10 Times Video Games Made You Feel Bad (For No Good Reason)

For all the whimsy and relaxing fun that the Harvest Moon series can bring you, it does keep one element of farm life brutally realistic: your animals will die.

And while this can be down to you not taking proper care of your animals or actively mistreating them, they can also just die of natural causes like getting old. Issue is, the game doesn't differentiate between a death that was your direct fault and a death that was just fate, so the script is exactly the same for both.

This means that you can have a beloved critter who was perfectly taken care of pass away due to old age, and the game will then berate you for "letting" it die, as though you have some secret hidden ability to let cows and sheep become immortal you're just hiding.

This is even worse in Harvest Moon: Magical Melody, where the game also comes after you when your first animal gets sick, by showing you a uniquely traumatising cutscene where you dream the creature has died and are told how much you suck.