Of Witchcraft and Chickens

It turns out we've been rather busy for the last few days, so when I said a few days ago that Final Fantasy VII was "almost nigh", I actually should have said it was "almost almost nigh". Or maybe I shouldn't have said "nigh" at all- I've never actually looked that word up, drawing it instead from the ever-so-tentative depths of my memory. Like so many of the words there, I just know I've read it somewhere, but I'll be darned if I remember where. For all the certainty I have, it may as well be a corruption of night, or perhaps some deluxe English ale.

Assuming I am correct, however, let it be known that FFVII is now well and truly almost nigh. I hope.

Harvest Moon DS continues to be a absolutely torturous ordeal. Winter was a seemingly never-ending string of empty days that were largely spent giving presents to the townspeople and fishing, and wooing the witch to the point of marriage is becoming an ordeal that somehow manages to be both difficult and monotonous- something of a rarity in games.
The requirements for marrying her (which, incidentally, are presented nowhere in the game- I've had to use online guides) are at once outrageously difficult to meet and sickeningly cruel. My character must overwork himself constantly, give her over a thousand gifts, and spike the town's annual Harvest Festival stew with poison mushrooms for five years (this I've actually derived some pleasure from; there's nothing quite like seeing your vastly more successful agricultural rival sputtering and fretting about the quality of their vegetables). Worst of all, she requires that you send at least fifty of your farm animals to an early grave.

This is a hard enough pill to swallow from a purely financial standpoint- even if you're just killing chickens (which can be hatched from an egg and require next-to-no food), you're still wasting loads of egg money, whether from the eggs that hatch or would-be productive chickens, and when you add in the sort of crushing moral weight that comes with the realization that you are essentially slaughtering your loyal work-animals in spades to appease a witch, you can't help but wonder what exactly the developers were thinking when they incorporated it into a otherwise quite genial and light-hearted game.
And then, even after I had passed over that particular moral speed bump and started resignedly numbering my chickens in the same way as the Cat in the Hat numbers those curious little things, I had to deal with the chickens' surprisingly strong constitution.
You can't actually kill them, see, so you kind of have to neglect them to death. I tossed two of mine outside in midwinter, where they've been ever since. There's nothing to eat out there as far as I can see, they've weathered storms that shook the very foundations of my buildings and confined my character to his house for the entirety of the day, and yet when I checked on them the other day they were positively peachy (though not without a certain steely attitude towards my little farmer). These are obviously from some government-bred clutch of mutant super-chickens, which would be great if I didn't have to kill them!

If HMDS continues in this vein (that is to say, long, dull, and exceedingly frustrating) for much longer, I may end up abandoning the game- something I only do very rarely. It's telling, I think, that the most fun I've had with that game over the last few weeks was when I was complaining about and ridiculing it.

I'd better sign off here. Not because I don't feel like writing anymore, but because I'm evidently getting up at 10 am tomorrow morning. That may seem just fine, or even a little late, for some of you early-birds and school-goers out there, but, for me, it may as well be the beginning of time itself.

Signing off,

-Smashing Brother

"Pass us a Nigh, barkeep, now there's a good chap"