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What is the best Harvest Moon game?
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My only complaint is that it's a little too hardcore. There are ton of upgrades and things to buy but the only way you'll ever afford them is if you grind the mine for treasure every other day. In other HM games, I'll trek to the bottom of the mine once to see what's there but in this game I did it four or five times and I don't even like mining. I just wanted more wonderfuls and more money. Also, people's happiness will decrease if you don't talk to them for awhile. Faceless townspeople will leave if you ignore them too. I found myself talking to every person every day to avoid this and it felt like a chore. The watering/sun system was fine at first but eventually I lost patience with it.
Basically, I would recommend Island of Happiness to a Harvest Moon veteran but I would never recommend it to a person new to the series.
Island of Happiness : see above post. Great but not for a newbie.
Magical Melody : I loved this but there are little to no story or character events. There are many SNES characters in it though! This game is trumped by ToT in every way.
HM DS: I haven't played this one. I heard it's alright under the game-breaking glitches.
Rune Factory 1 : It's pretty decent. The sequel is better but doesn't make this one bad. I'd recommend it if you're looking for monsters to fight while growing turnips.
HM PS2 : You mean Save the Homeland? This game is character driven and actually pretty good. The cons are that farming is practically optional and that you can't get married.
Wonderful Life: Starts off great but then becomes boring even for a farm simulation. It's not terrible but I wouldn't recommend it.
VERDICT: If you can't wait for Tree of Tranquility, I'd honestly recommend Magical Melody for the GameCube... but then again I hear the European Wii version is worse so I dunno.
edit: ToT's sequel, Animal Parade is supposed to be out October 21st.
Island of Happiness is awful. Avoid it.
Magical Melody is enjoyable and a great place to start but it's definitely Harvest Moon Easy Mode.
Harvest Moon DS is my favorite but it's balls to the wall difficult; mainly because you have to know youe way around all the glitches.
Rune Factory is a great series but 1 devolves into repetition WAY too quickly. 2 is more interesting but it starts as uber basic Harvest Moon until you get married and that's a good long time into the game. RF Frontier is probably the best Harvest Moon out there right now and one of the most beuatiful games I've ever seen. HOWEVER. The Runey system is mind blastingly annoying to deal with. Find out all about it before you start playing.
There is no PS2 Harvest Moon gfame worth playing.
A Wonderful Life was an interesting attempt but in the end it just doesn't end up working out as a very good game. I'd avoid them as well.
So what makes it awful? I thought the concept sounded cool.
edit: actually, I made this exact thread over a year ago:
http://forums.penny-arcade.com/showthread.php?t=54883
it's 6 more pages of mostly the same advice
From what I have read about it, stylus only controls (no other option!) coupled with poor hit detection means you're going to be wasting a lot of energy in-game and in real life. Characters say less than in other games, everyone is barely characterized with very little dialogue. Apparently it is easy, yet takes a long time to get going, since upgrades are very expensive.
They fixed it in later interation of the "Boy" game as well.
Of course, they removed all the special fiancees from the Girl version so it's totally boring.
I agree though, I prefer the ending+scoring.
I would shy away from Island of Happiness in general. It has some neat systems to it, but it's also needlessly complex. The crop growing system requires you to keep very careful track of the weather if you want your crops to grow well (this is not explained in-game), and the social system isn't explained very well. People will sometimes randomly go off into a huff and refuse gifts from you for no apparent reason. And while it's neat to see the island grow, most of the residents who move in are just Generic Farmer/Tourist/Fisherman/Whatever #4 with no personality. I'm a Harvest Moon veteran, but I found that it was too much work and not enough game, overall.
I mean, if you're moving to a new town obviously you're going to spend the first night in the inn. The mayor gets your house ready fairly quickly but let's be real; you need a place to sleep for a few days. The nearby farm will give you a place to stay but expect to earn your supper. (Also, Craig is awesome.)
I liked how characters moved in gradually. I would've liked if they started moving in on their own instead of making you complete the first recipe though. I missed one of the items and had to wait until the next flea market to buy it, pushing the date of new new characters moving in by a whole season.
I also liked how there is a story beyond "dead relative's farm needs fixing". The story isn't mind blowing, but it has nice pacing and I didn't always know what would happen next.
I liked how other couples got married and quickly (impossibly quickly!) had a child of their own. Jin and Anissa had a school age child by the fall of year 1! The kids have their own personalities too, although mostly a mashup of their parents.
I liked how you could dress in different clothes and decorate your house with different furniture. It's not the only Harvest Moon to do this, but I think it's a great feature. It's neat how other characters have different clothes for the colder seasons.
I like how you can attend a festival, leave and go fishing/whatever, and come back to see the end of the festival. Why should you waste a whole day?
I like how you can (slowly) befriend animals and make them your pets. Turtle was a nice addition to our family.
Seriously, best HM game ever.
edit: And you can ride around town on an ostrich. GOTY.
http://www.playfirst.com/game/wandering-willows
http://www.mobygames.com/game/wandering-willows
Longer description from Mobygames:
That sounds... kind of neat? It's $20 as a download now, but Amazon is advertising it for sale as a disc game on Sept. 7 for $10. Wondering if anyone's played it before and can comment.
EDIT: Just noticed there's a timed (1 hr) download from the publisher site. Guess I'll try it when I have time.
Animal Parade looks like a revamp of ToT (which I never played, but which sounds great) with more features. Sunshine Islands looks like it has a bit less going on, but it's portable, and has button controls (I liked IoH, but the touch controls drove me nuts). Any suggestions?
(Forgive the thread necromancy)
Tree of Tranquility is phenomenal for a "pure" harvest moon game, with only a few features missing or that I don't like (there have never been ANY perfect harvest moons).
Rune Factory is also excellent, and brings in the combat RPG experience.
I'm still going to say HM64/FoMT for me.
HM64 is the perfect simple harvest moon game, as perfect as a game with the localization company's name misspelled in the title screen can be.
FoMT is right at the edge of complete perfection...with all those bugs. Enough content to last a person 1000 hours or more, but still accessible to your average player.
Also, whenever you paused the game in your field, it took a crap ton of time to get back from it.
BTN was great because it added a bunch of nice features and more festivals. That game never froze up or glitched out on me, so I consider it the best in the series.
ToT was great and I played it for 14 hours in one day. The only problem I had with it was the long load times going from area to area.
I don't know much about Animal Parade, but I'm thinking about getting Sunshine Islands. I skipped the one before it since it was only touch controls.
It's fairly easy to get FoMT to freeze, but most of those are well known and easily avoidable. Can't do anything to fix the load save times on BtN, nor some of the random freezes during those times, which were the worst. I lost two saves to that game, both over 50 hours.
FoMT was really good, but I didn't play it as much as 64 or BTN for some reason.
I wish there was a perfect Harvest Moon, but there isn't. Even Magical Melody had a few problems with it. And I thought the AWL series was awful.
Harvest Moon (SNES) - Classic, simple, challenging, controls well, fun.
Harvest Moon 3 (GBC) - See above, expanded somewhat, but also shrunken down at the same time.
Back to Nature (PSX) - Huge amount of content, great controls, great town, great cast, great farm, but nearly impossible to pick a save back up if you stop to play some other game for any significant length of time.
The rest failed to appeal to me for various reasons, often technical suckage. In the case of HM64 I didn't own an N64.
So far no Rune Factory game has held my attention either. I don't feel like they're trying hard enough with them.
PSN: theIceBurner, IceBurnerEU, IceBurner-JP | X-Link Kai: TheIceBurner
Dragon's Dogma: 192 Warrior Linty | 80 Strider Alicia | 32 Mage Terra
Thus, it is the best game in the series. I didn't mind the stylus controls in the first one after I got used to it, and I liked having all the townspeople (having to start a town from scratch that was fueled by how much you stimulated the economy was an awesome idea), and I thought the upgrade progression was easier and made more sense than in any of the other games. But they seemed to be the biggest complaints, and it looks like they took all that stuff out. Except the upgrade progression, which seems to be the same.
Sunshine Islands is the same location and characters, except the island is already fully developed. You "resurrect" other islands in the chain which brings in new characters and stuff, but the number of characters has been trimmed down to 30 or so, with only a few faceless characters. There's a couple new people, but I'm disappointed it's the exact same cast.
To resurrect the islands, you need to collect sun stones. You get these the same way you get sprites in HMDS, by checking random locations, shipping certain numbers of seasonal crops, giving gifts to townspeople, talking to people, et cetera. I've got two or three so far, and I think you can resurrect islands with sets of 3-10.
There are also harvest sprites that offer to "enchant" for you, for free, and in addition to tending your farm, they also do things like raise friendship levels with specific townspeople, make things in the shop cheaper, stuff like that. You unlock these guys too, but you start with a basic set that does pretty much everything.
The crop cycle is more forgiving, I've heard, but I never had problems with it in the first game. Seems okay so far, but I'm only halfway through spring. The wonderful system is back, but the important stones are actually for sale in the shop instead of being the one thing in the game that is impossible to obtain.
I think the friendship system is a little more complex. You need to unlock stones by giving gifts, which is something I'm not inclined to do unless I'm courting someone.
PSN: theIceBurner, IceBurnerEU, IceBurner-JP | X-Link Kai: TheIceBurner
Dragon's Dogma: 192 Warrior Linty | 80 Strider Alicia | 32 Mage Terra
Sad day.
I really just liked all the characters.
I'd say go with ToT. It really is a superb Harvest Moon game, and will be significantly different to play from IoH, unlike Sunshine Islands. But I think everybody should try ToT.