If we're sharing honest opinions minus filter here: if you worded your question differently, more people would answer, and they would be less defensive and have more interesting answers. You've limited the people who will reply.
Condescensing and annoying people like myself will still have a lot to say, but people with fun stories and heartwarming anecdotes will not want to put themselves out there for what seems like will be a snarky put-down as a response.
Specifically, the "kiddie game" opening was fine, but the way you worded the followup came across less like you were confused and more like you wanted to have a group shit-on of adults who play mario kart. Being a little more vague would've been your friend here. "but it looks like i was wrong" might've convinced people who don't want to be shit on to give an answer.
The part about it being unfair by design was fine, but the last paragraph again comes across as "anyone want to hang here and make fun of the losers who like this obvious bullshit?"
anyway, i don't play party video games generally but my impression is they want to appeal to different skill levels, abilities, and ages, so they often have additions that level the playing field so it's not just Gamer Frieda winning while everyone else gets bored and gets out the playing cards (which can also have a random quality that means sometimes the newbie will win or at least not be bored and frustrated).
These catch up elements add extra elements for dedicated players to account for, which is more memorization and reflex training, which is a kind of fun for the type of people who play outside parties.
I like that they put some guides up ahead of their announcement. At some point I followed polygon on here, and I remember the guides being some of the most frequent updates.
With most games, I don't mind just watching a playthrough, but this is one I'd actually want to play. Maybe in a few more years the emulator will have fewer bugs or I'll get a cheap 360 (or a new computer ). I'd forgotten how disappointed I was back then I couldn't play it on pc!
I thought they were more interesting than average, even when I disagreed with a take. The kind of site there should be a ton of, with varying takes for people to despise to a baffling degree. Sad to see it gone, or "gone" and turned intp a slop factory with known terrible working conditions for the people left.
Regardless of feelings about the people themselves, it's awful that they fired the union members probably deliberately at this point in the sale so they wouldn't have to go along with their contracts.
iirc, there was one old harvest moon game where you played as a woman and you could marry a guy OR live forever with your female bestie. i don't remember if that one made it to the english speaking world.
stardew valley really upped the game when the guy who made it decided it'd be no big deal if you wanted to pursue a same sex relationship in it. now it feels like a standard of the genre to let you do that, and it really wasn't always like that. other games did it, too, but it still felt exceptional back then.
(but, yeah, the gay thing was a big deal for me personally, especially at the time sdv came out. i don't know if it was generally a big deal for most players, but that's definitely a reason for it to catch a certain sort of player's eye back when it was first becoming popular.)
It rarely works out, but it'd be great if some of the fired staff tried going independent. A couple of my favorite groups managed it after they were fired in similar circumstances.
The initial appeal for me was that I enjoyed harvest moon, except for how the old tech made the experience of playing it suck so bad, I couldn't replay it. It was annoying doing any of the basic tasks like switching tools iirc. so there was a huge opening in the market for a new harvest moon that wasn't annoying to play. And where you were allowed to be gay.
So the initial buzz came from that, imo. the people who wanted a new harvest moon game were like 'wow, finally!' and then word of mouth did its thing. these days, nostalgia for it specifically drives people back to play, along with extensive modding and occasional free updates keeping things fresh.
i think other people can explain better why the harvest moon formula itself is so appealing, but i just think it's interesting how an indie game can get so popular by just being like "what if i made this big corporation game people want a new entry from, but fixed the stuff in it that sucks?'
Is this something that's relatively fool proof to do? I'm very good at imagining disasters. That's the big mental block I got when I thought about dual booting before.