tl:dr If your a harvest moon then you'll probably like this title once you download some mods to make it feel like home. If your not familiar with harvest moon at all you'll love it even more.

Harvest moon series is a weird roller coaster in terms of quality. As soon as the actual devs of the series moved on to make stories of seasons is the second the series dropped in quality in immeasurable ways. This left a huge gap in the farming sim/Life sim market.

Stardew valley attempts to fill in that gap and I'd argue it's done an impressive job and does even better then certain natsume titles. Socializing with the townsfolk, crop management, mining, and super natural elements are all here with a different shade. Some features have been streamlined for the better like buying upgrades for the home and crop placement. New additions like sprinklers and scarecrow management have been added along with a slew of other things. Mining borrows some aspects of runefactory in the shape of combat.

Overall the towns folks are the least interesting aspect of the game. They tend to be very bland, and have less interesting dynamics and personality. You won't get popuri dying mother or a prier boy who's an orphan living with the pastor. Instead you'll get Sebastian's lifestyle of smoking, being an edgy boi, and step dad that just doesn't get him. Sam father being a military man who's often not around his family. Dynamics certainly, but honestly many of the cast are not as relatable in there struggle as the classic harvest moon titles.

Rivalry not a thing in these titles despite the fact that it seems the dev might have had it in mind when designing the relationship the towns folks had. The combat is honestly not good, and should be removed anyways. It is harvest moon after all not runefactory. Options for crops looks varied, but you'll soon find that there's only 1 real viable way to get as much income as possible.

Walk speed is way too fucking slow and the overall village is way too large and needed to be more condensed. Plus another normal feature in harvest moon was the fact that in building time stops moving all together allowing you to essentially do whatever task you had in whatever building without worrying about the shops or events shutting down. A feature that honestly doesn't change much in it's removal, but feels weird to not add it anyways.

Alot of my issues can be modded out of the game and because it's so easy to mod the crap out of this title you can actually just create an entirely different game. Or even add sudo expansion that expand the city, and add more townsfolks. Replay-ability is endless and it's not uncommon for someones title to look completely different from others.

Reviewed on Nov 27, 2022


1 Comment


1 year ago

just to eliminate some confusion:

even the earliest harvest moon games are actually called "story of seasons" in japan. the new "harvest moon" games are not made by any of the same developers, and are only called what they are because natsume owns the "harvest moon" name

it's convoluted and confusing but the current "harvest moon" games are nothing more than cheap attempts to cash in on a recognizable name