A dissapointment for HM fans and PSP owners alike
The biggest qualm with IL is that it's been designed, not as other harvest moons, but has had an annoying storyline that suffocates the gameplay in order to accomodate itself. At the starting intro, you are told that you're a robot, and that every week you'll need to take up some maintenance time with your maker, which incidentally gets the story moving along at a very slow pace. that rules out marriage and children.
Tied into the storyline, are crystals which inset into your farmland to 'unlock' new areas to farm. You cant proceed the story unless you have the required crystals as they unlock new doors in wilderness areas in which story related elements are.
Add the fact that the storyline MUST be progressed in a linear fashion with no room for mistakes*** nor room for freedom, and the whole of what IL stood for in trying to break new ground in the HM franchise with a storyline, falls to pieces.
The second largest problem with IL is the ornamentality of most items ingame. You get a kitchen, but are a robot so you cant eat. You get given a dog and a cat, but cant enter them in petshows as in other Harvest moons. Money has almost no value, as the only way to improve your farm is story related, so as such growing crops and raising animals becomes meaningless as the only item to spend it on is growing more crops.
Growing crops themselves become meaningless once you've got a helper****.
All in all, while IL was a brave attempt at putting new ideas into an old franchise, it sacrificed it's gameplay for a shoddy storyline, and made it a shallow boring ghost of HM
***-SPOILER
One of the story specific quests requires that you find a harvest sprite who likes parties, the only way to find him is by growing 20 of a certain type of flower of which only grow in winter.
You need the highest level watering can to penetrate the ice, and you have to meet him on christmas, if not ,you've got another boring year ahead.
****-SPOILER
The robotic helper clears weeds, logs, small stones, waters plants, resulting in taking care of crops almost redundant as all one need do is plant the seeds and harvest the actual crop.