Harvest Moon SNES: Ideas for a parody/weird text rewrite, please.

(Wasn't sure if this should go here or in Writer's Block.)

I was in the middle of translating some of the text of the original Harvest Moon, turning it to Italian (since I'm studying Italian and no Italian version of the game yet exists), when I found the text painfully mundane... and in some places, actually a little weird.

This led me to wonder what the game might feel like if the characters were quite different. For example, one girl talks about rain so much that I considered making her a Goth.

So this thread is for suggestions and/or discussion of different characterizations for the girls (and townsfolk) to have, if the game were less mundane and more... quirky, even dark. (I don't want sexual or gory content, though hints could be there: A girl talking like a creepy stalker, for example, or the bar girl (Eve) turned into a stripper, because let's face it, the dialogue about her is pretty darn close.)

Not saying this'll ever make it to a full translation patch, but I figure the exercise itself has merit, and it should be interesting to see how far one can push the content of a simple farming game with a limited cast and short dialogue options. (Each piece of dialogue has at most 3 pages with 3 lines each, each line something like 28 letters long... and much of the dialogue is one page (or even just one line) and I don't have the skill to alter that, so no giant monologues.)

Anyway, if you have any ideas at all, please post them; I'm interested in seeing what you come up with. And how weird/creepy/spooky/memorable you can make a character who doesn't have many lines, like the shipper and shipper-in-training.

Note: The girls:

• Maria: Long blue hair, practically lives at the church.
• Nina: Poofy pink hair, lives with her mom at the flower shop.
• Ann: Orange ponytail, lives with her dad at the tool shop and is an inventor
• Ellen: Brown hair, seems a little more mature than the rest, not sure where she lives but she gives you her dog.
• Eve: Blonde hair, works and possibly lives at the bar. Seems to dress up more "adult" than the rest.

There's also the Mayor and his wife, the Priest, Florist (sells seeds), Fortune-Teller, Peddler, Rancher (sells livestock), Tool Shop owner, Fisherman, two kids (boy and girl), a couple people at the bar, couple woodcutters on the mountain (they can upgrade your house), and some harvest sprites. Hope I haven't forgotten too many people; it's been a while since I actually played through the SNES version.

Ideas!

edited 27th Sep '13 4:44:41 PM by Kilyle

I suggest taking The Terrible Secret Of Animal Crossing as your inspiration.

There's always the temptation to turn Ann into a Girl Genius style Spark mad scientist. Veer away from that option. Agatha Clay isn't a very interesting character, and you want spin.

Make her a secretive type, always doing something offscreen and ending her dialogues in a rush to go do something else. She's the Dr. Frankenstein, working on a project both mysterious and nebulously vague. No Measuring the Marigolds, Ann doesn't want to do something as blatant as measuring Jack's leg to see if it would work for a transplant. It's all about subtlety and suggestions. "You might want to steer clear of the graveyard tonight." "Don't worry, when I'm done your cows will milk themselves!" "Let me know if you catch any of those wild dogs that come out at night, 'kay?"

... I've never played Harvest Moon on the SNES, but I'm a big fan of the series so this sounds really fun and interesting! Even if I can't read Italian!

Hey, I like Agatha :) but yeah, I think that would be a bit too obvious.

(Side note: I want to someday make a series that goes on to be as popular as, say, Kim Possible, and has the main character as a young scientist named Ethyl. I figure if the Foglios can manage to make Agatha work for a fun teenage main character then maybe Ethyl could get a shot of renewed life as a particularly geeky science name.)

And I'm not sure if I'd be doing this creepy version in English or in Italian. Possibly both. It might be difficult for me to make really decent Italian lines since I'm not that far into the language (I studied it in college and on my own for a bit, but only got re-interested in it thanks to Duolingo, and I'm only up to about level 8 so far).

By the by, depending on what sort of utilities I can pull together and whether the code is particularly transparent when it comes to graphics, I might be able to change the sprites (pictures) somewhat. The palettes might be a bit harder to shift, though. But I could conceivably change how the girls look (one creepy thought that springs to mind is having them all be exactly the same... don't think I'll be doing that), and if I could do that I could probably also change the visuals on the projects Ann works on, and the drink Eve gives me.

I could see the "Ann's project blows up in my face" being more like a face-hugging alien, for example. And I think the aftermath of Eve's drink gives me 2-4 frames of him dancing around with bug eyes, so that's a fair amount to work with.

Oh! and (again assuming that graphics hacks are straightforward, which in some games they're not) I could change the crops you grow. There are two Spring crops and two Summer crops, plus grass; I don't think any of them are animated. Could harvest eyeballs or something. Though I think subtlety really will be more effective at creating a creepy game.

...this is making me want to go play Earthbound, where the weirdness is the backbone of the game.

ETA: I would like to go on record as saying that I am not stingy with my ideas. If anyone else wants to take this sort of idea and run with it, making their own version, I would be eager to see the results. Just 'cuz I came up with it doesn't mean others can't give it a go.

edited 28th Sep '13 1:47:02 AM by Kilyle

So we've got a creepy secretive scientist type (Ann) and a Goth, who I think was Nina (I think she was the one talking about rain all the time), thus a pink-haired Goth but I think not a Perky Goth.

What about Maria, the girl who hangs out in the church most of the time?

What about Eve, the beauty at the bar? The bar patrons seem to think highly of her.

And as for Ellen, for what reason does she give her dog to you? (One thought: Perhaps she doesn't want Ann to experiment on the dog?)

It's also possible to change their relationships, e.g. by making two of them sisters. Let me know if any ideas spring to mind about this.