The very essence of compulsion: I play a boring manual labour game to escape boring manual labour...Contains Spoilers!
The story centers around you, an android, who is built to show people how to farm in an old fashioned way. You are made by Professor Hope, the local scientist of this small, volcanic island-bound farming community, as he is concerned that the gods of nature are annoyed at human's over reliance on technology, and mechanised farming. You are given a small plot of land and some tools (apparently on an old temple grounds), and two days after your construction you are left on your own.
The game is essentially an RPG. You have several "human attributes" which increase with certain activities, eg cooking increases when you make a new dish, or watch the cooking channel. You can go to bed at any time, and choose to wake up at one of two. You can till your land, plant crops, remove weeds and water your plants. You can also harvest crops and flowers, find resources, harvest wild crops, and later get animals which produce milk etc. You also have some side mission of getting these stones to open up more of the farm land. On weekends or the afternoons you can go into town and talk to the villagers, or see your "father" Dr Hope, or even watch TV.
The graphics are a little blocky, its fixed perspective 3D, and as it is a port, it doesn't look as good as some PSP games. The music is bland, but fairly relaxing. There is almost no action in the game whatsoever, you are never in any danger, and there isn't any combat. The story is entirely linear, which is not a bad thing, but there are some events which you can change the outcome of to get different items.
The story makes absolutely no sense. Your Dr Hope builds you, a robot, to work on a farm with tools, to grow crops to show the humans how over-reliant on machines they are. So, androids aren't machines now? Tools neither? You even get a robot at one point, and a monorail, and all your animals are kept in a machine barn by android animals. It's also very transparent. At one point Dr Hope falls ill as the spirits start to weaken, because you see HOPE is DYING. Subtle. And, all this stuff about the volcano blowing up because everyone uses machines... why not just build a boat and leave? Anyway, that aside, the game is well enough produced and there is something very compelling about it, but its just not that much fun. I am all for games being less about shooting, and games that teach people constructive useful skills, but this isn't one of them. Perhaps the other Harvest Moon games are better, but this one is just a waste of time.