Ever wanted to live life on a farm, with nothing but the sun, the fresh scent of your crops, the muddy fields underneath, and cows and chickens to keep you company? Well, you're in luck, because you have just inherited your grandfather's ranch, but it's in a terrible state of disrepair! What ever can you do?
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Harvest Moon on the SNES is a charming classic, but definitely shows its age. Starting up a farm from nothing and building relationships with the townsfolk is still so satisfying, and there's a relaxing joy to its simple gameplay loop. However, the slow pace won't be for everyone, the controls are a bit clunky, and there's not a ton to do outside of the main farm work. It's a nostalgic gem for sure, but newer players might find it a bit too barebones.
Note - as I did not beat this game, this write-up should be taken more as a set of observations than a genuine review
Played on the Wii U Virtual Console
Farm simulators may be a dime-a-dozen these days, but back in the 90s they were actually pretty risky: as Toy Story, of all things, duly-showed, agrarian aesthetics were dying in the public eye -- the Internet was growing, Space Camp rising, and even Clint Eastwood had finished his cowboy tenure with Unforgiven.
Yet in 1996, a little company called Amccus burst onto the scene, debuting the first entry in what would eventually be called the Story of Seasons franchise. Dubbed Harvest Moon (or Farm Story in Japan), the premise was somewhat similar to popular JRPGs at the time in that you played as a blank slate tasked with restoring a piece of the world, that piece, here, being your family’s dilapidated ranch.
Unfortunately, despite not featuring an experience system, Harvest Moon feels too adjacent to those aforementioned role-playing games, its contents regurgitating their grindy schematic into a unique, though ultimately elongated, reskin. See, instead of levels, you’ve got monetary thresholds; instead of fighting, you’ve got ploughing; and instead of journeying across a foreign land, you’ve got backtracking galore along the same routes.
Anyone who’s played the myriad of spiritual successors out there knows how things go: you start off with a big plot, till the soil, plant seeds, water them till ripe, sell ‘em, use the profits to either buy more seeds or animals, and rinse & repeat. The problem is, whereas those aforementioned sequels built upon the formula and added diversity, you get no such changes here - progression is built on repetition, meaning you’ll end-up going through the same motions as though you’re grinding for exp ala Final Fantasy/Pokemon/insert_JRPG_of_your_choice. And I know it isn’t fair to criticize a game for lacking something its sequels have, but in determining whether or not a classic holds-up, such comparisons are necessary for deducing if those subsequent additions were common sense supplements or outright genuine innovation (the former, of course, being derogatory in nature towards the progeniting classic in question).
But even on its own merits, Harvest Moon stumbles due to its deliberately-lethargic scheme: you’re all but made to start out with crops because they’re the cheapest commodity available (chicks are $1000; cows $5000!), and after planting them you’re forced to hydrate them square by square by square -> after they maturate, you got to pluck them square by square by square and drop them into the shipping crate piece by piece by piece -> once you get animals that yield produce, you’ll need to pick each egg up yolk by yolk by yolk, or milk every cow, udder by udder….by udder.
Yeah, if it isn’t obvious, this is tedious work. On the plus side, I suppose Amccus successfully recreated 19th century rural farm-life; on the negative side, though, it doesn’t make for a fun time. Harvest Moon has frequently been described as relaxing, but I often found myself more bored than serendipic throughout my 10+ hour runtime, and what’s particularly grating is how the game goes out of its way to make things worse than they should be: you can’t navigate through plants because apparently stems are as thick as stone; you can’t water your middle crop (harvests are grown in a 9x9 grid) until the rest have been reaped, you have limited stamina that can only be replenished through protracted trips to a hot spring ayonder, there’s no rucksack for storing more than one-good at a time, dropping something insta-destroys it, you can’t put stuff for shipping overnight lest it auto-rots, and, perhaps worst of all, you can’t upgrade most of your tools manually. With the exception of the watering can, you’ll have to wait for pre-scripted events in order to acquire your next gear, and arriving at those points requires trudging through hours-and-hours of content: content that I’m not sure many people will willingly stick with.
None of this is even getting into the shortness of the days, which is egregious even by abridged standards: it’s not 5 or 4 or even 3, but 2.75 measly minutes. That’s right, in the time it takes you to microwave a burrito, you’ve got to complete all your daily chores, which yes becomes problematic the larger your grange grows. True, you’re not going to be handling crops every day, but treating(+) your animals, selling their staples, running to town to purchase/peddle additional goods, and successfully serenading your date (more on that later) all take time that the game simply doesn’t give you enough of.
Now, to be fair, some alleviants have been thrown-in to help make things more palatable: you’re able to purchase a horse that acts as a mobile shipping box, grass (in non-winter seasons) constantly regrows/doesn’t need water, chicken eggs can be used to conceive an unlimited supply of hens without needing to procure new ones, chicks don’t have to be fed, wood (for upgrading your house) is auto-stored, you don’t collapse from exhaustion, and, best of all, you’re not penalized for nighttime labor: so long as you irrigate your land and put feed in the stables before heading to bed, the game will count it as having been conducted for that day. Unfortunately, the fact that you’re basically strong-armed into working consecutive nights is doubly indicative of the excessively-swift pacing of the days.
There’s more I could harp on, like how slight movement resets the breakage counter on a boulder/log, how you only have two spaces on your tool belt, or how chickens are automatically killed by wolves if you leave them outside (defeating the whole purpose of setting-up a pen), but to go into all that detail would drag out this review pointlessly. I get that some of Harvest Moon’s prolixity was purposely implemented for the sake of realism, but when taken in conjunction with everything else, it ultimately brings down the product as a whole.
As stated earlier, Harvest Moon incorporated a bit of a dating sim into its framework via the ability to charm a girl and get married (sorry hetero-women, no choices for you), and, in fairness to the writing team, they actually crafted a decent amount of dialogue (granted, a lot of it has to be unraveled over the course of the game, but it is there). Sadly, this aspect is even more simplified than Mass Effect’s due to it purely coming down to you talking to them and giving them gifts tied to their personality. Such a quid pro quo system would be tolerable on its own merits, but the problem, once again, comes down to that everlooming hourglass: with less than three minutes, it becomes a pain in the @ss to balance your duties whilst concurrently running down to the village, talking to them, and/or bringing them a present, a task you have to repeat near-everyday should you wish to (eventually) have a spouse.
Graphically, things are pretty outstanding. Being a SNES release, Harvest Moon naturally boasts sharp pixel art, with NPCs textiles, in particular, doing a phenomenal job conveying their respective characters’ personality (your MC’s farmerwear, Ann’s tomboyish attire, Nina’s more-modest churchgoing garb, etc…). Seasons, as I said before, exist in the game, and effort was thankfully put into their visualization beyond a standard repaint ala Super Mario Bros: footprints in the snow, dead leaves in Autumn, brighter fields in summer, etc….etc….
The real standout, however, has to be the animations programmed for each action: from tools to golden tools to even dancing, you’ll discover a series of special movements coded exclusively for your character.
My only complaints had to do with three foibles: one, your main character’s eyes look permanently dead and depressed (no seriously, at first I thought he was just tired, but that’s his default visage); two, rainfall and extraneous cows in the barn (I believe more than 4) result in a noticeable framerate drop; and three, there’s this ugly yellow/brown filter they put over the camera lens. I get that family-owned farming is often associated with the past, but this discount sepia aesthetic felt unnecessary and honestly diminished the inherent vividness Harvest Moon’s canvas otherwise possessed.
Sound falls along the same wavelength as those aforementioned animations due to the engineers at Amccus synchronizing each with an appropriate din. 2D-based games never invested heavily in sound, but what you get here is a solid auralscape even by those standards. That said, there is a defect in the form of a screechy robot beep donned for the text bubbles (I have no idea what Amccus was thinking with this annoyance, but you’ll be glad to speed through it).
Music is where the game truly drops the ball as, much like A Link to the Past, there’s an insufficient amount of it. You’ve got a single tune for each season, in addition to the town, mountains, and festivals. There are some miscellaneous ones crafted for certain areas (like the chapel), but given that you’ll barely spend any time in those places, you’re liable to primarily hearing the other songs again and again and again. Having a single track/season, in particular, was boneheaded because the game allocates 30 days/quadrant, meaning you’ll hear the same music on repeat for an extended period of time. Composer Tsuyoshi Tanaka is a talented musician as, with the exception of Spring, I liked every leitmotif he crafted here (especially the town’s), making me wonder what led to him shortchanging the score as a whole.
Ultimately, I gave-up on completion due to the grind for cash being too much. I fully concede I may have been playing the game wrong as Harvest Moon is often cited as a relaxing enterprise by most fans; that said, its formula has, objectively-speaking, been improved upon by succeeding ventures (most notably Stardew Valley), meaning you won’t get anything here that you can’t garner from other ventures.
NOTES
+Treating = feeding, selling their bodily products, and (in the case of cows) brushing them.
-It’s pretty interesting to see how little information there is about Amccus online: not only do they lack a Wikipedia page, but they didn’t even go on to develop any of the other Story of Seasons entries, making me wonder if they were absorbed by publisher Natsume or simply fell apart like (tragically) so many other indie devs.
-This game allows you to go skinny-dipping with a girl….I promise I’m not kidding.
-Cutting grass and hoeing acres has the chance of sprouting a frog or mole respectively -- pretty cool additions.
-Sometimes your character will pause to observe a flock of birds ascend from his front yard upon opening the door in the morning.
-You get a dog at the beginning of the game, but he honestly appears to serve no discernible purpose besides generic companionship (was more originally intended for Fido that had to be dropped during development)?
Played on the Wii U Virtual Console
Farm simulators may be a dime-a-dozen these days, but back in the 90s they were actually pretty risky: as Toy Story, of all things, duly-showed, agrarian aesthetics were dying in the public eye -- the Internet was growing, Space Camp rising, and even Clint Eastwood had finished his cowboy tenure with Unforgiven.
Yet in 1996, a little company called Amccus burst onto the scene, debuting the first entry in what would eventually be called the Story of Seasons franchise. Dubbed Harvest Moon (or Farm Story in Japan), the premise was somewhat similar to popular JRPGs at the time in that you played as a blank slate tasked with restoring a piece of the world, that piece, here, being your family’s dilapidated ranch.
Unfortunately, despite not featuring an experience system, Harvest Moon feels too adjacent to those aforementioned role-playing games, its contents regurgitating their grindy schematic into a unique, though ultimately elongated, reskin. See, instead of levels, you’ve got monetary thresholds; instead of fighting, you’ve got ploughing; and instead of journeying across a foreign land, you’ve got backtracking galore along the same routes.
Anyone who’s played the myriad of spiritual successors out there knows how things go: you start off with a big plot, till the soil, plant seeds, water them till ripe, sell ‘em, use the profits to either buy more seeds or animals, and rinse & repeat. The problem is, whereas those aforementioned sequels built upon the formula and added diversity, you get no such changes here - progression is built on repetition, meaning you’ll end-up going through the same motions as though you’re grinding for exp ala Final Fantasy/Pokemon/insert_JRPG_of_your_choice. And I know it isn’t fair to criticize a game for lacking something its sequels have, but in determining whether or not a classic holds-up, such comparisons are necessary for deducing if those subsequent additions were common sense supplements or outright genuine innovation (the former, of course, being derogatory in nature towards the progeniting classic in question).
But even on its own merits, Harvest Moon stumbles due to its deliberately-lethargic scheme: you’re all but made to start out with crops because they’re the cheapest commodity available (chicks are $1000; cows $5000!), and after planting them you’re forced to hydrate them square by square by square -> after they maturate, you got to pluck them square by square by square and drop them into the shipping crate piece by piece by piece -> once you get animals that yield produce, you’ll need to pick each egg up yolk by yolk by yolk, or milk every cow, udder by udder….by udder.
Yeah, if it isn’t obvious, this is tedious work. On the plus side, I suppose Amccus successfully recreated 19th century rural farm-life; on the negative side, though, it doesn’t make for a fun time. Harvest Moon has frequently been described as relaxing, but I often found myself more bored than serendipic throughout my 10+ hour runtime, and what’s particularly grating is how the game goes out of its way to make things worse than they should be: you can’t navigate through plants because apparently stems are as thick as stone; you can’t water your middle crop (harvests are grown in a 9x9 grid) until the rest have been reaped, you have limited stamina that can only be replenished through protracted trips to a hot spring ayonder, there’s no rucksack for storing more than one-good at a time, dropping something insta-destroys it, you can’t put stuff for shipping overnight lest it auto-rots, and, perhaps worst of all, you can’t upgrade most of your tools manually. With the exception of the watering can, you’ll have to wait for pre-scripted events in order to acquire your next gear, and arriving at those points requires trudging through hours-and-hours of content: content that I’m not sure many people will willingly stick with.
None of this is even getting into the shortness of the days, which is egregious even by abridged standards: it’s not 5 or 4 or even 3, but 2.75 measly minutes. That’s right, in the time it takes you to microwave a burrito, you’ve got to complete all your daily chores, which yes becomes problematic the larger your grange grows. True, you’re not going to be handling crops every day, but treating(+) your animals, selling their staples, running to town to purchase/peddle additional goods, and successfully serenading your date (more on that later) all take time that the game simply doesn’t give you enough of.
Now, to be fair, some alleviants have been thrown-in to help make things more palatable: you’re able to purchase a horse that acts as a mobile shipping box, grass (in non-winter seasons) constantly regrows/doesn’t need water, chicken eggs can be used to conceive an unlimited supply of hens without needing to procure new ones, chicks don’t have to be fed, wood (for upgrading your house) is auto-stored, you don’t collapse from exhaustion, and, best of all, you’re not penalized for nighttime labor: so long as you irrigate your land and put feed in the stables before heading to bed, the game will count it as having been conducted for that day. Unfortunately, the fact that you’re basically strong-armed into working consecutive nights is doubly indicative of the excessively-swift pacing of the days.
There’s more I could harp on, like how slight movement resets the breakage counter on a boulder/log, how you only have two spaces on your tool belt, or how chickens are automatically killed by wolves if you leave them outside (defeating the whole purpose of setting-up a pen), but to go into all that detail would drag out this review pointlessly. I get that some of Harvest Moon’s prolixity was purposely implemented for the sake of realism, but when taken in conjunction with everything else, it ultimately brings down the product as a whole.
As stated earlier, Harvest Moon incorporated a bit of a dating sim into its framework via the ability to charm a girl and get married (sorry hetero-women, no choices for you), and, in fairness to the writing team, they actually crafted a decent amount of dialogue (granted, a lot of it has to be unraveled over the course of the game, but it is there). Sadly, this aspect is even more simplified than Mass Effect’s due to it purely coming down to you talking to them and giving them gifts tied to their personality. Such a quid pro quo system would be tolerable on its own merits, but the problem, once again, comes down to that everlooming hourglass: with less than three minutes, it becomes a pain in the @ss to balance your duties whilst concurrently running down to the village, talking to them, and/or bringing them a present, a task you have to repeat near-everyday should you wish to (eventually) have a spouse.
Graphically, things are pretty outstanding. Being a SNES release, Harvest Moon naturally boasts sharp pixel art, with NPCs textiles, in particular, doing a phenomenal job conveying their respective characters’ personality (your MC’s farmerwear, Ann’s tomboyish attire, Nina’s more-modest churchgoing garb, etc…). Seasons, as I said before, exist in the game, and effort was thankfully put into their visualization beyond a standard repaint ala Super Mario Bros: footprints in the snow, dead leaves in Autumn, brighter fields in summer, etc….etc….
The real standout, however, has to be the animations programmed for each action: from tools to golden tools to even dancing, you’ll discover a series of special movements coded exclusively for your character.
My only complaints had to do with three foibles: one, your main character’s eyes look permanently dead and depressed (no seriously, at first I thought he was just tired, but that’s his default visage); two, rainfall and extraneous cows in the barn (I believe more than 4) result in a noticeable framerate drop; and three, there’s this ugly yellow/brown filter they put over the camera lens. I get that family-owned farming is often associated with the past, but this discount sepia aesthetic felt unnecessary and honestly diminished the inherent vividness Harvest Moon’s canvas otherwise possessed.
Sound falls along the same wavelength as those aforementioned animations due to the engineers at Amccus synchronizing each with an appropriate din. 2D-based games never invested heavily in sound, but what you get here is a solid auralscape even by those standards. That said, there is a defect in the form of a screechy robot beep donned for the text bubbles (I have no idea what Amccus was thinking with this annoyance, but you’ll be glad to speed through it).
Music is where the game truly drops the ball as, much like A Link to the Past, there’s an insufficient amount of it. You’ve got a single tune for each season, in addition to the town, mountains, and festivals. There are some miscellaneous ones crafted for certain areas (like the chapel), but given that you’ll barely spend any time in those places, you’re liable to primarily hearing the other songs again and again and again. Having a single track/season, in particular, was boneheaded because the game allocates 30 days/quadrant, meaning you’ll hear the same music on repeat for an extended period of time. Composer Tsuyoshi Tanaka is a talented musician as, with the exception of Spring, I liked every leitmotif he crafted here (especially the town’s), making me wonder what led to him shortchanging the score as a whole.
Ultimately, I gave-up on completion due to the grind for cash being too much. I fully concede I may have been playing the game wrong as Harvest Moon is often cited as a relaxing enterprise by most fans; that said, its formula has, objectively-speaking, been improved upon by succeeding ventures (most notably Stardew Valley), meaning you won’t get anything here that you can’t garner from other ventures.
NOTES
+Treating = feeding, selling their bodily products, and (in the case of cows) brushing them.
-It’s pretty interesting to see how little information there is about Amccus online: not only do they lack a Wikipedia page, but they didn’t even go on to develop any of the other Story of Seasons entries, making me wonder if they were absorbed by publisher Natsume or simply fell apart like (tragically) so many other indie devs.
-This game allows you to go skinny-dipping with a girl….I promise I’m not kidding.
-Cutting grass and hoeing acres has the chance of sprouting a frog or mole respectively -- pretty cool additions.
-Sometimes your character will pause to observe a flock of birds ascend from his front yard upon opening the door in the morning.
-You get a dog at the beginning of the game, but he honestly appears to serve no discernible purpose besides generic companionship (was more originally intended for Fido that had to be dropped during development)?
Monotonous and repetitive and I don’t even know if I’m doing it right
Pretty charming and cute. An important game for the farming sim genre.
the first harvest moon game is very special. it's very different from nearly every other game. there's no real UI on screen, you can only hold one item at a time, and you can only hold two tools. also the days are not very long at all. but nights never end. but during the night you can't ship your items. all these limitations cause you to play a very specific way that i just love. you try your best to ship as many items as you can during the day, and maybe you can finish your chores during the night time. but! then you need to give presents to a girl you like during the day too. all these little questions of how to manage your schedule due to having no real inventory is beautiful to me.
This is a hard review for me to write. This game here is one of the most important games of my life. A favorite of mine since when I was a kid. By playing it more than 15 years later, I unfortunately found some glaring issues with it. Now, how does my feelings stand up after knowing about such flaws?
This is indeed a charming game. Its core systems work pretty well. The main thing is... this game punishes you for playing well. There I was, at Fall of the Second Year, having accomplished almost everything the game had to offer (the only thing left was to have my second child, but there was nothing I could on that sense; it was just a matter of time).
Without anything to look forward to, every mundane task of the farm became pointless. Why am I taking care of 12 chickens and 12 cows every single day if I can't be rewarded in any way for doing that? It was time consuming and tiresome (and it became worse knowing that the game can't handle many characters at the same screen; the framedrops were annoying). Half of the game felt pointless, really. I don't even know how I got to the end of it without dying of boredom.
House renovations? Got it. Marriage? Got it. Children? Got it. Max animals? Got it. Crops to the max. of my stamina? Got it.
Nothing of value was left. I had clearly exhausted the majority of the contents of the game halfway through it.
Although this game is still dear to me, much of the good experiences I had with Harvest Moon are directly linked to how poorly I played it when I was a kid. I'm not a pro, not at all. I could do much much better than I did. But just being a little above average was enough to make the game pointless. It's sad to admit it, but most of the fun I derived from this title came directly to my inexperienced younger self, learning what the hell a farming simulation game was. There were times when I didn't even manage to finish the game with a child, or even having any cows to begin with.
But the thing is... the systems work well. They are solid. And this game is special to me, still. I can't possibly give it a lower score than 3 stars out of 5. If I can let my heart speak and counsciously let it go over my critical thinking, let this game be the one where it does so. This one deserves it. My heart is willing to triumph this time, so it is with profound love that I thank this game for everything it did for me. For helping shape my taste in gaming and media in general, for keeping me company in my younger days of solitude. I love you, Harvest Moon!
This is indeed a charming game. Its core systems work pretty well. The main thing is... this game punishes you for playing well. There I was, at Fall of the Second Year, having accomplished almost everything the game had to offer (the only thing left was to have my second child, but there was nothing I could on that sense; it was just a matter of time).
Without anything to look forward to, every mundane task of the farm became pointless. Why am I taking care of 12 chickens and 12 cows every single day if I can't be rewarded in any way for doing that? It was time consuming and tiresome (and it became worse knowing that the game can't handle many characters at the same screen; the framedrops were annoying). Half of the game felt pointless, really. I don't even know how I got to the end of it without dying of boredom.
House renovations? Got it. Marriage? Got it. Children? Got it. Max animals? Got it. Crops to the max. of my stamina? Got it.
Nothing of value was left. I had clearly exhausted the majority of the contents of the game halfway through it.
Although this game is still dear to me, much of the good experiences I had with Harvest Moon are directly linked to how poorly I played it when I was a kid. I'm not a pro, not at all. I could do much much better than I did. But just being a little above average was enough to make the game pointless. It's sad to admit it, but most of the fun I derived from this title came directly to my inexperienced younger self, learning what the hell a farming simulation game was. There were times when I didn't even manage to finish the game with a child, or even having any cows to begin with.
But the thing is... the systems work well. They are solid. And this game is special to me, still. I can't possibly give it a lower score than 3 stars out of 5. If I can let my heart speak and counsciously let it go over my critical thinking, let this game be the one where it does so. This one deserves it. My heart is willing to triumph this time, so it is with profound love that I thank this game for everything it did for me. For helping shape my taste in gaming and media in general, for keeping me company in my younger days of solitude. I love you, Harvest Moon!