Headscratchers / Harvest Moon DS

• Why didn't Natsume change the names of the characters in DS/Cute? Too lazy?
  • Personally, I'm glad they didn't. It always makes me mad when translation companies feel like they need to change character names to make them seem more "American".
    • Actually, I prefer Skye's English name. "Steiner" kinda sounds like a hot dog company...
  • Maybe it was because the whole Generation Xerox thing in the Japanese versions was pretty pointless and confusing.
    • But the problem is that they kept the Generation Xerox in the American version, too. For example, talking to Gustafa while he's in his house causes this confusion:
  Gustafa: A man named Gustafa built this yurt. He lived his days wandering and singing songs.
  • No it wasn't. It made sense to me, much more sense then a bunch of people naming their children after their grandparents.
    • Why would they need to be different people to begin with? Their relationships are all exactly the same, their jobs exactly the same, their jobs exactly the same, their homes exactly the same, their appearances... You get the idea.
  • It makes the games more interesting and lets them somewhat expand the plot..In a confusing manner.
• Why didn't they make Cody a special bachelor in DS Cute? He's single, he's probably younger than Carter and Griffin (two legit bachelors), and he even laments being a bachelor. The boys got four special gals, so why not a measly two? Did they not want to sprite "different" kids for him because he's Ambiguously Brown or something? (Well, unlike most of the men in the valley, he doesn't even consider the possibility that you're proposing to him if you show him the Blue Feather... Maybe...?)
  • For that matter, why didn't they make Daryll a bachelor and have Leia be the rival for him?
    • They probably didn't have Daryl and Leia as a rival couple because Leia is a special bachelorette in Harvest Moon DS (and also in the Japanese version of Cute), and special marriage candidates don't have rivals for their affections in the first place (most likely because special bachelor/ettes tend to have a ton of extra requirements to marry them, so including a rival would just add to the work). I don't know about Cody, though.
• What's the deal with the whole Generation Xerox thing in the first place? It doesn't really make any difference whether the DS/Cute characters are the ancestors of the A/nother Wonderful Life characters, since the series loves to recycle characters anyway. It's pretty easy to play through the game without ever knowing they're supposed to be descendants of the original characters. Since all the DS/Cute characters look exactly the same as they did in A/nother Wonderful Life, changing the names and calling them descendants doesn't really make sense to me...
  • The Generation Xerox doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me, either, especially if you consider that there's most likely some inbreeding going on. I prefer to think of DS as being an Alternate Universe of A Wonderful Life.
  • Are certain supposed to be cousins or something? I'm not getting how this all works.
• I don't have that many issues with the amount of special bachelors in DS Cute, since the Mineral Town boys are marriageable in Cute where the MT girls weren't in DS (...well, they were, but it ended the game), but they went through the trouble of making daughter graphics, so why didn't they edit the colors and patterns on the kid sprites for the bachelors? They already had designs for Rock's, Marlin's, and Gustafa's kids from Another Wonderful Life. It would make a lot more sense if Marlin's, Carter's, and Gustafa's kids actually looked like them...
  • IIRC, the Another Wonderful kids were just recycled from the boy version. It is weird, but in the case of Gustafa and Carter, you can chalk it up to recessive genes. Blonde and red are recessive colors, and they both have dominant black/brown hair, so if they have blonde/redhead genes buried in there, makes sense. Of course, if Claire (who'd have to have all blonde genes) marries Gustafa, it falls apart... and that has weird implications for Pony, whose recessive genes would be determined by who she marries. But if Pony marries either, or Claire just marries Carter, it still makes a kind of sense! Take it from someone whose self and whose sister had platinum hair as children, but two blackish brown-haired parents. (Now our hair's darkened to goldish brown so we look more like them.)
    • No, the Another Wonderful Life kids actually did get different designs◊ than the kids from the boy version. Although this troper admits how they worked around Gustafa's Opaque Lenses was creepy (though fixed for the kid's character model, where he simply had purple irises instead of the concept art's big gaping purple circles of nothingness...).
• Does anyone besides me wonder about shopping over the telephone? Whenever you buy something from Karen's store, for instance, she says, "Thanks, I'll put it in your rucksack!" (or something similar, at least) and bam there it is... but you're... buying over the phone. How...?
  • Since Teleport Stones have been made easily available (they're a mere 1000 Sprite Coins each at the Sprite Game Center, and that's not a lot), they're probably using those. They send the stuff by stone.