Difficulty:

Easy

Time Spent:

20 to 40 Hours

The Bottom Line:

"Almost, but not quite"

My favorite things about it:
- I love the graphics, theyre sharp and clear and easy to read and see, and well designed. Not realistic, but if your aiming for a more cartoon-y feel, they're wonderful.
- I like the dating aspect of the game, and the farming is just fun, and a lot of the things I loved about Harvest Moon 64 are in it.
- Riding the Ostrich is fun.
- I'm glad I'm still allowed to name my animals and farm whatever crazy names I choose.
- I like the design of the town.
- Rainbow recipes are like a treasure/scavenger hunt, which is a welcome addition.
- Mining is fun.
- It's cool that you get to choose the plot of land you start on, and then you can create houses on all the properties and take over the whole board like Monopoly.
- House decorating is very entertaining.
- Allowing the player to choose a gender makes the game more accessible to girls.

Things I dislike about it:
- I hate that the camera doesn't rotate, come on, even on Harvest Moon 64 you could rotate it in 90 degree angles, why are we moving backwards?
- The motion controls are boring, although it was generous of them to make fishing either pressing a button repeatedly and hurting your finger, or just hold the wii remote upright for a while. Kind of a drastic difference.
- The days start to get repetetive and long and dull and almost like torture after playing for a year or two.
- Some weird issues with things that should have been fixed.
For example: rice says it grows multiple times. No it doesn't.
Saury says it is found on the Gull Islands. No it's not, its in the ocean below the town.
- It very hard to make turtles and wild animals become pets, but maybe I'm just not trying hard enough.
- Town is hard to navigate around at first, until you get used to it.
- You can't date the Mayor's daughter. Why not? Just because she's the mayor's daughter? Is she too young? She looks as old as all the other girls.
- Loading times are awful, especially if you go in an area, accidently go backward, and then have to wait for it to load, then go back yet again. (I do that a lot.)
-House decorating has too many red spots where you can't place objects for no discernable reason.

Overall it's fun. It's too bad that it gets dull very quickly. I love collecting the rainbow ingredients, I love the dating aspect, the farming is fun, getting rich is very rewarding. It's a great game, but it can be hard, sometimes you don't get a lot of information on things randomly and you have to figure out stuff for yourself.

Still though, I don't regret buying it at all.