I'm 10. I stand in video game section of Family Video. I get mesmerized by the sprites on the back of the box. I rent this game. I rent it again. And again. I never beat it but I fall in love. I end up with the gameboy version and play it endlessly.

I'm 22. I drive an hour and a half to used game shop. Going to mostly browse, but I secretly hope I find this game there. I don't.

I'm 37. Nintendo adds it to the Nintendo Switch Online catalog and I finally beat it. The sprite mesmerize me the same as they did when I was a kid. The OLED screen of the Switch feels perfect for these happy and colorful sprites.

The game itself is repetitive and lacks the depth that future farming sims will create in the wake of this game. But this game not only inspired a brand new genre and slow life games as a whole, but really has charmed me into what is going to be a lifetime appreciation of the beauty of its sprite work and the relaxing, calming simple gameplay loop.

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)?

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!

What I assumed would be a cozy, relaxing game ended up giving me a premature midlife crisis. Day in and day out, waking up and performing the same, repetitive tasks, hurrying to plant and harvest crops in order to buy more crops to plant and harvest, the workday fading in a blink of an eye all while the years stretched on endlessly past the horizon, all this meaningless toil, for what? For what? To repeatedly rehearse the same vapid lines with the girls of the town, flirting with Eve, the independent yet troubled alcoholic, only for her to give up her life and personality to marry me, never leaving the house, so miserable in her life choices that she loses affection points if you go to bed with her (is this a bug, or merely a reflection of her misery at playing the role of housewife?) I gave up about 2 years in.

There's no two ways about it: this game is tedious. It is a slog during which you do the same time-consuming thing, over and over, day after day. This is punctuated only rarely by interactions with townsfolk, which are inherently limited—especially as the game goes on—by the limited amount of daylight and the overwhelming time it takes to harvest produce.

By no means does that make this a bad game. It's a game about tedium, a set of daily rituals that invites you to incorporate it into your own daily ritual. You could call it a timekiller or you could call it a meditation, but it presents the player with an uncompromisingly austere vision of what "play" looks like and asks: do you want to engage with this?

I played 14 days in my beloved snes Harvest Moon for the first time since Stardew Valley was in early access and it’s still so good. Days are very short but nights are as long as you want. The issue is, you don’t have much stamina and you have a time limit to drop things in the box. I accidentally made my potato farm too big already. Foraging is a bit of a grind… you can really only grab 2 pieces of fruit and sprint back to your box before the sun sets, or quickly grab flowers for your gf (in my case I’m romancing my first wife ever, Ellen), and then grab 1 fruit. I am looking forward to taking my horse to the old town road instead.

Only having 2 tools on your person and carrying one thing at a time is tough to go back to, but it’s still workable. All things considered the game still feels really really good to play. Even though I did waste some seeds accidentally because I didn’t realize I had it selected instead of my hoe. But at least with switch online, it’s easy to just rewind and act like it never happened.

I never really realized how much the relationship mechanics are front-and-center from the beginning, but I guess the game doesn’t really show off that many competing systems up front. It takes a while to get the story going, upgrade your house and animals, and have weather events that open up new areas, etc. But for the first month there’s not too much going on, so I understand why they want you to start giving flowers to the girls and read their diaries.

I am so glad that Stardew exists and expanded on this game in every way, but there’s still value in coming back to this one. I hope I just pop it back in every once in a while to progress the story because it is pretty great once it gets going.

Pros: Revolutionary, if I had to pick a word for this game, it's that. Yeah, the simple farm game, simplest of them even, but even something so small as this created a ripple effect that changed the future of gaming forever.

Harvest Moon, the first in the Story of Seasons/Bokujo Monogatari series, created by Yasuhiro Wada, really is a very simple game, but it did so much new, and in such a new way, that captivated me endlessly, and kickstarted a whole new genre of video games. Wholesome games! Alright alright, let's talk about it. In this game, you inherit a ranch from your deceased grandfather, and it's a run down old place, and it's your job to spruce it up, start a farm, plant crops, raise livestock, get to know the townsfolk, meet a special lady, start a family, make a lot of MOO-lah, and become, well, a ranch master! The system that makes this game function, what charts your progress, is a day-to-day calendar, with four seasons, 30 days apiece. Each day is on a set timer, which allows you to do whatever tasks you so desire within the time limit, then at night, you clock in, save your progress, go to bed and start the next day, repeating the cycle.

This blew my mind. Yeah, that right there, was mind blowing. Very commonplace now, wouldn't think twice about it. But a system where you control an avatar player, and it essentially functions like a mini-life, wasn't really seen much up until this point. A day and night cycle alone, where the graphics depicted on screen gradually shift from morning to sunset to night, and the different visuals for each season, was captivating. Also incredibly atmospheric and immersive. This was essentially a second life after all, and you're playing as an individual with their own actions, their own limitations and vulnerabilities too. This wasn't Sim City or Sim Farm or what have you, you weren't an all-seeing overseer god-like being, nah, you're this scrunkly little dude just trying to make it by. And that creates a deeper connection with, well, everything around you! Not to mention, the visual style for the game is very lovely, with cute chibi graphics! Easy to love.

Typically you start off the game foraging the woodlands for fruits and berries to sell, then fishing in the pond there, which is quick easy cash, enough to buy some vegetable seeds. Spring has Turnips and Potatoes, and Summer has Tomatoes and Corn. Each have their own properties like growth rate, regrowth, and can be sold at different prices. You'll need a series of tools to till the soil and generally work the farm, chopping wood, breaking rocks, cutting weeds and all that. So you're given a Hoe, Sickle, Axe, and a Hammer to do all the field work. Secondly, you'll want to plant some grass fields, to make way for chickens and cows, once you can afford them, which will grant you daily eggs and milk. You can keep them out to pasture, or feed them cut grass in their barns and coops from the silo. Very farm-y farm stuff! In addition to the livestock, you also get a pet dog early on, who's just the cutest dang thing! Make sure to pick him up or whistle them every day. They have the ability to keep your livestock safe overnight from wild animals (supposedly, I've never seen them myself). And lastly, and this is one of my favorite memories of the game, during the dead of winter, in the middle of the road just out in the distance of a foggy snowy setting, you meet a lonesome horse, simply standing there, as if meeting you was their destiny. It's a quiet and beautiful moment, a lovely memory. And they're wonderful, when they grow older you can ride them around your farm, and use their saddle bags to ship crops to make money more quickly than you would otherwise carrying them back and forth to the shipping container.

Outside the farm, is Flowerbud village, a bustling town full of villagers, shops, homes, a lovely town-square where seasonal festivals are held, and five bachelorettes that you're capable of wooing. Ann the tomboyish redhead who works at the tool shop, Nina the pink haired girly girl who works at the flower shop, Maria the blue haired girl who plays the organ at the church (yeah, there's a church in this game, with a Christian cross even, haha!!), Eve the blonde bartender who gives you free alcohol every night (yeah, for real, there's even a funny drunk animation for ya!), and Ellen, the short haired brunette girl whose family runs the restaurant, she's the one that gives you your dog at the beginning of the game. Get to know them, raise the friendship and heart levels enough (you can check how many hearts you have with a girl in their diaries...) and you can propose using a blue feather. Choose to marry, and you can start a family on your farm, even have a couple kids! Of course you gotta make your farm suitable enough for a family, and you can build your house larger, and even paint it, to look real nice. For the 90s, this was a lot of customization options, believe me!

So you've raised a family, built a successful farm, and made a ton of money, what's left? Well, there's some fun fantasy elements hidden in the game, little elf-like Harvest Sprite dudes underneath your ranch, these dudes can help upgrade your tools. And there's even a Harvest Goddess who can grant you a wish! Among other fun little elements that go beyond the simple life on the farm.

But in this first entry, you aren't bombarded by menus, and stats, it's all very mysterious, and simple... Very easy to get sucked in to this tiny comfy, uncomplicated life!

So what you'll come away with most of all, is that simple life, living in a cozy little town, running your simple little ranch, with your adorable itty bitty chibi animals. There's a lot to appreciate, and you really do, day after day, form a connection. And you'll fall in love... It's no surprise to me, that Harvest Moon changed the world. Shortly after this game came out, we got games like Animal Crossing, the Sims, Farmville, Boku No Natsuyasumi, Minecraft (yeah, I'm saying it, Minecraft owes a lot to Harvest Moon), and most influential of all, Stardew Valley, which caused a MASSIVE wave of farm and farm type games permeating the games industry to this day, expanding the audience of people who play games immensely.

Harvest Moon was a small seed, planted in rich fertile soil, that then sprouted into a giant beautiful beanstalk.

Cons: heh, how do I go back to the negatives after that?... Well, this was the first step after all, and made by a small team, so there's plenty of hiccups with gameplay or elements that are just a bit too basic that later games would improve upon immensely. I would say though, the one standout con for me, at the time of this game's release, was that there's a definitive ending, the game stops, and you can't keep playing. That was a major bummer for me, I wanted to continue my farm until the day I grew bored of the game, not when the game forced me to... And yeah, this too, was something immediately remedied in the very next entry!

What it means to me: My grandmother, I've mentioned her before here, she was a wonderful person, created a loving and welcoming space for us grandchildren to play and have fun. And every time we'd visit her, we'd rent a SNES game. Upon one visit, she actually had a recommendation for us, which wasn't very common, let me tell you! She suggested this game, a game about... farming? Well, she knew when we were little, we loved to play with farm animal toys at her house, so, it was a good suggestion, so we rented it!!! My grandma, she was such a big hearted loving soul, and us kids didn't think outside our little world of action platformers or fighting games very often... So a game about farming, this is not regular!! But oh my God, thank you, grandma!! This game, this entire series that we then fell in love with, my brother and I owe it all to her.

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.

Proposta interessante, cheio de mecânicas muito condizentes e tem uma história bem simples mas que convence bem. Seu objetivo é prosperar em uma fazendo, casar e ter filhos (se quiser). O bacana aqui é que você tem que se planejar porque cada estação do ano tem suas configurações, no inverno seus animais não pode ficar para fora, no verão as plantas da primavera não prosperam.

Se você vai jogar esse jogo e quer ao menos um final feliz, procura um bom detonado, a risca mesmo você vai ficar com o final ruim. O jogo termina depois de 3 anos, o primeiro ano você vai sofrer bastante (aproveite a noite para trabalhar mais), depois que você consegue as ferramentas douradas tudo fica mais rápido. Não é um jogo pra quem não gosta de uma rotina, porque aqui você tem que seguir uma rotina de fazenda TODOS os dias.

Por sorte, consegui liberar alguns finais bons na parte da colheita, criação de galinhas (como essas me irritaram, sempre atrapalhando na hora de tratar elas), casei com a Ann e meti 2 boneco nela ahaha

Só não jogo mais uma vez porque foram 35 horas de jogatina, já saturei por enquanto. Mas, é um excelente jogo!