My favorite Harvest Moon game is still probably A Wonderful Life, but since this is the new game, I figure I should review it first. It lives up to my expectations, and is a great addition to the series. There were a few disappointments, but the game’s rewards outweigh them. Now, without further ado, time to review.
Plot Overview: Most Harvest Moon games are relatively plot less. One of my biggest pet peeves with this series is that after A Wonderful Life, the developers began trying to complicate their games a bit more by introducing a being known as the Harvest Goddess, and also by tossing in the Harvest Sprites, which were featured in A Wonderful Life, although they really didn’t affect the game. I love the games for their simplicity – just trying to carve a life out of a scrap of land and living amongst some of the most simple-but-pleasant townsfolk you’ll meet.
The plot for this game in particular is that you’re traveling to an island, Waffle Island, to be exact (all the towns are also named after food), you want to become a rancher, but a storm hits and you faint. You have a strange vision of the Harvest Goddess trying to tell you something, although you can’t make out most of her words. After you start up your ranch, you’ll learn about how the Harvest Goddess’ tree died, and, how the Harvest Sprites disappeared along with the island’s famous rainbows. It’s up to you to revive them all, and do the normal things required of you in a Harvest Moon game.
Artwork: It’s rather plain. Basically, if you’ve seen one game in the series, you’ve seen them all. The artwork doesn’t change too much between games, and this one is no exception. That’s not to say that the artwork is bad, rather that it’s not very flashy, pretty, or bold. That’s not what Harvest Moon sets out to do! It’s a simple game that requires the player to be able to set aside their penchant for eye candy type games and find pleasure and joy in the simplest of settings, playing as the most plain-looking character they’ve ever laid eyes on.
Animation: It’s fluid, but the gameplay and settings don’t require it to be very sophisticated. The animation isn’t choppy at all, and everything looks great. Your character is able to perform all of his (or her) actions in a realistic way, and, with the exception of the horse, all of the animals’ movements are fine.
I say all except the horse because when you ride your horse, he looks less like an animal and more like a stop motion toy. His head is kind of jerky and the whole thing is just a letdown. As good as everything else is, you’re almost better off riding an ostrich throughout the game if only because it doesn’t look like its about to collapse from improper movement at any point in time.
One of the more interesting aspects of the game is the range of emotions your character is able to express. They’re very exaggerated, but it was comical to watch my guy sweat all over the place at the prospect of (gasp!) pulling weeds all by himself, or to get excited when he learns that he’s getting his own house and plot of land. It’s rather cartoon-like, but that’s what’s expected of this game. It’s just great to watch these characters express themselves in ways we haven’t seen in the series.
Sound Effects: Here’s a quick rundown. The animals all sound fine; there’s no chickens that sound like ducks, no cows that sound like some random person making “moo” sounds in a microphone, and no horse that sounds like a stroke victim. The ocean waves, waterfall, and characters’ footsteps also sound fine. However, the sounds emitted from the various items aren’t spectacular. Breaking rocks and chopping down trees sound like they’re little more than recycled sounds from previous games, and the milker is just a strange thing in and of itself. It makes this weird squeaky sound that makes me wonder how my goat can stand it.
There really aren’t many sound effects other than the ones I mentioned. There’s a little chime that sounds whenever you talk to an animal or present a gift to someone. It’s not special at all, but it is there.
Music: There’s a tune for your house, a tune for each season, and sometimes there’s special occasions that require a different tune, but music is really a background element of the game. Since there’s very few special events that require a big score to set the mood, the music remains simple, but effective. It’s hardly memorable; if you were to ask me to hum a quick one from the game, I probably couldn’t do it. However, that doesn’t mean that I don’t recognize the music as I’m playing. It isn’t soundtrack worthy, but the game would feel dull if it was without.
Gameplay: The first hour of this game is boring. There, I said it. I was afraid that it was going the route of Animal Crossing when I first started it up, for in the beginning you can’t get your own house right away, instead you have to stay with a farmer and family to learn the basics of farming, as if it’s hard in the first place. Then, after a few days of watering this guy’s crops, putting them in the shipping box, and weeding his garden, you get your own place. You even get to pick where you want your house, although it’s not a critical decision. Your choices for land are all pretty much right next to each other. After this, you get to work on building your ranch, making friends, finding a girl to court, and trying to reawaken the Harvest Goddess.
What makes this game different from previous ones in the series is that you don’t start off with a coop and barn. Instead, you have to raise crops, fish, and scavenge items in order to make enough money to be able to build them, and you have to supply your own rocks and lumber to do this. There isn’t any gold lumber available, nor can you buy what you need, you just have to do everything yourself. This provides some challenge in the game, which I enjoyed. This put building your ranch in the forefront of the game instead of the Harvest Goddess quest, which, thankfully, feels like a sub-plot.
On that note, it’s nice that the Harvest Goddess quest is almost an afterthought. There’s not a lot of pressure to spend all of your time bringing back the rainbows (and the days are short in this game), but it is still rewarding enough to not put it off forever. For example, new places open up when you do decide to bring back a rainbow, and one of the girls requires a specific rainbow event to take place in order to marry her.
There are also a lot more animals to raise in this game. You have your normal chickens, ducks, and cows, but the goat also returns! I’ve always liked goats (my own pet goat is a pygmy goat), and I was a bit sad when A Wonderful Life seemed to be the only game that featured them.
Another big change in animals is that the horse is optional. In all other games, you eventually come across a horse, and it becomes your main method of transportation. This game introduces ostriches, which you can ride around! Not only do ostriches provide you a faster means of traveling, but they also lay huge eggs once every four days. In my game, I own both a horse and an ostrich, but I like the ostrich more.
You can also acquire pets. Just make friends with the animals you come across and they’ll one day show up at your house to live, and there’s plenty to befriend! There are a few different dogs and cats, but there’s also a monkey, turtle, weasel, rabbit, baby boar, and squirrel, just to name a few.
This also marks the first game where you can choose whether to play as a boy or girl. I suppose the general idea is to keep from alienating potential gamers by only allowing one gender. Up until this game, all Harvest Moon games featured either a boy or girl, and although I’ve never played any of the girl games, I assume that they all feature the same kind of gameplay. There doesn’t seem to be any real difference between the two in this game, except that the boy can marry any of the girls and the girl can marry any of the boys. Both genders have plenty of people to choose from, so no worries there.
Courting is the same in this game as in the previous ones. Talk to your potential spouse and bestow gifts upon her (or him) and buy their love! You trigger special heart events that eventually lead to a confession of love. After that, it’s only a matter of acquiring a blue feather and proposing. And while it isn’t necessary to marry, if you do and have a kid, then when the game ends you can choose to keep playing as your child.
You can also trigger rival events by forming relationships with a potential spouse’s rival, but I wouldn’t recommend you do this with the girl or boy you want to marry.
Other activities are fishing, mining, and cooking. There are different fish in each season, so the variety of fish is increased in this game. Mining is very much the same as it is in the DS version of Harvest Moon. Simply drop from floor to floor, smash rocks and crystals, collect the spoils, and either upgrade your equipment or sell them for extra cash. To cook, simply buy some cooking supplies, steal other peoples’ recipes (or get them to tell you some), and just start cooking. You can also experiment, but this ends badly for me.
If there was only one thing I could change about the Harvest Moon games, it would be the length of the days. I always get frustrated when playing these games because there just isn’t enough time in a day to do all the things I want. I’m terrible with time management!
Characters: A Wonderful Life introduced a whole slew of characters that could be reused in later games, but this game offers a whole new cast. Admittedly, I like the familiar characters better. I particularly miss Daryll, the crazy scientist who looks like Tim Burton’s Vincent. There also aren’t any supernatural characters to marry, so my mermaid dreams have been shattered.
The only real irksome thing I can think of regarding these new characters would be that the translators decided to Englishize all their names. Harvest Moon games have traditionally featured names that were both English and Japanese, but this game just changes them all, which is especially weird because some of the changed names were originally English sounding!
Character Development: Your relationships with the various characters strengthens, but the characters all remain true to themselves without much development at all. This isn’t an epic, story-filled game, though.
Tone: It’s a fun game, plain and simple. It never gets too serious and it’s very whimsical. Not much to say here.
Dialogue: The characters are all quite well written! Everyone has their own personality and the dialogue is very good at reflecting that. For example, Hamilton is very cheery, likes to talk about rainbows, and prompted my brother and I to wonder if he might be a closet gay. I’m pretty sure he’s not, but when he used variations of the word “fabulous” three times in a single dialogue box, it left me scratching my head.
Luke has some of the most personality-filled dialogue in the game, so talk to him lots if you can. However, my stupid little character’s “let’s go!” line is pretty annoying. He just shouldn’t talk, plain and simple.
Recommended? This game isn’t for everyone. People tend to either love Harvest Moon or hate it, so if it sounds like it’ll float your boat, then go for it. Otherwise, it would be a complete waste of time for you to even try to like it.
Plot Overview: Most Harvest Moon games are relatively plot less. One of my biggest pet peeves with this series is that after A Wonderful Life, the developers began trying to complicate their games a bit more by introducing a being known as the Harvest Goddess, and also by tossing in the Harvest Sprites, which were featured in A Wonderful Life, although they really didn’t affect the game. I love the games for their simplicity – just trying to carve a life out of a scrap of land and living amongst some of the most simple-but-pleasant townsfolk you’ll meet.
The plot for this game in particular is that you’re traveling to an island, Waffle Island, to be exact (all the towns are also named after food), you want to become a rancher, but a storm hits and you faint. You have a strange vision of the Harvest Goddess trying to tell you something, although you can’t make out most of her words. After you start up your ranch, you’ll learn about how the Harvest Goddess’ tree died, and, how the Harvest Sprites disappeared along with the island’s famous rainbows. It’s up to you to revive them all, and do the normal things required of you in a Harvest Moon game.
Artwork: It’s rather plain. Basically, if you’ve seen one game in the series, you’ve seen them all. The artwork doesn’t change too much between games, and this one is no exception. That’s not to say that the artwork is bad, rather that it’s not very flashy, pretty, or bold. That’s not what Harvest Moon sets out to do! It’s a simple game that requires the player to be able to set aside their penchant for eye candy type games and find pleasure and joy in the simplest of settings, playing as the most plain-looking character they’ve ever laid eyes on.
Animation: It’s fluid, but the gameplay and settings don’t require it to be very sophisticated. The animation isn’t choppy at all, and everything looks great. Your character is able to perform all of his (or her) actions in a realistic way, and, with the exception of the horse, all of the animals’ movements are fine.
I say all except the horse because when you ride your horse, he looks less like an animal and more like a stop motion toy. His head is kind of jerky and the whole thing is just a letdown. As good as everything else is, you’re almost better off riding an ostrich throughout the game if only because it doesn’t look like its about to collapse from improper movement at any point in time.
One of the more interesting aspects of the game is the range of emotions your character is able to express. They’re very exaggerated, but it was comical to watch my guy sweat all over the place at the prospect of (gasp!) pulling weeds all by himself, or to get excited when he learns that he’s getting his own house and plot of land. It’s rather cartoon-like, but that’s what’s expected of this game. It’s just great to watch these characters express themselves in ways we haven’t seen in the series.
Sound Effects: Here’s a quick rundown. The animals all sound fine; there’s no chickens that sound like ducks, no cows that sound like some random person making “moo” sounds in a microphone, and no horse that sounds like a stroke victim. The ocean waves, waterfall, and characters’ footsteps also sound fine. However, the sounds emitted from the various items aren’t spectacular. Breaking rocks and chopping down trees sound like they’re little more than recycled sounds from previous games, and the milker is just a strange thing in and of itself. It makes this weird squeaky sound that makes me wonder how my goat can stand it.
There really aren’t many sound effects other than the ones I mentioned. There’s a little chime that sounds whenever you talk to an animal or present a gift to someone. It’s not special at all, but it is there.
Music: There’s a tune for your house, a tune for each season, and sometimes there’s special occasions that require a different tune, but music is really a background element of the game. Since there’s very few special events that require a big score to set the mood, the music remains simple, but effective. It’s hardly memorable; if you were to ask me to hum a quick one from the game, I probably couldn’t do it. However, that doesn’t mean that I don’t recognize the music as I’m playing. It isn’t soundtrack worthy, but the game would feel dull if it was without.
Gameplay: The first hour of this game is boring. There, I said it. I was afraid that it was going the route of Animal Crossing when I first started it up, for in the beginning you can’t get your own house right away, instead you have to stay with a farmer and family to learn the basics of farming, as if it’s hard in the first place. Then, after a few days of watering this guy’s crops, putting them in the shipping box, and weeding his garden, you get your own place. You even get to pick where you want your house, although it’s not a critical decision. Your choices for land are all pretty much right next to each other. After this, you get to work on building your ranch, making friends, finding a girl to court, and trying to reawaken the Harvest Goddess.
What makes this game different from previous ones in the series is that you don’t start off with a coop and barn. Instead, you have to raise crops, fish, and scavenge items in order to make enough money to be able to build them, and you have to supply your own rocks and lumber to do this. There isn’t any gold lumber available, nor can you buy what you need, you just have to do everything yourself. This provides some challenge in the game, which I enjoyed. This put building your ranch in the forefront of the game instead of the Harvest Goddess quest, which, thankfully, feels like a sub-plot.
On that note, it’s nice that the Harvest Goddess quest is almost an afterthought. There’s not a lot of pressure to spend all of your time bringing back the rainbows (and the days are short in this game), but it is still rewarding enough to not put it off forever. For example, new places open up when you do decide to bring back a rainbow, and one of the girls requires a specific rainbow event to take place in order to marry her.
There are also a lot more animals to raise in this game. You have your normal chickens, ducks, and cows, but the goat also returns! I’ve always liked goats (my own pet goat is a pygmy goat), and I was a bit sad when A Wonderful Life seemed to be the only game that featured them.
Another big change in animals is that the horse is optional. In all other games, you eventually come across a horse, and it becomes your main method of transportation. This game introduces ostriches, which you can ride around! Not only do ostriches provide you a faster means of traveling, but they also lay huge eggs once every four days. In my game, I own both a horse and an ostrich, but I like the ostrich more.
You can also acquire pets. Just make friends with the animals you come across and they’ll one day show up at your house to live, and there’s plenty to befriend! There are a few different dogs and cats, but there’s also a monkey, turtle, weasel, rabbit, baby boar, and squirrel, just to name a few.
This also marks the first game where you can choose whether to play as a boy or girl. I suppose the general idea is to keep from alienating potential gamers by only allowing one gender. Up until this game, all Harvest Moon games featured either a boy or girl, and although I’ve never played any of the girl games, I assume that they all feature the same kind of gameplay. There doesn’t seem to be any real difference between the two in this game, except that the boy can marry any of the girls and the girl can marry any of the boys. Both genders have plenty of people to choose from, so no worries there.
Courting is the same in this game as in the previous ones. Talk to your potential spouse and bestow gifts upon her (or him) and buy their love! You trigger special heart events that eventually lead to a confession of love. After that, it’s only a matter of acquiring a blue feather and proposing. And while it isn’t necessary to marry, if you do and have a kid, then when the game ends you can choose to keep playing as your child.
You can also trigger rival events by forming relationships with a potential spouse’s rival, but I wouldn’t recommend you do this with the girl or boy you want to marry.
Other activities are fishing, mining, and cooking. There are different fish in each season, so the variety of fish is increased in this game. Mining is very much the same as it is in the DS version of Harvest Moon. Simply drop from floor to floor, smash rocks and crystals, collect the spoils, and either upgrade your equipment or sell them for extra cash. To cook, simply buy some cooking supplies, steal other peoples’ recipes (or get them to tell you some), and just start cooking. You can also experiment, but this ends badly for me.
If there was only one thing I could change about the Harvest Moon games, it would be the length of the days. I always get frustrated when playing these games because there just isn’t enough time in a day to do all the things I want. I’m terrible with time management!
Characters: A Wonderful Life introduced a whole slew of characters that could be reused in later games, but this game offers a whole new cast. Admittedly, I like the familiar characters better. I particularly miss Daryll, the crazy scientist who looks like Tim Burton’s Vincent. There also aren’t any supernatural characters to marry, so my mermaid dreams have been shattered.
The only real irksome thing I can think of regarding these new characters would be that the translators decided to Englishize all their names. Harvest Moon games have traditionally featured names that were both English and Japanese, but this game just changes them all, which is especially weird because some of the changed names were originally English sounding!
Character Development: Your relationships with the various characters strengthens, but the characters all remain true to themselves without much development at all. This isn’t an epic, story-filled game, though.
Tone: It’s a fun game, plain and simple. It never gets too serious and it’s very whimsical. Not much to say here.
Dialogue: The characters are all quite well written! Everyone has their own personality and the dialogue is very good at reflecting that. For example, Hamilton is very cheery, likes to talk about rainbows, and prompted my brother and I to wonder if he might be a closet gay. I’m pretty sure he’s not, but when he used variations of the word “fabulous” three times in a single dialogue box, it left me scratching my head.
Luke has some of the most personality-filled dialogue in the game, so talk to him lots if you can. However, my stupid little character’s “let’s go!” line is pretty annoying. He just shouldn’t talk, plain and simple.
Recommended? This game isn’t for everyone. People tend to either love Harvest Moon or hate it, so if it sounds like it’ll float your boat, then go for it. Otherwise, it would be a complete waste of time for you to even try to like it.
Comments
Post a Comment