Okay, so maybe I jumped the gun a little on making this website. I'm super hype about doing it! Like, really hype. But man, the more I learn about this, the more I realize that I have No Idea What I'm Doing. If you're reading this, things will probably look a lot ugly and plain for a while. I'm working on learning how to not make it look like this, but I am one person with ADHD and five thousand things to do in a day. Soon, I'll hopefully also have a job, and that'll mean that I have even less time to figure out what I'm doing and make this place look like what's in my head.
Not that there's much in my head. Sure, I have ideas, but I don't want people to think I have some grand vision. I don't have moodboards or whatever, I have aphantasia. Mostly, I just want this place to feel like home. Not sure what that means, yet.
Okay, so I have no plan, extremely little experience (my main experience having been spending time on forums way back when and knowing how to, like, do italics without hitting the "italics" button), and mostly just the direction of "I wanted to rant about farm sims on the internet so someone might hear me". Yeah, maybe I did jump the gun. But I have ADHD and I jump guns like schoolgirls jump rope and I wouldn't say it's failed me yet. To say it had "failed" me would imply that I learned nothing from the experience, and that's only true if you think the only lesson one could possibly learn from double-dutch gun-jumping every day at recess is to stop jumping the damn guns. Hell, I've already learned a fair bit more HTML than I'd known before, so it cannot possibly all be about slowly and carefully easing into every little thing I ever do and spending all my time thinking and none of it doing. Believe me, if I let myself think about everything, never once would I find the time to have fun.
Which brings me, I guess, to what I thought I was going to be typing when I sat down to flex my hot, sexy, "HTML Beginner Tutorial" from HTMLDog knowledge.
I thought I'd sit down and talk about the farm sim I'm playing right now--Harvest Moon: Sunshine Islands. I picked it up on an urge, actually the same day I decided out of nowhere I'd make a website about it, though a couple hours earlier. I'm a very longtime fan of the Harvest Moon/Story of Seasons series of games, and really the whole-ass genre, but Sunshine Islands was a game I never got to touch. I think I'll wait to delve into it too far, but basically, I've played through nearly a year of the game in just a few days, and boy do I have thoughts about it.
Here's my first thought: I have no idea why in the world this is the more popular of the two games. (Its point of comparison being Harvest Moon: Island of Happiness, a game made a year or two before Sunshine Islands with many of the same assets and characters.)
I mean, okay, sure, fine, whatever. They added some small quality-of-life changes. But they also ripped the sense of progression from the game and made a lifeless, somewhat boring sort of world where you have the ability to raise islands from the sea and affect almost nothing in anyone's lives around you. Harvest Moon: Another Wonderful Life (and its predecessor, A Wonderful Life, where you play as a guy instead of a girl) had the thing where you're just living your life and not that important in the grand scheme of things, but then, A/nother Wonderful Life wasn't about raising islands from the sea to save your archipelago or whatever. That game was about living a peaceful, monotonous life and raising a child. It didn't pretend like you were supposed to be important. You raise up an island and, wow, it's almost exactly like every other island! Maybe one or two people comes to live on it. Despite being on the sea floor for an untold number of years, there's fully-grown trees on it and thriving wildlife, seemingly unharmed by their years below the sea! And you know what else is on those islands?
Nothing. They're boring. Lifeless. I hyped myself up to raise the Mystic Islands, where two warring, magical beings have allegedly lived for centuries. I expected a goddess spring, complete with all the beauty and magic that would make sense for a spring where the goddess who brings vitality to the entire world lives, and on the Witch Princess's island, a completely flipped kind of aesthetic, all dark and witchy, which would make sense for a place where the Princess of all Witches (and allegedly the most powerful witch in the land) makes her home and performs powerful magic. Hell, at least a really big tree.
But we don't get that. The game is barren in surprising places. The Witch Princess's island is just a bear-shaped rock with a bridge leading to the dock and the Goddess Island. The Goddess Island is just a weird-shaped rock with a bridge leading to the docks and the Witch Princess's island. The Goddess Spring? Sorry, brother. It's literally a puddle in the middle of the rock. At least there's plant life on Goddess Island. And that continuing to exist despite centuries on the seafloor I can even dismiss as being so close in proximity to the Goddess Spring. But then, why is the Witch Princess island completely barren? It's like a two minute walk if you were to walk there in real time. In real life you wouldn't even need a bridge--they're so close, you could just wade over the sand.
I could go on for years about this game. And I will... eventually. For now, take this update, with the promise that someday this website might even be pretty.
All my best,
Drops
go home?