caves and killing pets/monsters and talking to insipid townsfolk and planting soulless cabbages. I won't ask you why I do this, despite everything. Only I know the reason, deep inside my heart, and one day I'll get shot in the heart by an arrow and the reason will pop out my butt onto the ground, and it will look like a poo.

Did I mention that the music for Rune Factory is repetitive and dismal? I probably should have, because that's where I'm going with this. Thanks to the invention of ear phones, I can listen to an iPod while playing the game and not really miss anything that I wouldn't detest anyway. But you can't listen to any old thing while playing theworstgameevafeaturingkillingandfarminginone, you can only listen to things that are related to farming in some way. That's the fun of it. Otherwise it's stupid.

So okay, here's what I have so far. Suggestions welcome!

1. King Harvest (Has Surely Come) - The Band
Actual lyrics: Dry summer, then comes fall/ Which I depend on most of all/ Hey rainmaker can't you hear the call?/ Please let these crops grow tall.

Theory: This works on many levels, or actually on just one level. Unfortunately it only rains about 3 times a year in RH, so you don't really depend on the rainmaker as much as backbreaking labour. But I like how it's all "hey rainmaker", like "what doing?"

2. Straw hat and old dirty hank - The Barenaked Ladies
Actual lyrics: I tend the wheat field that makes your bread/ I bind the sweet veal, pluck the hens that make your bed/ Mother Nature & Mother Earth/ Are two of three women who dictate what I'm worth.

Theory: This is just entirely fitting because the guy in the song is psychotic and kills the woman he's obsessed with because she won't return his feelings. Other memorable lines include All of this corn I grow, I grow it all for you, and damn if I haven't said that aloud to my DS while courting my jail-bait love interest(s) in-game. Actually, I'm still hoping the game will end the way this song does, because that's the only way any part of it would every make sense, ever, ever.

3. Jubilee - Ida
Actual lyrics: Hardest work I ever done, working on the farm/ Easiest work I've ever done, swinging my true love's arm.

Theory: This song is far too cheerful on the whole, but it underlines the futility of the "dating sim" portion of RH. In this world, being friendly with folk is as physically and mentally exhausting as breaking twenty boulders every morning. And boulders sprout by the dozen every morning. Just saying.

4. The Calender Hung Itself - Bright Eyes
Actual lyrics: And I kissed a girl with a broken jaw that her father gave to her/ She had eyes bright enough to burn me. They reminded me of yours/ And in a story told she was a little girl in a red-rouge, sun-bruised field/and there were rows of ripe tomatoes where a secret was concealed.

Theory: More pedophilia, which I swear to god this game keeps hinting at. The father of one girl character is a Catholic priest (or so he suggests in dressing as the pope) who keeps telling you his daughter is becoming a woman in that way... No wonder the poor girl is reaching out to whatever wandering squatter shows up at the old farm. Plus, rows of ripe tomatoes. Been there.

4. Field Behind the Plow - Stan Rogers
Actual lyrics: Poor old Kuzyk down the road/ The heartache, hail, and hoppers brought him down./ He gave it up and went to town. /And Emmet Pierce, the other day, / Took a heart attack and died at forty-two. / You could see it coming on, 'cause he worked as hard as you.

Theory: This whole song is a fucking goldmine. Every verse is rich with Harvest Moon-style pathos and tragedy. It colours over the lines a little with "buy the kids a winter coat", when you could just craft one from the skins of your pets and then, oops, you're barren anyway, but basically it should be on the game's soundtrack.

5. Maggie's Farm - Bob Dylan
Actual lyrics: I ain't gonna work on Maggie's farm no more. /No, I ain't gonna work on Maggie's farm no more. /It's a shame the way she makes me scrub the floor. /I ain't gonna work on Maggie's farm no more.

Theory: One of the most dissatisfying things about RH is that you don't really own the farm you're creating. You're just "working on it" for a girl named Myst. The people in town know this and most of them mention it every time you try to talk. "It's good you're helping with the farm" they say repeatedly, or "has Myst pulled the wool over your eyes?" That's a clever reference to sheep, which incidentally aren't in the game. Instead of sheering sheep you may shave the fur off your captive monsters. It's as rewarding as it sounds.

Last and least, I have for you the official theme song of Rune Factory: Harvest Moon. Please watch at least 1.5 seconds of it, because I watch that much 100 times a day, at least. It's impossible to restart the game without "FRY DOWN TO MEEEEEEEEEEE" blaring tinnily from the DS speakers. The lyrics make no sense at all, but the sound makes them indecipherable anyway so it doesn't matter. The accompanying video has nothing to do with the game. At all. Exceptions to this rule include the starring male character (that's you), the blushing girl with white hair (that's Myst, the slave-driver), and the brief glimpse of cabbages in a cave.

CABBAGES IN A CAVE.

Fin.