The most lifeless and glitchy Harvest Moon Adventure yet!
Let's get to the dirt of this review. This game is in one word: unfinished. There was a pretty good amount of potential with it, but there are just so many things missing that it almost seemed like this game is still slated for a later release and they just sent you a work in progress. There are missing sound effects, missing functions for items, and even entirely missing items. One in particular makes it impossible to marry some of the special girls in the game. It seems odd that any debugging crew would overlook issues as massive as this. but if you play trough even a season or two of this game (if not less) you will start to wonder if this game ever was debugged! Basically, this game is glitchy to the point where it hinders normal gameplay.
I'll stop with the glitch gripes there because though I could go on for pages, I think most readers get my point by now. Moving on to a less important portion of the game is the presentation. The presentation is decent in graphics and sound (minus the oddly placed and seemingly missing sound effects that pop up) can sound good. The seasonal music around your farm sounds great. Really the issue here that ruins presentation is how the general graphics are just recycled from previous harvest moon games. The only nice touch as far as presentation goes would be would be portraits of the characters you talk to. Other that, graphics are outdated
Now your thinking so the graphics are just there, and the game has a buttload of glitches. Where is the good? Well the good comes in when you get down to the raw farming gameplay, that though is somewhat ruined by the previously (and heavily) mentioned glitches, is still there. The farming is basically unchanged from the other Harvest Moon games, and when you get around the other issues in this game, it plays just as good!
To make a long story short: It seems when Natsume created Harvest Moon DS, they used the saying "If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Unfortunately when they shipped he game, they didn't realize that it was broken, and when comes to the insane amount of glitches in this game, they sure didn't fix it.