One of my biggest takeaways from Harvest Moon: Animal Parade so far is the difference between Japanese and North American approaches to some of the same gameplay concepts. You can see something similar in the difference between JRPGs and WRPGs.

When you compare Harvest Moon and things like Animal Crossing, they seem to relish in doing things one-at-a-time, adding friction and keeping it slow. If you stick with it you start to realise those little bits of friction aren’t a “flaw” so much as they are an aspect of the design philosophy and part of the point.

vs. something like Stardew Valley, where they keep it low-pressure but you have access to a whole lot of semiautomations and hyperefficient workarounds; part of the fun is configuring (and perhaps overclocking) your setup to run in the way you want it to.

It’s got me contemplating what Australian values are in this context, which is always difficult to seive out from our various influences – we spend a lot of time and money consuming culture from international sources, and insofar as we support our own, the niche it occupies is mostly “side hustle”. Precious few escape that without first escaping the country. So we rarely get to see our own cultural relationship to concepts like work, community, humour, etc. represented in “full-time professional” media without it getting twisted to the point of being unrecognisable.