Harvest Moon DS is one WACKY game... its community too.

I wanted to take a while to talk about Harvest Moon DS! It's one of my favorite games of all time. I can't say top favorite, because my top favorite changes every five seconds and it would REALLY date this post by a lot. But generally Harvest Moon DS (or just HMDS for short) stays near the very top of my list.

I got it on Christmas of 2011 - back when I celebrated Christmas, crazy I know - which means I'll have played it for 11 years on the 25th this year! That's pretty exciting. I don't think I played it much when I started out, but I do know that as soon as I figured out what exactly I was supposed to do, it became one of - if not my MOST played game of all time.

I do remember being quite confused when playing through the opening cutscene. Mainly the one with Thomas, I accidentally let my dog kill him first time around because I didn't know what was happening. Trust me, I would've saved him if I knew what was happening... he ended up becoming my favorite character later on, and still continues to be to this day!

For the most part, in my early days I would just walk around the farm and town aimlessly. It took me a long while to get a grip on how to use tools, ship items and such. I completely forgot the tutorial sprite channel was even a thing, it probably would've been very useful. In fact, I vaguely remember using it at some point, and it ended up being pretty beneficial because little me had never played a farming simulator before.

I'm just so glad I had never gone onto the internet in hopes to have conversation with other people about the game at that age. That was 2011, and the late 2000's and early 2010's were not the proudest times for the Harvest Moon fanbase from what I can tell, especially pertaining to DS. I feel like I would've lived in fear of the BWK.

Nowadays, I can interact with the community just fine, and I do have a circle of friends in it that are pretty nice. I'm glad I haven't come across anyone who's been especially mean towards me outside of maybe Twitch streams. But luckily that's kind of easy since I can always dip from the stream and I've never really been followed off of it.

In general? Pretty wacky game with a pretty wacky community. I haven't interacted with the Harvest Moon DS-specific side of the community in a while, so maybe I should start doing that more. I really don't know what I'm afraid of, I think everyone's pretty mellow and chill nowadays. But when you see old forum posts from the 2000's and how bad they can get, and have very high anxiety and sensitive feelings like myself, it can be hard to look past that ahaha.

In any case, hope you enjoyed this random little post that I cooked up for you all. This is the first post that I've made that has a semi-bit of effort put into it, so I hope it was at least a fun little read!