From The Shadows Comes The Harvest

Only in video games...

So.  I'm still tearing up the forces of badness in Blue Dragon.  It actually is paced fairly slow for a JRPG, mostly because of one thing:  The Encouragement of Rampant and Incessant Kleptomania.  Some luminous soul on the developer's team decided that they should take the old school 'random crates contain goodies' concept and somewhat (but not really) newer Elder Scrolls concept of "holy crap take all the clutter and junk and make it searchable and salable" and toss them into a blender.  After about a hour of being set to frappe, we wound up with "spend an hour per location ALL THE THINGS SUCH LOOT."

We're not just talking a bit of gold and some random potions squirreled away in crates and pot and stuff; we're talking like walking up to a vent in an ancient techno-fortress and being handed magic gems and free stat boosts!  We're talking looking at a plate of fruit and grabbing ten pieces of gold and an XP bonus.  And on top of all this, is the "nothing" mechanic.  A good portion of the searchable objects hold Nothing, which sounds like your usual "ain't found squat."  It isn't.  The game keeps track of how many Nothings you find, and there is a character that hands out special gear when you hit certain milestones.  Oh, and there's a DLC which hands out some extra goodies, one of which is a set of glasses that highlight things that hold Nothing.  Some of them are pretty surprising, and this is made more so when you realize that means similar objects hold actual stuff.

What all of this boils down to is that we have a tale of plucky teenagers that smash evil with kickass animal totem shadow puppets, whose downtime is taken up by communing with the kender spirit and walking away with enough junk to weigh down a mechanized platoon.  It's hilarious, awesome, and just hair disturbing at the same time.  What makes it worse is we have the traditional JRPG "NPCs are blind, kindly idiots unless explicitly indicated otherwise" thing going on, so we have situations like turning a palace upside down and the king offering to let you go smite evil together.

Oh, did I mention we have the usual JRPG in-battle theft mechanic, as well?  I'm telling you, it's like Dire Straits put it, "Money for nothing and your chicks for free!"  All we need is a crafting system (sadly omitted) and this would be the fine expression of The Harvest in action.

Oh, and thanks to cookie cutter container syndrome, we have a wardrobe full of cute dresses in several of the local (all male, with only one exception, and she has her own rooms) army's quarters.  Lookin' good, Miss Cloud!