A fucking weird game. And that's coming from a series that is overall weird to begin with.

Some of the most unhinged heart events in the whole series.
A surpringly high amount of those focus on your DVD player (???)

Weird ass game. A fun take on the world of A Wonderful Life.

My first Harvest Moon game was Harvest Moon: Friends of Mineral Town. In fact, that game was one of my first real gaming experiences as a young child, so when I eventually picked up this game for the Nintendo DS, I was expecting a similar experience to the one I had with my first Harvest Moon game.

What I got instead was a world of disappointment. The game isn't bad, but it is far from good. The characters and town just aren't as engaging somehow, and everything about it felt bland in comparison to Friends of Mineral Town. The game had some upsides, but it is nowhere near the quality of Mineral Town, so it was a pretty disheartening experience overall.

With the whole Natsume debacle, and the game changing titles and all of that, the Harvest Moon brand has absolutely tanked. You can play Story of Seasons instead, the true continuation of the series, but even then, the quality has dropped over the years.

My advice: If you want to play a good Harvest Moon game, play Mineral Town and skip this one. If you want a good modern faming sim, play Stardew Valley. Harvest Moon DS isn't really worth the time, unfortunately.

Played as part of CONQUERING MY CHILDHOOD

"You can't cook tasty food without an oven.
That's a hot purchase."
- Mayor Thomas of Mineral Town, 2005

Stardew Valley opens with a fairly tame intro, showing your character moving to the countryside to escape their draining, corporate city life. 11 years prior, Harvest Moon DS had managed to up the ante just a little. In the first five minutes of the game, you bear witness to two goddesses locked in battle, ending with one of them accidentally turning the other to stone and banishing her to the hell dimension. She then turns to you, a farmer boy, and tells you that you're the only person who can save her, before teleporting you back to your farm - a run-down wreck with nothing there, despite there being no reason to believe you've only recently moved in. It's such a wreck, in fact, that upon leaving your house, the mayor of the next town over starts laughing and insulting your farm, prompting your character to start trying to kill him by attacking him with every tool you own - he dodges every hit, and even manages to namedrop a previous game while doing so. Your dog comes up and ambushes him, and you're given a prompt to help the mayor or not - if you choose no, your dog kills the mayor and the credits roll. It's fucking WILD.

Then the game starts.

And sadly, it makes itself immediately clear that the game somehow managed to spend all of its personality in the first five minutes. If you couldn't tell that the localisation is a bit weird from the More Friends of Mineral Town namedrop from the mayor while dodging your onslaught, you'll know when you see the typos straight afterwards in the tutorials. Or when you see the typos that punctuate a bunch of the dialogue in the game. Or just, from the dialogue itself, because most of the character dialogue reads like a robot wrote it. I talked to one of the bachelorettes at the duck festival and she said, I shit you not:

"Ducks are so white. I wish I was that white."

Truly empowering.

Hardly any of the characters actually feel like people and it makes it really hard to care about them, which is a bit of an issue in a game where the characters are meant to be fairly important! To the point where marriage is meant to be one of the main objectives! But how am I supposed to care!

The progression is pretty much as bizarrely underwhelming as it felt going from murdering a guy with your dog to watching anime girls talking in robotic English within minutes of each other. Let's take the mines as an example. You can unlock the first mine at any point in the game, as long as you enter the excavation site at the right time of day in order to trigger the cutscene. Once you're there, in the very first mine, you get access to the first four tiers of ore. Awesome, time to upgrade all your tools a bunch! Oh, dear reader, if ONLY it was that simple! You call up Gray on the phone (because the valley doesn't have anything in it) and he tells you that, no, you just can't do that yet! You just, can't! To be honest I'm not sure what exactly it is stopping you from doing those upgrades but I think it's some hidden exp system or something? Very strange. Anyway, you reach the bottom of the first mine and maybe even get some tools upgraded in the meantime, then the next mine opens up. What wonders could await us here? What new ores could await us here?

...what new ores?

Obviously I'm just taking one specific bit here and ripping pretty hard into it, but that's because every other aspect feels as wacky and strangely paced in their own weird ways. It'd take a lot more time and words to go into this sort of deranged detailing about every other progression system, but hopefully this still paints a decent picture of how it generally felt. Not good!

I've highlighted pretty much what I disliked about the core of the game, but we aren't done yet. There's a few more noteworthy frustrations that aren't really tied in with those, but still add up to bring it all down even further. I don't have a good way to structure this so I'm just gonna puke it all out into an incoherent word vomit. Are we ready?

Whenever you throw an item out, it lowers your friendship with everyone in the town by a bit (except for one of the goddesses in the intro, who you can't marry anyway because of a bug). Not only does this never actually get communicated to you, the only use for weeds is to sell them for 1g a pop and you can't do anything with them, so why not throw them all out? Hey, why does everyone suddenly hate me? Stamina is communicated through your character falling over in various ways whenever a tool brings your stamina low enough. You can imagine that this is annoying enough to begin with, but this extends to when you are fighting enemies in the mines! You ever just hit a chicken in the head with a hammer, dealing nonlethal damage, and then collapse on the floor in front of it as it pecks you in the eyes? Tangentially related, but the gameplay in the mines is really awful. Every mine past the first has an obscene amount of floors (it goes 10 -> 255 -> 999 -> 65,535!!), and digging for the stairs will only make you go down a single floor. Luckily, you can fall down holes in the floor to go through multiple floors at once! These holes are hidden, so most of your spelunking will consist of charging around sticking your dirt-caked nose into every single tile of every single floor, just to make sure you didn't miss one. To make matters worse, the combat system is just one of the worst in any game I've played. You'll have to just trust me on this one because it's hard to make a good comparison or anything, but it is bad. Feels like it's there just to fill some game mechanics quota rather than to make the game any better. Thankfully if you save and reload on a floor in the mines, it gets rid of all of the enemies (except for one for some reason?). Thank me later, if you ever decide to play this game.

And so ends our story, a bitter tale of me getting unreasonably vitriolic about a game that's pretty bad, but not offensively so. Definitely not bad enough to warrant all of this, at least. I still had some enjoyment early on because it still hits a fairly satisfying gameplay loop, at least while you're still in that early stage where you aren't really doing anything other than farming. But it's still easily one of the worse games I've put myself through, and I'm glad it takes so long to do anything otherwise I'd have probably stuck around for longer.