Harvest Moon and me

I first heard of Harvest moon several years ago, in the era of GBA and GC. A friend from Sweden, SkuttyWan, mentioned the game to me. A game about farming? No thanks, sounds boring.
Then many years have passed and this summer my girlfriend was going through some DS games and said she'd want to try Harvest Moon DS Cute. She started playing it, liked it and soon after I started playing HM DS (not the cute one). I must say that I was very wrong years ago, as farming has never been so fun! Sure some things are very frustrating, like levelling up animals, but overall the game is very enjoyable. At least it was for the first two years or so. At that point I had already married Celia and life was getting ot repetitive. Get up, water the plants in the basememnt, water in the fields, pick up any ripe crops, pet the animals, collect the eggs, ship stuff... What put me off is also the fact that I played a glitchy game (I heard that later they started selling debugged games).
After HMDS I started playing Rune Factory: A fantasy Harvest Moon. This game has a story through the game: you come to a village and have amnesia. A girl offers you an abandoned farm where you start working and going to caves/dungeons to fight monsters, farm and unravel the misteries. I liked this games also because it makes use of a speciall skill system, where the better you skill in a specific are (forging, pharmacy...) the better stuff you can make. I hated the obvious time sink in the game. After some caves you have to wait till winter to enter the next, which meant two full seasons for me. I spent most of that time killing monsters for loot and levelling myself up in the process. The result: I swooped through the next dungeons :D I got married to Melody there and finished playing after the main storyline was over.
I'm currently playing Harvest Moon: Island of Happiness. Farming became more difficult here, as it's not enough to water the crops every day, but they need a certain amount of sun and water if they are to grow. And there are no better tools as such in the game, but certain wonderful stones that boost the tools. And these wonderfuls are somewhat hard to come along in the first three seasons. The most money I made so far came from getting to the bottom of the mine, but that took me a lot of real life time. Still I have enough money to upgrade all the roads and some of my buildings. All in all, I feel this game is much harder than HMDS and it'll take me much longer to feel I completed my goals :)

I'm also looking forward to Rune Factory 2 and when we have a Wii, Tree of Tranquility and Rune Factory Frontier.