Classic Video Game Monday: Harvest Moon

Back about five years ago or so, I would have to sit down and explain to people in detail about why a game about farming was so fun and addictive. These days it’s much easier because everyone’s played Farm Town or whatever it’s called.

Seriously though, who would’ve thought that tilling soil, planting crops, harvesting and selling said crops, and trying to get the cute librarian girl to fall in love with you would be fun? It is, though.

I played two different versions of this game, one for the original Game Boy (basically a port of the one for SNES), and one for Game Boy Advance called “Friends of Mineral Town”. Both were essentially the same, except the GBA version had better graphics/sound and removed some hilarious Engrish like “Confirm the origin of fire!” if you approached your stove.

Harvest Moon’s trick is to suck you in by enticing you with more and more goals. First you just want to get your crops planted. Then you want to sell the crops so you can get money for cows and chickens and stuff. Then you start exploring the village and you find out there’s this whole dating sim game going on with about six different girls. Getting one to like you is an excruciatingly long and painstaking process that involves memorizing where she is on certain days and bringing her specific flowers and gifts that she likes, and doing this for months. And months. And months. You put up with it, though, because it’s such a challenge. And because some other guy is always trying to barge in.

Girls. Am I right? *brofist* ... wait.

Supposedly you can eventually get to a point where the girl likes you enough that she’ll marry you and then one day you’ll randomly wake up with a kid; I never got that far myself, though. The closest I got was spending about a year in game getting Cute Librarian Girl’s affection for me to go up by approximately half a point. On the plus side, if you fail at all that, you can always watch your cows have babies instead. (The mystery of what exactly is in the “Cow Miracle Potion” is never explained, but that’s probably for the best.)

Ooh! I almost forgot another thing you could do in this game. Expand/build your house. That was one of those things that I never really got into because the girls were too distracting.

Curse you, anime girls!

Oh, Harvest Moon. It’s been a while, but one of these days I’m sure I’ll get the urge and jump back in.

9 thoughts on “Classic Video Game Monday: Harvest Moon”

  1. Yay Harvest Moon! I still don’t know why I like these games – it should be absurdly boring, but I love ’em.

    Did you ever play any of the spinoffs, specifically Rune Factory (or its sequel, or the Wiimake, or, or…)? It was an interesting twist on the standard Harvest Moon formula, but there just weren’t enough hours in the virtual day.

  2. Oh man, Harvest Moon. I lost so many hours playing Friends of Mineral Town it’s not even funny. Thanks for reminding me, lol.

  3. My girlfriend gets ‘too distracted’ by girls.

    Happy, or sad? Happy, or sad? I don’t know!

    Also:

    “Harvest Moon’s trick is to suck you in by enticing you with more and more goals.”

    I read that as “more and more girls.” >.>

  4. I LOVED Harvest Moon…mostly because after it finished entertaining me, my mother and sister got into it. My mom plays games, but it was cool to watch my sister whose experience with video games was watching me or my mom enjoy something like that.

  5. My first encounter with Harvest Moon was for the N64. I’d seen the box in the local Toys R Us and the cutesy box art caught my eye. I was greatly amused to see it was a farming Sim and couldn’t believe someone would actually buy & play a game about farming.

    When I got home I went online and for some reason felt compelled to research this strange game I’d seen, and the more I learned about it the more I wanted it. I was stunned to see used copies on eBay selling for $40 or more, especially when picked it up brand new at an EBGames for $30.

    I got home, began playing, and I was hooked. I tried the GBA versions but the small screen didn’t have the same appeal as seeing everything unfold on my TV. Later I got the Gamecube version, A Wonderful Life, and it was wonderful. Like you however, I never really played it through to “the end”. In AWL I did end up marrying the brown-haired girl from the neighboring farm and we had a baby, but I never played it until my starting character died.

    Did you ever try any of the girl versions, where you play a girl farmer? I think the Gamecube had one, based on AWL I think, while the Wii’s Tree of Tranquility is apparently one of the best HM games to date.

  6. Ooh! I almost forgot another thing you could do in this game. Expand/build your house. That was one of those things that I never really got into because the girls were too distracting.

    That’s probably why you could never get their level up more than half a point; you have to have a bigger house before they will pay attention to you (at least in the SNES version).

  7. Man, who could hate Harvest Moon? I’ve owned and played the original, the GB version, Mineral Town, AWL, HM64, AWL2 (The girl version, my brother bought it), HMDS, but the veritable “Mack Daddy” of all of the Harvest Moon games was Magical Melody.

    It’s kind of funny really, because A Wonderful Life was excellent in theory, and more realistic than any which had come before it. It spanned, chronologically, about 30 years, and marriage in the first year was required. You’d get to teach you son and see what he became. People moved in and out, people got older, the kids would get older and get married, great personal interactions, the ability to set up your own stands and sell things…. Really, the biggest problem was the farming implements.

    To say that the farming and ranching was intensive would be an extreme understatement. Crops had to be watered 2-3 times a day, and needed different soil types to grow. The sell price of the crops barely covered the price of the seeds. Dairy products sold well, but livestock would only give milk after being impregnated, and then they would stop after a while. The only real way to make money was to plan trees, and work your tail off to get them growing well, and then turn the fruit into seeds with the seed maker and sell the seeds. Really, there was a lot of innovation that was really, really cool, but in the end they kinda messed with a lot of the basics.

    Magical Melody, though…. that became what AWL should have been. They brought the cute graphics back over the massive 3d world, and gave the game a bit of a story line. Then they brought back all the basics, and improved in them, brought everything that was cool about AWL in and improved on it…. and if I am not mistaken, it was the first HM that you could choose to play as a guy ~or~ a girl. As far as HM goes, it’s the best I’ve found. Since then I’ve played Rune Factory 1&2 as well, those were excellent enough, but HM:MM still stands out as the best of the series for me at the moment. If you you played the first one and liked it, if you played the GB/GBA versions and liked them, if you played (especially) the N64 version and liked it (that comes in second place for me), grab this game if you ever see it. It is ~gold~.

Comments are closed.