AWL Remake

[TBustah!]

In case you've been living under a rock for the last few months...



They've confirmed the release date since this video was posted: June 27th. The Japanese version is out already, but I'm going to avoid looking at any footage until I've had a chance to jot down my uninfluenced thoughts.

My Wishlist

1. Make things more intuitive.

You can't blame Marvelous for trying to mix things up twenty years ago (crap, has it really been that long? Well, we didn't get it until early 2004 in North America, and I didn't pick it up until at least the fall of 2005, I guess). Less than a decade into the series' run, things were already getting a bit stale. You can only change the setting and characters so many times (and sometimes they didn't even do that) before people start to notice that the core gameplay hasn't changed much. Unfortunately, the main way they tried to do that was by increasing the difficulty and throwing a bunch of gimmicks at us. Neither of those are bad things in and of themselves, but their idea of difficulty was to increase the amount of work needed to complete certain tasks, and they didn't explain the changes to that stuff or the new stuff very well. Forcing me to water and milk more than once a day doesn't increase the difficulty, it just wastes my time (not that that particular resource is in short supply in this game, but I'll get to that later). The soil management, cow breeding, plant hybridizing, and fertilizer stuff was all interesting, but not implemented very well. I shouldn't need to consult GameFAQs to figure out what fertilizer I need and everything else I need to know just to grow half decent potatoes, and the hybridization was more complicated and annoying that it needed to be. Shut up and mix my seeds, Tartan. I don't mind the challenge of having to befriend you to get started, but having to talk to you several times just to get the prompt when I need it is just plain evil. A built-in pedigree for both plant and animal hybrids would also be helpful. Speaking of animals...


2. Make animal breeding more interesting, and fix a few other things.

I really should've read through a few guides before I got too into this game back in the day. It would have saved me a lot of time and heartbreak. When I learned that you could crossbreed plants and that there were bulls in this version for the purpose of impregnating the cows, I jumped to the (not unreasonable) conclusion that you could create hybrid breeds of cattle... nope. I set myself to the task of breeding a single cow that was descended from all four breeds just to see what would happen, and what did I ultimately get? The same Holstein pattern that, growing up in rural western Nevada, I saw at least once a week in the real world. I thought, "Okay, it looks like a regular cow, but maybe it will produce special milk". Nope. There is no point to breeding cattle beyond keeping the milk flowing. At the end of the day, there's really no way to get better milk other than selling your cows and trading up, or buying a better bull and hoping that the baby takes after Dad.

This remake is their chance to fix that, and it doesn't need to stop with cattle. Why not introduce different breeds of the other animals? The sheep, chickens, and ducks were all breedable in the original, but they only had one variety each. It's possible that they meant to introduce more, but cut them for whatever reason, like that shed you can't open (which was going to be a horse stable, dunno why they didn't just take it out entirely). The different purebreds and their descendants should also have advantages and disadvantages. Otherwise, why would anyone want anything other than the ones that produce the most valuable products? For example, maybe the more expensive breeds of cows produce better milk, but the cheaper cows can keep milking for longer between calves, and you can crossbreed to to min/max it.

Oh, and the goat. I wouldn't mind the nasty surprise of it only producing milk for a year if they let us sell them to free up a slot in the barn. Supposedly, you can allow the goat to die if you abuse it, but A: that's messed up and you shouldn't have to do that, and B: I could never get that freeloading beast to keel over. Either fix it, remove it from the game, or at least give the uninitiated a clue that a year's worth of valuable goat cheese isn't worth it in the long run.

3. Either shorten the clock and the chapters, or give us more to do.

Even with the unenviable tasks of watering and milking more than once and making sure the chickens have had enough to eat, there really isn't that much to do each day. I usually finished pretty quickly and then just kind of sat on my hands until it was time to water again. This is probably when other players befriend NPCs, but beyond wooing the girl or guy, that's something I never really bother with in these games unless there's something to get out of it. Even fishing, something that I usually do in other entries to make a little extra money, is too frustrating to be fun or worth it. The digsite? Maybe if I'm wooing Nami, but I've never gotten to the most interesting and valuable stuff that comes later because I've never played beyond the third chapter. That's how bored I got.

The same goes for the chapters. Two years for each one would be acceptable, but you have to play through a total of ten years just to see everything. I put about half of that into more convention entries in the series before I lose interest (tops), but combined with how empty the days are in this one, that's absolutely insane. I could see myself playing for ten years if I was slowly building up the farm or there was a big second quest you unlocked later like in Stardew Valley (I've actually got seven or eight years on one file, in part because of the island), but everything is handed to you in this one, you don't have any control over the layout of the farm, and there isn't much to do after marriage beyond raising the kid. They don't have to copy everything that Stardew or the other games did, but something has to give. For example, maybe instead of locking the digsite's progress to the completion of a chapter, the progress on it could depend on how much work you put into it. To encourage that, they should also put more and better stuff in there to dig up, things that can be sold and things that can be used to upgrade the farm. Stardew Valley does this almost to a fault. Fixing the digsite would both give us something to do in our spare time and encourage us to keep playing for several years.

Anyway, at the very least, they're adding festivals, which was something that the original sorely lacked. I think maybe the reason why is that Mineral Town and that unnamed city that Chris and Grant commuted to were supposed to be fairly close by, and so the implication is that the characters just went to the events there, but I don't care. If I can't go there, none of it exists. Whatever. They're at least adding the stewpot one and fireworks, both of which have already been seen in the series several times before, but it's better than nothing.

4. New characters and more interaction.

The FoMT remake added new marriage candidates, and that's something this one desperately needs. I like the three original girls well enough, but one or two new choices would be nice. Really though, I'm talking about the guys. I always felt bad for the ladies, both the player character in AnWL and the real ones playing these games. Your options were a hippie who squatted on public property in a tent (I guess this game was ahead of its time. ), another layabout who lived with his parents and didn't seem to have any real goals or ambitions, and the only one who seemed to have a job gave off all sorts of creepy vibes. I know I'm not the only one who thinks that about that last one. Every fanfiction I've read for this game makes Martin a stalker, a pervert, a rapist, a murderer, more possessive of Celia than he actually was, or all of the above. Every. Single. One.

A few other NPCs might not be a bad idea, either. I get that the idea is that this valley is sparsely populated, but a few new faces that come and go over the course of the game wouldn't hurt. I counted them just now... thirty-three humans including the player and child, plus a few supernatural creatures? I'm surprised it's that many, it doesn't seem like it. I still think you could add a few more and maintain the isolated feel. FoMT had a few more than that, but it both seemed like a small town and more fleshed-out.

Even if they don't add any new characters, more interaction would go a long way. The festivals are a good start, but I also want the player's family to celebrate birthdays and anniversaries again, the spouse and child to have more than a few lines to say at any given time, and more cutscenes with all of the characters. There were far too few of that last one in the original. I don't care if this stuff is fairly barebones as it was in FoMT, something is better than nothing.

5. Your Child

One of the biggest selling points of the original was watching your child grow up, but there really wasn't much to it beyond giving him or her gifts, befriending certain people, and putting certain toys in the box. There could be so much more to it. Instead of just putting toys in there, how about playing mini games? Playing catch with your kid if you're going down the athletics path is a no-brainer. So is giving him chores on the farm. Art could be a puzzle game with colored shapes, scholarship a trivia game, and music a rhythm action game. Instead of making a few passive adjustments and hoping for the best, these could be skills that you actively help the kid level up. Ever played Bully? Think of the mini games you'd play in the classes. There could even be upgrades that you unlocked for their completion like Bully had. Scholars could upgrade your machinery and build new machines, and artists could make new products out of raw materials that you could sell or at least allow you to paint your farm buildings different colors. Farmers and ranchers are self-explanatory, the kid would get better at helping you with those tasks and/or help you sell your products at better rates. Maybe musicians could unlock new songs for the record player?

6. Misc. Quality of life fixes

The backpack in the original too big. Way too big. Part of the challenge of these games is starting out with a small bag and upgrading it as you go. It doesn't have be four slots, but it should be at least somewhat smaller. Somewhere between not being able to pocket anything like in the original game on SNES and having a D&D Bag of Holding on your back, there's got to be a happy medium. I never bothered storing anything in the shed other than obsolete tools, because you can could carry everything you needed. Give the horse saddle bags like in other games if you have to, he could use another use beyond transporting you around the valley.

Cooking and foraging could also be better. Cooking wasn't very intuitive, and there wasn't much to eat lying around that could stop that annoying stomach growling in a pinch. The improved fishing I mentioned in #3 would go a long way here, maybe they could even add the campfires from Magical Melody so that you could cook fish anywhere.

How about a general store? Takakura could still sell your livestock and produce for you, but waiting for him to come back with certain things you ordered was just a pain. Sometimes I needed something then and there.

Money could use some balancing. Some stuff was really expensive, and it took a long time to save up for it because only a handful of products were big money makers (unless you got into the hybrids and some of the other unintuitive stuff I complained about in #1). Once you got it, there wasn't much incentive to make more money. This is part of the reason why I can't go back to farming games where the buildings are all handed to you: saving and upgrading is part of the challenge and fun. I don't want to play a game where the stuff I need is expensive and moneymaking opportunities are few and far between, I got enough of that living in a border town for eight years.


That's about it. I'm not expecting them to reinvent the wheel, I just want something that I can actually play all the way through this time before losing interest. If that means simply copying and pasting what works from the other games over what didn't in this one, fine, but it could be so much more than that. At any rate, I've still got my original copy of AWL and am not picky enough about graphics that simply putting a new coat of paint over it will convince me to buy it again.

What are your thoughts? What do you want to see?