Who would have thought that one of the most addicting games of all time was a farming sim?
Harvest Moon has a very simple story, and the game wouldn’t work any other way. You play a young man who recently moved back into his hometown to start a farm. That’s it. For the rest of the game…you farm. You plow your fields, grow crops, and raise animals. When your crops come to harvest, you can ship ‘em off to town for some money, money you’ll need to upkeep your farm. I like going into the neighboring town, taking some seasonal fruit, and selling it as added income. You have to watch for weather, because it’s bound to rain, or snow, or gasp! the dreaded hurricane. That’s right, you’ll get a hurricane. You have to board your house up after seeing the ad on television (the weather is about ALL you watch on television) and you’ll probably lose all your crops. I always kept my dog in the house, and my other animals in the barn, so I didn’t lose any livestock. The days, seasons, and years progress, and as you get older, tending your farm isn’t enough anymore. You may want a bigger house; you may have to make repairs after the hurricane. You have to hire someone for that. You can go to town functions, talk to the people in both towns, and sooner or later you’re gonna have to get hitched. There ain’t no other way around it, a hitchin has got to go down. (You have no idea how bad I just set Microsoft Word off typing those last few sentences. The thing is such a stickler for grammar it almost takes the fun out of typing. Maybe PC’s really are best represented in those Mac Commercials). Well, once you get married you have to add on to your house, that’s what I’ve been trying to get at. But seriously, Harvest Moon is fun. It’s so simple and engaging that you can’t help but be entertained by the way the game isn’t afraid to have fun, and isn’t afraid not to take itself seriously. It really goes some way toward legitimizing farm-based Sims. That was a joke. You can laugh. Anyway, yeah, it may take awhile to the hang of, but soon enough you’ll be running your farm like a true pro.
The graphics have their own distinct feel as well. Everything is very fluid, cartoonish SD kind of thing that really gives the game some artistic credibility. It’s kind of the last type of animation you’d expect to see in a game like this, but it works wonders. Everything is colorful and fun without becoming too childish which really goes toward setting up a bond with some of the people you’ll be seeing a lot of, like your dog, your wife, or yourself. The graphics are a mighty fun thing in Harvest Moon, and I don’t really know if the game would be the same without them.
The sound in the game is also pretty good. The music sounds good, the sound effects are pretty good, everything works quite well. There really isn’t much to say about Harvest Moon’s music. It kind of gets overshadowed by the other elements of the game, but the tracks aren’t annoying, even if they don’t stand out.
This game is such immense fun that its hard to imagine that it could ever get old, although I’m sure it’s bound to happen after so many ten’s of hours spent tending your garden and jacking fruit from the neighboring community. It never happened to me though, and I played the game quite often. He truth is its kind of brilliant fun is just something that needs to be marveled at. Open and shut, cut and dried.
Harvest Moon is loads of fun, there’s just no other way to put it. It’s one of the best games for the SNES, for that generation and, frankly, for all of them. Great start to a great series.