While it is easier to let Mark do all the work, helping him means cutting down production time on the currently worked on toy. If you are spending most of your time running the toy shop but need toys, Mark has a order list on which you can drag whatever toy you need and how many (holding the stylus on the toy ups the quantity by five) into and he will get right on it.

Then there is the third option which is to do both jobs. This is most likely going to be the best option for most players since running the toy shop and workshop both become tiresome and mundane on their own after a short while. Pressing the A button will allow you to switch between the two characters and get back a little of your sanity. Unfortunately, no matter which way you choose to run the shop, it all becomes very repetitive and boring the longer you spend playing the game.

To help break up the tediousness of shop life, Mel and Mark can venture to four places, the beach, the town square, the commercial district, and the residential district. However, exploration isn’t all that great either, especially when the characters move at a very slow pace even while “running”, not to mention the “invisible walls” that players will eventually run into. There is only one real need to travel outside of the shop at all and that is to unlock hidden toys in your production tree. The rest of the time you basically interact with NPCs with nothing more important to say other than “the weather sure is nice”.

Regardless of how you decide to spend the characters time, days only run from 9 A.M. to 7 P.M. When you have had enough of the day and the game, pressing the start button takes you to the save screen so you can move on to other things.

In retrospect, I suppose you could say that GAMEINVEST set out to develop a Harvest Moon game that was more accessible to casual gamers by removing the layers of extreme depth the Natsume franchise has. However, by removing those layers, GAMEINVEST has left us with a very simple, very basic game that fails to grab players’ attentions for more than an hour at best.

Even just by fleshing out the NPCs would have helped the experience tremendously. While every series needs its foundation, Toy Shop feels like the blueprint of something better.