The odds are, if you haven't been following the Japanese gaming scene, you probably haven't heard of Hometown Story. Despite the game's all-star cast of developers - led by the Harvest Moon creator, with are by one of the main Pokemon artists, and a soundtrack provided by the Final Fantasy composer - news on the code-named Project Happiness has been extremely thin on the ground since it's original announcement. In fact, all we really knew was that you ran a shop and had some cuddly floating beast to help you out. Fortunately we managed to get our hands on the cutesy handheld title at last week's Gamescom show in Cologne- and we're a little bit less in the dark as to how it'll all work now.
Following in the well-trodden footsteps of the Harvest Moon games, Hometown Story focuses on building relationships with your town's inhabitants and building up your retail empire to help revive the flagging town. You begin the game by inheriting a pokey run-down store from your grandmother, and from that point on it's up to you to customise it's contents and layout, choosing the best items to rake in the dough - depending on the goods you stock and how much you flog them for, certain villagers will start dropping by more often and your relationship with them begins to grow.
I NEED a cuddley Pochica. NOW.
Those of you who've played Harvest Moon: Grand Bazaar on the DS will likely feel right at home with Hometown Story - your working days pass in a blur of tending to the customers that pass through your doors and restocking shelves in a way that's not too dissimilar to the farming title's weekly bazaar. Essentially, a prospective buyer wonders through your doors, peruses the wares you've artfully arranged around the room, picks one up and trots over to the till, at which point you simply need to stand behind the cash register and press the A button to take their money. From what we played, it seems like you can only have one of each item on display in each spot in your shop, meaning that you'll need to dash out and replenish your shelves between serving people at the till. And all the items on sale come directly out of your inventory, including those you've found and foraged from the town outskirts, with the occasional wondering salesman toddling into your shop to sell you new items to display - seeing as you're not a farmer this time round it seems like you'll have to rely on other people to bring you the goods, which is a nice change of pace.
On the social side, Hometown Story promises a much wider range of relationships with characters and a more involving story than any of the previous Harvest Moon titles - which the series creator Yasuhiro Wada feels have morphed into more of a marriage simulator than his original vision intended. Of course, you can still get married, but perhaps it's been stepped back a bit so it's no longer the free-for-all not-so-subtle hint-dropping we found towards the end of Rune Factory 3, even if being the village casanova is fairly entertaining. Each character you come across, of which there's more than thirty to meet, will have their own unique back stories to uncover as you get to know them better, as well as favours to ask you. Unfortunately, how the social side pans out is a lot harder to tell based on our limited time with the game - but the idea of a more story-driven social game sounds good to us.
Hometown Story is due to hit stores sometime around the first half of 2014 for the Nintendo 3DS - so far the exact date is a bit of a mystery. Until then it's time to get your glare on as those Americans are getting the game a good few months before us again - boo!
