Harvest Moon Archives

Here’s my review for Spring 1 – Spring 26:
Story:

The story is kinda second rate in my opinion. First, you get on a boat looking for a deserted island to start a new life. Then your boat gets in the middle of a storm, and gets hit by lightning. You and everyone in the boat survived, and you’re in a deserted island. Happy that you accidentally found a deserted island you wanted in the first place, you begin your life.

Woah, so. . . what was the point of the storm? Couldn’t the story just plainly be that you and the family docked in the island without the drama of a storm? If they are going to put a storm in, they could at least made some sort of drama out of it. Like some people died, and you name the island after the people who died. They didn’t work very hard with the storyline.

The grandfather of the family who survived the storm with you finds some land that appears to have been used for ranching. Now they send you to work on it. The other family decides to do shipping instead.

Umm. . . Why did they send you to do it? The grandfather is a retired farmer, so it would make more sense for that family to run the ranch, and you do the shipping. But I guess that it wouldn’t be Harvest Moon if you’re not the one farming, but they could have given a good excuse as to WHY you had to do it, and not them. Maybe the family of red heads don’t like blonds, and they make you do the hard labor?

Controls

Controls are very different, but clearly unnecessary. The other 2 Harvest Moon games had it so that you use the d-pad and the buttons for moving and farmwork. But now, the whole game is controlled using the touch screen. You get used to it after a while, but it gets annoying, because your hand and the stylus stick obstructs your view. I don’t know about everyone else, but after playing the DS for a while, the bottom screen is a bit scratched and blurry from the constant tapping and rubbing from game to game. I hate it when the main game is on the touch screen and not on the top screen. These are my 2 main reasons:

1. The top screen is clearer because it doesn’t go through the wear and tear from years of tapping and rubbing.
2. The top screen is a little bit bigger, which is easier on the eyes.

I did find out that you can use the d-pad or the four buttons to use the tools, but the mayority of the game is run by stylus. They should go back to the old school way of DS games, because these types of controls are quite frustrating.

Gameplay

The older Harvest Moon games are failry challenging, but simple to play and in some ways, relaxing. But this game is a huge grind fest! You start off with nothing, not even a village. You have this annoying Full bar that forces you to eat everything you run across, or else you pass out from starvation. You have a clear mission, but no clear destination as to when the game ends. No powerberries. You cannot buy Wonderful stones until Winter or win them through festivals. You need those Wonderful stones now, not in Winter after going through tears of blood of the first 3 seasons.

The movement system is very awkward for farming. It’s hard to position your character for using most of your tools unless you master the controls. You need to use your stylus to throw things into the shipping bin, and half the time the character takes too long to do some chores, or other times you get this annoying confirmation screen for just about everything you do.

“Do you want to ship this item?” Duh!
“Do you want to put the feed into the storage bin?” Why did you have to ask? Just put it in the storage already!
“Load game?” Yes! I want you to load the @#$%ing game!
“Do you want to overwrite this save data?” No, I only tapped the diary and hit save just for fun.

Character Interraction

Same as most Harvest Moon games. Dump gifts on people to befriend them. No sense of realism.

Overall

I think the game is okay at best. It’s new, and because we love Harvest Moon so much, we tend to excuse the flaws. But I promise you that this is a game that you will never want to play more than once. The grind is too painful to start a new file. And if you lose the game/game gets corrupted, you might as well give up, and try for the next game.

Year 1 Review:
Farm

During the first year, you tend to upgrade the farm a lot. Mainly because you want the cows and chickens to start making friends, wooing that special girl, make/find recipes, or just to ship to make profits.
What I didn’t like about the upgrades is that you have to pay for every single upgrade. Even if you purchase a coop/barn extension, you need to buy each individual feeder, shipping bin, incubator/birthing pen, and feed storage upgrade. This caused me lots of frustration because I felt that Gannon should have included many of these upgrades along with expanding the coop/barn. Expanding the coop and barn a second tome is VERY expensive, and to buy the extras can set me back a lot of money.
The house extension is the same way. Unlike traditional Harvest Moon games where expanding the house comes with a free kitchen/bed, you have to pay for EVERY LITTLE THING! This is a reason why I never liked Friends of Mineral Town as opposed to Back to Nature, but I lived with it.

Village:

You really don’t need to build much for the village. The bridges and roads were fairly priced, and it feels good when the villagers thank you for the hard work.
But I kinda hate the fact that you expect to talk to everyone every single day. If you don’t, the villagers tend to have these bad moods where they don’t accept gifts. My recommendation is to only focus on two villagers at a time: The girl/guy you intend to marry, and one of the main villagers.
I don’t see a purpose to dump your hard earned crops to sub-characters, so I just talk to them when I see them. If they leave, I could care less.
I find it Humerous that Gannon only takes a single day to build anything. For a big guy, he’s pretty fast.

Other areas:

The Jungle and Forest are excellent places to gather grasses and flowers. I never sell Blue Grass, Indigo Grass, Purple Grass, or white grass because they are valuable to digging in the mines. Flowers are good selling items, but I am not sure about a use for the red magic flowers that grow in Fall.

Animals:

Animals are VERY hard to get their affection up. It takes forever to get a single heart level up, and there are these hurricanes and Snowstorms that are impossible to avoid. My recommendation is to properly raise 1 cow, sheep, and chicken to max level at a time so that you can win festivals. The way I can see that happening is to leave them outside as long as humanely possible without exposing them to rain/storms/wild dogs. Make sure your dog is outside to protect them.

Mines:

These are a real pain in the keister. Any trick that you used for mining in the previous games do not work anymore. Although you can still mine a fortune, these potholes are very frustrating. I can see why they have you lose stamina each drop (To make getting to the 255th floor a challenge), but why so much? Every other drop would run my character’s stamina to the ground, and I return home. I have to load the game like 100 times before I’m done for the day.
The mines are very randomized. Every time you load the game, the location of the potholes, gems/ores, and stairs changes. So you cannot reload and find the same items in the same spot. Yo have to use luck and a lot of grasses/foods to get down deep into the mines.
The best place to mine for gems is the first 25 floors of the mines. Floor # 26-255 have a lot of ores that sell for next to nothing. You can find some valuable ores/gems, but unless you specifically need them, they are not worth the effort.

Fishing:

Fishing is easy and yields large profits in the beginning of the game. You are required to hand over your turnips to Taro once a day until he hands the rod over, but it’s well worth the sacrifice. Many characters love fish, so it’s a valuable tool for friendship or marriage.
I was also able to find a king fish. Spa Catfish. No idea what purpose do the king fish have in the game.

Festivals:

Festivals are okay. But you still wish for the older festivals instead like the swimming festival (64, BTN) Egg Festival (SNES, 64) Tomato Festival (BTN) and other favorites. There are no horse/dog races that I am aware of. The festival that they hold for all animals are like animal shows that check the happiness of your animals. I do like the fact that you are rewarded with a wonderful stone if you are able to win the festivals.

Pets:

The dog’s principle use is to guard the farm from wild animals. It can also earn you a wonderful stone if you take excellent care of it. Makes the effort to love our dog well worth it.
The horse can take you anywhere in the village at lightning speed. This is very important because as you unlock other parts of the island, you need the extra speed to get around. It can also earn you a wonderful stone in a festival. Makes loving your horse well worth the effort.
The pets do eat food like the other animals, but the 20g a day is well worth the price.

Marriage:

Like many Harvest Moon games, marriage is not hard. Just dump gifts on your partner, expand your house, buy a bed, and propose. Marriage events are lacking creativity, and the number of festivals where you date the guys/girls are few and far in between. I do find it interesting that events may vary depending on what answers you give the guys/girls.
Personally, I am very close to getting married to Lanna. All I need to do is to buy a bed for her to sleep on, and propose.

Rice Paddies:
The paddies are a cool concept, but I wish that you didn’t require a Yellow Wonderful Stone to access/work on it.

Animal Care:

When you have a small number of animals, there is no problems with animal care. But after you get 12 animals in either the barn or coop, animal care becomes ANNOYING! Animals run around randomly, and get lost between themselves. You’ll end up brushing/milking/sheering/picking up/speaking to the animals several times a day before you care for all of them.
Plus some of the animals will ask you to use the touch screen to pet/brush/milk/sheer them, which is also highly annoying. I hated doing that in Harvest Moon: DS, and readding this feature to this game is not any better. Using the touch screen takes up too much real time, and it wears your wrists out after a while.
Moving animals out to the pasture is very annoying, especially the cows. Why can’t we just leave them outside until the weather gets bad. No, we have to move them in every night until the dog gets enough affection to protect the animals, and it’s still not recommended.

Pasture:

This made me so mad, I wanted to punch someone. Winter kills your grass, and the seeds still costs 500g. In Harvest Moon: Magical Melody, the grass dies in Winter, but the price was dropped to 50g. In Rune Factory, The grass dies after you harvest it once, but you get so much fodder from each square of grass, you don’t care. But this game completely nails you when it comes to growing a pasture for your animals. If it wasn’t mandatory to raising animals, I wouldn’t do it.

Farm Ranking:

I think this is cool to have, but it’s practically impossible to attain the max title of Universe Rancher. According to the calculations, you need to play over 2,000 years into the game before you can hope to reach that level of rancher. Is this even nessecary? Who actually plays that many years into the game. I thought that 200 years were too much, but this is dumb. I only play 2 maybe 3 years, then I’m done.

Marriage:

Severely dissapointing. My favorite game with a marriage system was Rune Factory. Each girl had a different way and condition to get married. If this game had some sort of variance as far as marriage, this game would be a lot more interesting. I could see something like this:

Chelsea/Mark: To Marry, you must have all farm and house extensions available, and own 12 chickens, and 12 cows and sheep, with a minimum of 3 each. Must attainthe title of Super Rancher.

Vaughn/Julia: To Marry, Must own 12 chickens, and 12 cows and sheep, with a minimum of 3 each. Win every animal related festival at least once.

Elliot/Natilie: Have the greenhouse maxed out, Win every crop related festival. Ship at least one of every single crop, including the ones you grow in the Rice Paddies.

Lanna/Denny: Caught every single type of fish, including the king fishes.

Sabrina: Have found at least one of every single ore. Won the Mining Festival at least once.

Witch Princess: Same as Harvest Moon DS. You cause a lot of trouble, kill a few animals, and poison the villagers in the Harvest Festival with a poisonous mushroom.

Pierre: KNow every recipe, and win the cooking festival at least once.

Shea: This is a tough one. I would have to say collect at least one of each type of Wonderful Stone, but we can get more creative with this.

Overall Game Review:

The game is something I would call a Fair Weather Game. It’s not very hard, and you can complete the main objectve in only a few short days. You can continue the game if you wish, but I don’t see why. Because the grind is so bad, I don’t plan to replay the game for a long time.