The fantasy element allows for Harvest Moon’s greatest achievement: the telling of stories. It never goes as far as Rune Factory’s monster-hunting element, because that would detract from Harvest Moon’s focus on small, quiet, personal stories, but being able to befriend a yeti or visit a casino run by pixies seems like a fitting distraction from rainy days on the farm. These fantasy elements are what keeps the games rolling through the years - the weird stuff, the magic and the myth, is the gamey bit - your reward for toiling so patiently over crop rotations and livestock management. Farming, in isolation, has never directly solved anything so exciting but Harvest Moon offers an entirely different take on agricultural revolutions. Does it sound ridiculous? Yes, of course it does. Another, Tale of Two Towns, tasks you with uniting two warring villages - through the power of farming. Harvest Moon DS asks you to save the Harvest Goddess, turned to stone by her rival, the Witch Princess, through the power of farming. Sunshine Islands, one of the many DS games, begins with a horrible natural disaster which sinks a load of islands, and you have to bring them back through the power of farming. The Harvest Moon games all center around the same basic concept: revitalising the farm through slow, but rewarding work, but each game has its own gimmick that brings it to life.
You can marry witches, mermaids and ancient princesses that live at the bottom of a mine. Here’s where the fantasy comes in: your equipment is magical. In Monster Hunter, you slay hundreds of beasts to craft a weapon which you will use to slay more in Harvest Moon, you toil for in-game months to unlock a new rank of farm tool that can help you grow even more crops. It’s a self-fulfilling cycle, and a satisfying one at that. In my eyes, Harvest Moon is the smaller, quieter cousin of games such as Monster Hunter and Destiny: games where the grind is the main mechanic, where progress is so incremental that even the smallest grain of success feels special purely because of the amount of effort spent on earning it. Such is farm life in the Harvest Moon world: the slow turning of the seasons begrudgingly giving way to life as you coax it out of the soil. The daily slog is slow, but progress is steady: plant crops, sell for a profit, repeat until you can afford animals, tend to the animals until you can afford more, repeat. Your dungaree pockets are stuffed with turnip seeds and dreams.
#Harvest moom series#
You begin nearly every game in the series with a run-down farm belonging to some dead relative or another. Harvest Moon keeps a lot of the chore, but with infinitely more charm, adding in romance, foraging, collecting and a touch of fantasy. Generally, games that deal in the mundanity of farm life tend to stick to the realities of having to wake up at 4am, heave silage and hay and crops into various farm vehicles, and drive around at road rage-inducingly slow speeds before falling back into bed at 10pm in your wellies. Two hours of patient crop-tending feeds into the larger time flow, the fruitful summers giving way to harsher, stonier winters as your farm blossoms and dies and blossoms anew. There’s little tangible benefit to a two-hour gaming session, but in the same way that scientists monitor the pitch drop experiment in the hopes of seeing a once-in-a-decade occurrence, it’s all about the wait. The series is part of a strange, yet compellingly charming mini-genre of role-playing games, alongside Animal Crossing and Rune Factory.
#Harvest moom Pc#
The PC is a natural home for a series of games about farming and domestic life, and we shouldn't be wondering why Harvest Moon is coming to PC after all this time, we should be asking why it has taken so long. The critical and commercial success of tranquil sim games such as Euro Truck and Farming Simulator, along with modern life management in the form of Cities: Skylines and The Sims series, is evidence of a continuing hunger for what might be considered the mechanics of the mundane. Now, the quiet, unassuming game is taking its first step - after nearly 20 years - onto PC.
Harvest Moon, a game created by Yasuhiro Wada as an antidote to the bustle of Japanese city life, has spent its entire life on Nintendo consoles (with the occasional foray onto Playstation), leaving a small but dedicated fandom in its wake. There’s plenty of room here for epic space battles with intricate economies and bucolic life simulators. Who would buy a game where the tutorial is an entire in-game year? In a world where it sometimes seems that guns, girls and grit are the special of the day every day, a game which eschews all that for turnips, livestock and progress seems like an outlier.
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