Harvest Moon! More Please!

So, if you looked over my previous post, you might have noticed (at the very end) a discrete mentioning of Harvest Moon: Magical Melody.

Harvest Moon is a farm-simulation game: grow crops, work on your husbandry with cows, goats and sheep (the latter two in later games) or with chickens. However, in the console-based incarnations of the game, you also woo a potential spouse (which is required in atleast two/three of the games) and get a child. Before HM: A Wonderful Life for the GameCube, you couldn't really do much at all with your child. He'd just stay basically as a toddler.

But, with A Wonderful Life, you got the ability to begin influencing your child's future among quite a few possibilities. The drawback with A Wonderful Life (and Another Wonderful Life, the version that lets you play as a girl) is how restricting it is. You -must- marry in your first year or your game ends. Also, the original edition of AWL had a very short number of years for you to play, along with the horrible other things taken out of the line (proper festivals, 30 day seasons, some other things).

Magical Melody? Ahh, boy oh boy did Marvelous Interactive [mmv-i.net, Japanese] and Natsume [natsume.com, English, Flash Heavy] make up for A(nother) Wonderful Life! It is very cel-shaded and very toony looking, but having proper village festivals back along with the ability to now raise and train multiple horses for racing has made it more than worth it. Plus, much to my happiness, many characters from past games have been brought back, including Nina, one of my favorite potential wives from essentially the first two-ish console-based versions of Harvest Moon (HM SNES and HM64). Plus, they finally incorporated playing both the boy and girl player characters into the game, so you no longer have to buy a second console game if you want to play the girl's side of the story (which..I will...undoubtedly...try at some point)

Now, here is the list of consoles that Harvest Moon has been on:
SNES, Nintendo 64, PSx/PSOne, PS2 (twice), GameCube (thrice), and soon to be Revolution/Wii, if I remember correctly.

On handheld:
Original GameBoy (twice?), GameBoy Color, GameBoy Advance (twice), Nintendo DS (soon, if not out by time of this post).

So, as you can tell, it has quite a good line of previous versions going for it. I've played the SNES, N64, one of the PS2 versions, and two of the GameCube versions along with Harvest Moon GB2, though I'd have to check my cart collection to confirm that.

And just because I'm strange, here are the names, in order to what I posted for console and handheld:
Console: Harvest Moon (SNES), Harvest Moon 64 (N64), Harvest Moon: Back to Nature (PSx), Harvest Moon: Save the Homeland (PS2), Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life SE (Special Edition) (PS2), Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life (GC), Harvest Moon: Another Wonderful Life (GC), Harvest Moon: Magical Melody (GC)

Handheld: Harvest Moon GB (GameBoy), Harvest Moon GB2 (GameBoy), Harvest Moon GBC (GameBoy Color), Harvest Moon: Friends of Mineral Town (GameBoy Advance), Harvest Moon: More Friends of Mineral Town (GameBoy Advance), Harvest Moon DS (Nintendo DS)(soon!)


Yeah..so I'm a Harvest Moon fanatic. I remember playing the SNES version, I was really emotional after I played the game to the end...it didn't allow continuing past the end of the game and I had probably been obsessed with the game for about a week before completing it. I don't have a destructive obsession like that anymore, but the HM games definately have a special place in my heart. Now ridicule me if you like, but it won't matter because I play what I like. I'm not about to pretend that I only play bloody slaughtering games. There isn't much engaging behind most of those.



...And just as I was doing some research for this post (just before this sentence here), I found out that the next-gen HM game will be Harvest Moon Online...Oh My God, thank you. Goosebumps all the frick over. It'll probably be on PC, with the possibility of Xbox360, PS3 and Nintendo Revolution/Wii. I'm going to go spaz in the corner now..eee, HMO..

Notes: The original house behind Harvest Moon was Victor Interactive, which begot Marvelous Entertainment, which begot Marvelous Interactive.