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Harvest Moon: Another Wonderful Life Hands-On

We give farming a feminine touch in this iteration of the strangely addictive Harvest Moon franchise.

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The Harvest Moon games have always been about the rewarding minutiae of a simple, rustic life--milk your cows, plant your crops, keep an eye on the weather, teach the dog some tricks, and in the end, run a successful farm and settle down with a spouse to enjoy it all. All this has typically played out from a male point of view (as you've always assumed control of a young man), complete with the selection and wooing of one of the village maidens to be your bride and bear your adorable children. Harvest Moon: Another Wonderful Life is essentially the same game as A Wonderful Life, but the twist is that you'll be playing a lady farmer this time around. We journeyed back to Forget Me Not Valley with a preview copy of the game to see how things have changed now that it's a woman's world.

Get dirt under your fingernails and plant a bunch of tomatoes. Tomatoes are the key to success!
Get dirt under your fingernails and plant a bunch of tomatoes. Tomatoes are the key to success!

Just as in Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life, your character is left an impressive spread of a farm by your deceased father. Deciding to leave the city life behind you, you travel to Forget Me Not Valley and meet up with Takakura, an older fellow with an enormous set of eyebrows who was a close friend of your old pops. He shows you around the farm, gives you a basic idea of what you need to take care of, introduces you to some of the more notable people in town, and then vanishes into his own cottage on the property, leaving you to your own devices. It's up to you to cultivate your fields as you wish, take care of your animal friends (you start off with a dog and your very own cow, which you can name), and begin making a wonderful life for yourself.

The most notable change in this version is that your character is a young woman instead of a young man, but she has no trouble performing any of the usual farm chores you'll need to accomplish to keep everything in tip-top shape. Harvest Moon is still a holistic experience, as everything you do is balanced by your monetary resources, the weather, the quality of your land, the crops you choose to plant, and the animals you choose to keep. As you move through various areas of the game, the green A button will change depending on the options you have available. You'll be able to interact with many things: you can check the soil to see how fertile it is before you decide what to plant, you can have a nice chat with your cow or give her a milking, you can pick up your dog and see how she's feeling, you can wash your sheep by the water trough for cleaner wool, and more.

There's always something to take care of on the farm, whether it's your crops, your beasts, or your pasture. If it's a rainy day, you'll have to pile the feed troughs high and leave your animals inside the barn so they don't get sick, but your plants will get plenty of water. If it's sunny, you should get your animal friends into the pasture to enjoy the grass and the warm air, but you'll have to water all your plants more frequently. There's a wide number of vegetables for you to plant, trees you can grow, animals you can tend to, and you're really only limited by your ability to care for them. The passage of days is accelerated in the valley, so you'll learn to make the most of the time you have for your various chores, while also making time for other options, like fishing, mining for fossils, or chatting up the townsfolk while looking for your perfect mate.

And, being that you're a lady this time around, you'll get to choose one of the eligible bachelors in town to be your better half. Much like the previous game, you'll win a boyfriend's affections by chatting with him and offering him presents. You'll be able to choose from the dark and shyly silent Marlin, the fashionable pretty-boy, Rock, and the guitar-strumming Gustafa. Once you've established a good relationship with one of them, you can offer him a feather and get hitched. Your child will inherit the qualities of his father, and you'll get to spend time cultivating family bonds while continuing to cultivate your farm. Being a stay-at-home father apparently doesn't bother your husband one bit.

Visually, the game isn't much of an update from A Wonderful Life, but it still carries the same rustic charm, bristling with lots of bright and simple detail. The 3D characters are all very distinct in appearance and contain a lot of personality in their looks. Also, the environments are dynamic. The time of day will be reflected in the direction and quality of shadows cast by the rising or setting sun, and you'll be able to see your seeds develop into sprouts, flowering plants, and ripening vegetables before your eyes. The sound package has a number of quaint tunes that change depending on where you are on your farm or around town, and there's a scattering of sound effects for varying actions and types of weather that helps to round out the world of the valley that much more.

Girls just wanna have fun.
Girls just wanna have fun.

Another Wonderful Life isn't an all-new experience; it is an iteration on A Wonderful Life that keeps virtually all the elements identical, but allows you to play as a young woman. For female players that might be tired of constantly being asked to have their strapping young farmer woo a variety of young ladies, it's a nice style switch that should serve to make this addicting sim just that much better. And you'll be able to hook up this game with the upcoming More Friends of Mineral Town for the Game Boy Advance to further flesh things out and make this tale of female agricultural acumen even more complete. Those of you who'd like to embark on a more feminine farming career don't have too much longer to wait, as the game is due for release at the end of July. Keep your eyes on this gamespace for more news as it sprouts.

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