Harvest Moon SNES was a good idea, but it would have been nice if it didn't end so fast, and with such a critique.
First, your field is a mess, and you have to clear it all up before you can do any crop-growing, which is the only thing you can afford at this point. Afterwards, you can grab 2 tools from your shed and till the earth and plant your seeds (which you buy from town). Next, watering and so on. Little does the player know that he has only a few short years to sell as much of every crop as possible, befriend everyone as much as possible, and woo the girls as much as possible. You also have to have all your animals love you, you have to have bought upgrade after upgrade, and you must have made an exceedingly large amount of money before the end of the game, or your score will be poor. Wow, that's a lot of work, and for a beginner, it's not easy. Of course, you can always go back later and start a new game to gain experience, but you'd have to go through the few years AGAIN, which is another long process, just to improve by a few thousand or so. What a great ending.
Now, it isn't all bad. You have a nice selection of mates to choose from, and you've got a fair amount of crop-growing that can be done, even at the beginning. I could harvest about a hundred turnips and a couple dozen potatoes at the end of my first spring. Even so, I still couldn't afford more than one cow and one chicken, and I was struggling to make the payments for the monthly feed. After the first year, I was about to get married, only because I worked my head off and had some previous experience with HM already from the newer games. Yes, I just started this game recently. I bought an old copy from EBGames. Anyways, I managed to have a score of roughly 8 or 9 thousand by the end of my farming years, which I thought to be pretty good. Then I heard that it could be more than triple that. However, I did have fun going back to HM's roots and playing around with the old controls, but thank heavens it improved over the years. I'm not sure I can stand this game much longer.
Basically, the gameplay is limited, but it does allow you some freedom. You can grow and do whatever you want, and you can go as slow as you want. But if you care about what happens at the end, you better pick up the pace and get to work. You have a variety of tasks you can accomplish, and some can be quite entertaining and even quite addicting in some ways. Farming is by far my favourite thing to do in the HM games, and I practically live off of my plants. It's a great game to play if you want to do some virtual nature-exploring and to get a taste of what the real thing's about, then by all means, get it. That's why I got it, and it wasn't all that bad. Still, it was a great disappointment to see that there was an ending and you couldn't go on forever. Still, it deserves some credit, being one of the first game to kick-start the long-running series.
Since all you can go back for is to marry a different girl or to improve your score, there isn't much replay value here. It's nice to go through it again if you didn't want to stop playing when it ended, but after a while it becomes annoying to start from scratch every time. Although the gameplay was nice and had some immersive aspects, there wasn't much els to do once your time was up.
I had a little problem with the animals as well. You had to put feed in a specific stall, or the darn animal wouldn't eat, and then it wouldn't give you any products for 3 days. Was there a storm? Too bad, no milk or eggs for 3 days, and that's if they're fed every one of those days. Another storm? Have fun. While it was nice to have something else living around the farm, to me, they felt a little useless at times. That has improved over the years though, which is good. As long as mistakes are learned form.
Overall, because I love the series and I know the first game is usually a bad start due to early and primitive graphics etc., and of course they did fix all the mistakes they made in this game, AND it was pretty fun to play through a couple times, so I can't give it lower than an 8. It's a good start to the series, but I wouldn't say it's a classic or that it was a revolutionary game for the SNES. It was solid, it was fun, it had good features, and it had it's perks. Even so, it did have a lot of problems, although some were easy to overlook. I say that anyone can play this game, as long as the ending isn't something you want to ace or you don't mind being cut off before you want it to end. It was a nice first, but it could have used a bit more planning out. Not bad though, in terms of style and flair. No wonder it's still going.