harvest moon just as awesome as ever

I was always a fan of Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life on the Nintendo GameCube, so I am happy to have gotten to play quite a bit of the newest title in the series this weekend. Harvest Moon: Tree of Tranquility for the Wii is just as good as I remember the GC game being: pastoral, tranquil and very cute. I love that you can choose to be a girl character in this one as I don't remember that being an option before. The shipping system is very cool and easy to use and the farming is as painstaking yet rewarding as ever. I just bought my first two animals, a calf (Moobie) and a lamb (Fuzzy) and my farm's vegetables thrive with the awesome power of the 3x3 watering can charge which is definitely a welcome innovation. The graphics are nice to look at but the game gets slow during rain and I would say about 15 to 20% of my gameplay time has been watching loading screens which seems like it could have been avoided. Nevertheless this is a very fun game with much to see and do and lots of interesting directions in which to go.