Harvest Moon: A horrible, slow life.
The main plot of the game is to raise a farm. You have ten days per season (trust me, it feels very long), and the game progresses as you get married, have a child and everyone gets old. In the ps2 edition, you get to marry Lumina and you also get more variety in fishing. That's it. That's the "special" edition.
"What's so bad about it?" you may ask. Well, for one, it's slow. VERY slow. I've never seen such bad frame-rate in my life! I'm sure there are other worst games than this, but it was torture for me to continue playing. I'm surprised that I even lasted one year into the game. Every time you go into a building, it loads; jump over a fence, loads; go to the pause menu, loads. It takes ten freakin' seconds just for your character to eat a food item. It takes five seconds to water ONE freakin' square field of crop. Look, I can go on and on about how bad it is, but I guess you already got the point.
The graphics aren't that great. Everything's 3d, and you can go into first person view from where you're standing, but the whole place is muddy. It's like there's a brown stain on that whole harvest moon world and if you looked closer at the ground, you can see lines. There was this one time, when it was five a.m in the game, I was outside and it was just pitch black. Literally, pitch black. Another thing to watch out for is that when it rains, the graphics get quite dark. Add all of this and the annoying background music, and you've got one recipe for an agonizing game. Thank god, at least you can turn off the music from the recorder.
The characters are truly boring. There's almost no life to them because they don't act as a community. In Back To Nature, almost everyone has a job, be it a librarian; blacksmith; priest; wine connoisseur; etc. In this game, everyone is in their own world and most of them don't have jobs. If you wanted to buy an animal or a tool, you just order it from Takakura and that's that. Also, there are hardly any town festivals. There's only ONE festival per season, and they aren't even fun. The girls that you can date look like they're eight years old. The harvest sprites don't even do ANYTHING! They're practically useless because they don't help you with any of your tasks. What's the point of befriending these emotionless characters? Sure, they give you free items, but after that, there's no point talking to them anymore.
Animals are the main source of your income. Instead of a balanced profit from both your crops and animals, you have to rely on dairy products instead because crops aren't even worth the time. They have made the sheep completely redundant because it only gives one wool piece per season. You get a horse, but you can't race with it or anything.
IMO, this is the worst harvest moon I have ever played.
If you want to play this, do NOT buy the ps2 edition. I'm doing you a favor, get the gamecube version instead. The point of a game is to have fun ... not suffer through it.