Harvest Moon: Quest for Perfect Endings
Feb. 27th, 2022 01:08 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
marchionessofmustacheSo, there are 20 potential ending scenes in the original Harvest Moon. I've only seen like a handful of them, as I've only cleared the game once or twice when I was a kid, and never again as an adult. So now I'm going to make a point to see all of them.
You don't have to play the game 20 times to see them all; multiple scenes can be triggered with a single playthrough of the game, though some are exclusive from others.
There is a way to "skip" to the end of the game and view the ending as if you played to the last day with your current progress. Basically it pretends the next day is the end of the game and shows you whatever endings you would have received at that point. Since the game is just on a timer, this just saves tedium. You could just 'wait it out' to see the endings, but this allows you to avoid jumping into bed hundreds of times just to hit the final day.
I'm not sure how much I want to abuse that skip yet.
To see all of the endings 'naturally,' you'd need to do a total of seven playthroughs of the game -- there's a bad ending, five different married endings (one for each lady), and a group of bachelor endings that you can get all at once while not being married. The rest of the ending scenes are for various milestones -- shipping so many turnips, having so many chickens, etc. -- and can basically be piled up while going for those other endings. There's one "sub-optimal" ending that gets overridden if you have more than 6 cows, that makes it exclusive to the 'better' cow ending.
Since getting the bad ending is literally just sleeping every day until the end of the game (doing much of ANYTHING avoids getting the bad ending, unless you just really don't understand the game and manage to play for three entire years without figuring it out), I'm going to use the skip trick to see that one. I mean, I could just sit there and click the bed 360 times, but I don't feel like I'm achieving anything that way and would rather just save my time.
That leaves six other endings to do, and I'm wondering how many full playthroughs to do to see them all.
I want to do at least two full playthroughs -- one to get a 'perfect' married ending and one to get a 'perfect' unmarried ending. Each of these will require me to override the sub-optimal cow ending afaik, so there's a potential third playthrough to get that and another one of the marriage endings, that I could easily play some kind of "challenge" run like no crops or something and see how that goes.
To get a "perfect" ending (all possible endings that can be obtained at once, including the 'best' one), you need the following:
To get the perfect unmarried ending, you need:
So a little easier in most regards (less happiness needed and you don't need to get all the Berries), though you'll have to court all the ladies, which is its own challenge (but not really because it's very easy to do).
If the marriages were different from one another, I'd easily jump into doing 6 different playthroughs to get the 'perfect' one of each. But there's a problem -- once you marry a girl, all her uniqueness is gone. She turns into the generic Wife character, who uses the same sprite no matter who you married (just the hair color is different), and says all the same stuff. So it's literally the exact same thing with a barely differing Generic Wife. A huge shame.
Each girl has one unique event, and you'd end up seeing them all in the unmarried harem ending, so it's not like you'd even see one different scene for each marriage playthrough. You can easily view all five scenes even just marrying whichever one you like.
So maybe I'll have to come up with some more 'challenge' ideas? Or just marry as fast as possible and use the ending skip trick... I don't know.
I do have the English, German, and Japanese versions of the game, and with two save slots each, that does tally up to a nice 6 playthroughs, so I could have a save for each wife and for the unmarried life between the three versions... which is tempting... but I feel like it might get too stale.
Some ideas for things to add to challenge:
- No crops
- No foraging
- No hot springs
- No talking
- No shipping (?!)
Of course not all of these at once lol.
Perfect marriage (Maria)
Perfect bachelor
No crops (Ellen)
No hot springs (Eve)
No talking (Nina)
No shipping (Ann)
Something like that could work??
No shipping might be impossible... you'd only be able to sell things on Sundays and only like 2-3 things at that lol. I guess you could manage a house upgrade and a blue feather, which would be all you need to get married... then it would be an interesting challenge to see how much else you could get.
"No talking" would probably be more interesting for Eve, since it'd be harder to get gifts to her. I guess once you had chickens you'd just make due with eggs, and you could probably get flowers from the mountain easily enough... so maybe it wouldn't be that difficult. It might be actually more difficult with a girl who goes away at night since you'd have to make sure to get her a gift during the day. But I guess then you'd just end up on eggs again. Maybe no talking + no hot springs should be combined into one thing. But then what would I do for a sixth playthrough? No running?? Hahaha.
No foraging actually seems dumb, it would just make the beginning of the game a little slower but then it'd be just a normal playthrough after that.
Actually, maybe you could compound the challenges by adding one each time instead of treating them separately.
No hot springs
No hot springs + No talking
No hot springs + No talking + No crops
No hot springs + No talking + No shipping
No crops + no shipping seems like it would just be tedious/boring/potentially impossible. It would just be sleeping til sunday then selling 2 grapes for 400G total. You'd probably want to get a couple chickens for summer and winter, as well as for the egg gifts.
You could also start with no talking and add no hot springs second.
So I wanna think about who I want to go for in each scenario. I kind of want my 'perfect' playthrough to be with Ellen, even though I just married her in my casual game. But her ending is my favorite -- includes horseback riding, mountain viewing, P-chan, and hot mustache livestock guy lol.
Perfect (Ellen)
No hot springs (Maria)
No hot springs + no talking (Eve)
No hot springs + no talking + no crops (Nina)
No hot springs + no talking + no shipping (Ann)
Harem (None/All)
OK my little brainstorm has gotten me excited. I actually was supposed to sleep like 4 hours ago (I got up because my blood sugar took a hit and I was all shaky, so I got up to eat some peanut butter and have a glass of milk, and decided to write this to wait out the shakes) so I'mma go to bed and then get up and get working on that perfect Ellen playthrough tomorrow!
You don't have to play the game 20 times to see them all; multiple scenes can be triggered with a single playthrough of the game, though some are exclusive from others.
There is a way to "skip" to the end of the game and view the ending as if you played to the last day with your current progress. Basically it pretends the next day is the end of the game and shows you whatever endings you would have received at that point. Since the game is just on a timer, this just saves tedium. You could just 'wait it out' to see the endings, but this allows you to avoid jumping into bed hundreds of times just to hit the final day.
I'm not sure how much I want to abuse that skip yet.
To see all of the endings 'naturally,' you'd need to do a total of seven playthroughs of the game -- there's a bad ending, five different married endings (one for each lady), and a group of bachelor endings that you can get all at once while not being married. The rest of the ending scenes are for various milestones -- shipping so many turnips, having so many chickens, etc. -- and can basically be piled up while going for those other endings. There's one "sub-optimal" ending that gets overridden if you have more than 6 cows, that makes it exclusive to the 'better' cow ending.
Since getting the bad ending is literally just sleeping every day until the end of the game (doing much of ANYTHING avoids getting the bad ending, unless you just really don't understand the game and manage to play for three entire years without figuring it out), I'm going to use the skip trick to see that one. I mean, I could just sit there and click the bed 360 times, but I don't feel like I'm achieving anything that way and would rather just save my time.
That leaves six other endings to do, and I'm wondering how many full playthroughs to do to see them all.
I want to do at least two full playthroughs -- one to get a 'perfect' married ending and one to get a 'perfect' unmarried ending. Each of these will require me to override the sub-optimal cow ending afaik, so there's a potential third playthrough to get that and another one of the marriage endings, that I could easily play some kind of "challenge" run like no crops or something and see how that goes.
To get a "perfect" ending (all possible endings that can be obtained at once, including the 'best' one), you need the following:
- 10000+ G
- 1+ chickens
- 7+ cows, one with 192+ affection
- Ship 200+ of each crop in the game
- Married with two children
- Secret garden filled (eat all 10 Berries of Power Tree)
- 900+ happiness
- Max dog hugging score lol
To get the perfect unmarried ending, you need:
- 1+ chickens
- 7+ cows, one with 192+ affection
- Ship 200+ of each crop in the game
- 300+ affection with all five bachelorettes
- 800+ happpiness
So a little easier in most regards (less happiness needed and you don't need to get all the Berries), though you'll have to court all the ladies, which is its own challenge (but not really because it's very easy to do).
If the marriages were different from one another, I'd easily jump into doing 6 different playthroughs to get the 'perfect' one of each. But there's a problem -- once you marry a girl, all her uniqueness is gone. She turns into the generic Wife character, who uses the same sprite no matter who you married (just the hair color is different), and says all the same stuff. So it's literally the exact same thing with a barely differing Generic Wife. A huge shame.
Each girl has one unique event, and you'd end up seeing them all in the unmarried harem ending, so it's not like you'd even see one different scene for each marriage playthrough. You can easily view all five scenes even just marrying whichever one you like.
So maybe I'll have to come up with some more 'challenge' ideas? Or just marry as fast as possible and use the ending skip trick... I don't know.
I do have the English, German, and Japanese versions of the game, and with two save slots each, that does tally up to a nice 6 playthroughs, so I could have a save for each wife and for the unmarried life between the three versions... which is tempting... but I feel like it might get too stale.
Some ideas for things to add to challenge:
- No crops
- No foraging
- No hot springs
- No talking
- No shipping (?!)
Of course not all of these at once lol.
Perfect marriage (Maria)
Perfect bachelor
No crops (Ellen)
No hot springs (Eve)
No talking (Nina)
No shipping (Ann)
Something like that could work??
No shipping might be impossible... you'd only be able to sell things on Sundays and only like 2-3 things at that lol. I guess you could manage a house upgrade and a blue feather, which would be all you need to get married... then it would be an interesting challenge to see how much else you could get.
"No talking" would probably be more interesting for Eve, since it'd be harder to get gifts to her. I guess once you had chickens you'd just make due with eggs, and you could probably get flowers from the mountain easily enough... so maybe it wouldn't be that difficult. It might be actually more difficult with a girl who goes away at night since you'd have to make sure to get her a gift during the day. But I guess then you'd just end up on eggs again. Maybe no talking + no hot springs should be combined into one thing. But then what would I do for a sixth playthrough? No running?? Hahaha.
No foraging actually seems dumb, it would just make the beginning of the game a little slower but then it'd be just a normal playthrough after that.
Actually, maybe you could compound the challenges by adding one each time instead of treating them separately.
No hot springs
No hot springs + No talking
No hot springs + No talking + No crops
No hot springs + No talking + No shipping
No crops + no shipping seems like it would just be tedious/boring/potentially impossible. It would just be sleeping til sunday then selling 2 grapes for 400G total. You'd probably want to get a couple chickens for summer and winter, as well as for the egg gifts.
You could also start with no talking and add no hot springs second.
So I wanna think about who I want to go for in each scenario. I kind of want my 'perfect' playthrough to be with Ellen, even though I just married her in my casual game. But her ending is my favorite -- includes horseback riding, mountain viewing, P-chan, and hot mustache livestock guy lol.
Perfect (Ellen)
No hot springs (Maria)
No hot springs + no talking (Eve)
No hot springs + no talking + no crops (Nina)
No hot springs + no talking + no shipping (Ann)
Harem (None/All)
OK my little brainstorm has gotten me excited. I actually was supposed to sleep like 4 hours ago (I got up because my blood sugar took a hit and I was all shaky, so I got up to eat some peanut butter and have a glass of milk, and decided to write this to wait out the shakes) so I'mma go to bed and then get up and get working on that perfect Ellen playthrough tomorrow!
