Harvest Moon comes to the DS, but not a whole lot has changed.
So, what exactly does HMDS bring to the table that you haven't seen? Well, first let me: "Who's ready for gimmicky touch screen controls?!" If you raised your hand in excitement in response to that question, you're gonna love the new content HMDS has to offer! For everyone else, there's always Rune Factory.
The touch-screen controls themselves consist almost completely of waving your stylus left-right as fast you can to pet, brush, milk or shear your animal. All of these mini-games are done by having the touch glove equipped. The games themselves run off of a point-system, and if you're good at them (and trust me, they're easy) then your animals will like you more if you do it daily, which is a chore as you can imagine. While you can just choose not to use the touch glove, it's greatly beneficial to use it instead of just pressing a, which is a bit frustrating at times.
The game also seems to have added... just a bit of direction. While previous games started you off with a farm full of the buildings you needed to raise the animals you wanted, you have only your house and stable in HMDS. This forces you to gather resources around the town using your axe, sickle and hammer. There are four materials you can use to build what you need, ranging from worst idea to best idea. The worst would be fodder, which is very cheap to build with, but can fall apart in even the weakest rain. Wood can be destroyed in blizzards and fierce storms, while I've yet to experience stone be destroyed. The last material, golden lumber, is solid enough to survive any weather condition but is a bit too expensive to be reasonable. The idea of gathering resources before you can start a poultry or dairy farm is actually a good idea, and something that should be repeated in later games.
While on the subject of new content, let's talk about the story. Yes, they tried adding a story into the farmwork. Do you really even need a storyline when all you're doing is farming? Yeah, I didn't think so. Anyway, HMDS takes place about 100 years after A Wonderful Life and Friends of Mineral Town. Now, as the game starts out, the Witch Princess becomes fed up with the Harvest Goddess, for some reason... apparently she's just "annoying" (as described by the witch herself) so, in order to solve this problem, she speaks a spell to silence her. The spell ends up doing the wrong effect; instead imprisoning her in an alternate dimension (maybe it's the 3rd, living in the far superior Wonderful Life game). The sprites get very upset over this, and she sends them to the alternate dimension as well so that can bring her back. But instead... they all become trapped as well. All 101 sprites wind up stuck in the dimension, and it's up to YOU to save them. How do you this? You till, water, plant, harvest, brush, milk, pet, marry, examine, fish and do everything you possibly can in the game to rescue them. This is supposed to give you a goal to go by; something previous Harvest Moon games lacked. It's instead ruined by the total randomness of how to rescue the sprites. It's too random for you to plan, and instead you just do whatever you want like in all Harvest Moon games, and you'll eventually get all 101.
Once you free 60 sprites, you rescue the Harvest Goddess herself, who then becomes a marriage option. There's actually quite a bit more marriage candidates than usual, and even more if you put a FoMT cartridge in the GBA slot of your DS (the regular candidates from FoMT). You can excpect the same girls from AWL (Muffy, Nami and Celia) but there's also a couple newcomers that you could only befriend on the Gamecube (Lumina and Flora). And, if you befriend Daryll, the scientist, he'll let you into his basement, where he keeps a mermaid (Leia), who you may also woo for marriage.
The regular girls are pretty easy to court (basically consisting of giving them a gift once a day and seeing each of their heart events), but the special girls (Leia, Witch Princess, Harvest Goddess and Keria) have some pretty strict requirements. Some of which are even a bit too ridiculous to follow through on. For example, marrying the Witch Princess requires you to kill off at least 50 of your animals! A task that will make everyone else in the town completely despise you. Or there's Keria, who requires you to dig down to the 255th level of the mine just do see her daily, which is NOT an easy task.
The other characters of the game can be befriend by gift-giving, as usual, but there's not a whole lot of point to it. Other than seeing a cutscene or two for befriending someone (and even still, you have to be at the right place at the right time) there's really no real reward for talking to the locals, unlike in A Wonderful Life where you got your tool upgrades by being friends with people, which is a lot more fun than mining for ore. Making friends does reveal a bit more personality to the characters in the town, but there's not much to the relationship other than giving them a present everyday, and since there's no real reward to it, the relationships seem pretty one-sided.
When you talk to the locals, they'll tell their ancestors settled here for whatever reason, and if you go back and play A Wonderful Life, you'll find that the same characters said the same things, just about themselves rather than their ancestors. It's a neat touch, but it hardly makes sense that the descendants of AWL all have the same names and are identical to them. It seems more like an excuse for laziness to escape making an entirely new game, to me.
Graphically, the game could have been done on the GBA with ease. There's nothing to gawk about in the game, though the scenery is quite peaceful and pretty-looking. The graphics aren't much of a bother, but I do sometimes wish it had a higher FPS rate. It seems a bit clunky as you run around, looking borderline slideshow-ish.
In conclusion: if you're a diehard Harvest Moon fan, you'll probably like this installment just as much as all the others. If you've never played a Harvest Moon game, it won't matter either way. If you want a Harvest Moon game that does something different for once, this one should be a pass. The added direction in the game still may not be enough for the game to live out the decades of in-game time it has to offer.