Harvest Moon: A New Beginning and Why We Keep Playing This One Game

Alright, so I talked about Rune Factory a while ago and I mentioned Harvest Moon, so you and I both knew that this would happen. A whole post on Harvest Moon, specifically new, 3DS Harvest Moon before I go back and talk about old, not 3DS Harvest Moon. But yeah, Harvest Moon. Ready? Go!

Despite this game being called "A New Beginning", this game does not in fact have a new beginning. See, Harvest Moon is like... not the most creative in the beginnings department. I mentioned this before, but... I mean it's really, really ridiculous how this always turns out. Your family has land in Insert_Town_Here, and you know, no one was using it or anything. Sometimes it's like, "Your grandmother/father owned this land, but then they died and you came to take it" and sometimes you're just... driving by and decide to stop in and become a farmer. As you do, I guess.

This game comes from the "my family owned this land and didn't think to rent it out to anyone" family. You just show up, right, and the mayor, Crocodile Dundee, is super happy that you're around.  He asks if you'd like to join the community. You can say no, of course, but that's saying no to adventure. So, you know, your character just automatically says yes.

His name's Dunhill, though.

So you join the happy little town of three people, but then you're joined by another guy, Neil, almost right away. So the town, including you, is five people strong. Then Iroha joins you, making it a six person town. Finally, Rebecca and her son Toni move in and you're now eight people in a small enclosed area and honestly... it could stay that way for a really long time.

But here's the kicker... Harvest Moon: A New Beginning isn't as good as previous Harvest Moon games. And I mean like, games prior to A Tale Of Two Towns. I mean games that are generally thought of as bad, like Grand Bazaar. Why? Well...

Harvest Moon: Not The Best Choice For A Game

Around this time in Harvest Moon, I assume people somewhere were complaining about... err, something. Namely, it's hard to get married to people because if you play without a walkthrough, you might accidentally force your sweetheart to marry someone else. So they dropped that completely from literally every following Harvest Moon game. But just so you know, there is literally no other form of tension in a Harvest Moon game in the beginning of the game.

"We're the hardest people to marry~!"

I'm not saying that the now defunct marriage thing is what makes A New Beginning not that great of a Harvest Moon game, but it's one of the little things.

A New Beginning by the title suggests that the beginning is, in fact, new. That could mean a lot of different things. But I think they decided to take a large step backwards in this game and so the title turns out to be a very... err, faulty lie of a name.

Anyone who buys this game usually buys it with the warning that it has the slowest start-up of every Harvest Moon game. If you've been told this, the person who warned you is absolutely, positively 150% not lying. This game has a literal full year of dicking around before you can really get to do anything. On top of that, if you're not cheating your way through the game, you might find yourself with maybe... two or three bachelorettes for the first year. If you're playing as a girl, you have pretty much the same odds. See, this game is following the template of a few of the games in this year-- full customization. Rune Factory IV had it in the sense that you could decorate your rooms (it wasn't the focus of the game and everything is static so it's pretty annoying) and Animal Crossing had it in spades. This game really focuses on that aspect of gaming, so it has to teach you how you customize your town.

How, you ask? Well, Crocodile Dundee will give you Town Restoration plans, because even though you're not the mayor, you're the one making executive choices for the town. You choose where things are placed, like houses, fields, and so on. Full customization of your farm is, of course, the dream. I don't, however, see why the game changed so much between A Tale of Two Towns and this game.

FARM EVERYWHERE GOD DAMN IT

All Harvest Moon games have a story to break up the monotony of just farming everyday forever, which is why the Harvest Goddess usually is such a raging idiot. Thankfully, they decided to nix the whole "The Harvest Goddess made another whoopsie" story and went for "Everyone moved out of the town" story. I especially like that everyone just demolished their houses the moment they were leaving.

"My son and I run an inn, which I subsequently destroyed out of frustration that no one was coming to visit Echo Village."

Your job is to complete the Town Restoration plans that Crocodile Dundee has and create a new town from nothing. What does this have to do with getting married? Everything. You have to build someone's house in order for them to move in, and you have to build houses of people you don't even like to get people that you do like. I mean, if we were going for full customization, at the very least you should be allowed to pick who you want living in your town. On top of that, to get these people to live in your town, you'd better be cheating or just save everything you pick up, because the town restoration plans happen to be seasonal.

And don't get me started on the hoops you have to jump for the mine.

They don't seem seasonal, which is the problem. For one plan, you need to ship 10 honey, but one of the vital items doesn't appear in the summer or the winter. So if you reach this plan and you've been selling that item, you need to wait a season. The game is already slow enough without this bogging you down. Another thing is that rocks, which you need to break to make material stone, appear very rarely. If you don't buy material stone from Rebecca, good luck trying to finish the second and third plans within two or three years. What's stupid is that black rocks are all over the place, and black rocks take a special hammer to break. What's even more stupid is that small rocks are also literally everywhere but you barely use small material stone for anything.

Some liar somewhere told me that it was easy to make money in this game, which would be true if you weren't sinking your money into buying material stone and saving literally everything on the off chance that it might be used later, which again, would be something you'd have to do if you aren't using a walkthrough. But I guess the worst thing is that you have to buy items to start dating other people, even if they have reverse proposal/engagements. Like if you want to marry Neil, you need to be carrying a blue feather so that he can propose to you. What?

"I can't marry you unless you've put down at least 10000000G on our future. PS, I'm not going to help you on your farm, so... you know, fuck that."

To further the vast amounts of work you need to do for this game, you can get your cows and other produce animals to be more productive. Sounds good, right? Except your animals die and you have to level them up by giving them treats. "Eh." You say. "Still not that bad." Yeah, I know. That's why no one in game informs you and you only learn via straight up cheating that you have to give them a certain number of specific treats (cow, chicken, sheep) and a certain number of general treats to level up your animal. The plus side is, the treats roll over. The minus side is, it takes a bloody fortnight (okay, longer than that) and it adds to the already pretty long amount of time you spend tending to your crops daily. I suggest getting a pet that can herd when you have maybe five barn animals and let them feed themselves outside.

Pets have always been the bane of Harvest Moon because they never give you a pet to start out with, which means you get the pet animal so late in the game that the pet becomes more of a hassle than your produce animals. I get that you don't want the game to be too easy, Natsume, but by the time I buy my first cat or dog, I'm literally done with the game. So this game decided to cut that short (thankfully) and make it so you could buy pets early on, if you complete the town restoration plans quickly. The moment you see "Build a Cottage", you should just dump your money into that so you don't waste half your morning running into and out of buildings to feed your animals. Unless you only have chickens, in which case you have to build a separate place for them to eat outside AND you have to put food down for them everyday. The only upside  to chickens is that the star level of the eggs corresponds to the number of hearts a chick hatched from said egg will have.

And if you have ten chickens, prepare to spend an in-game hour picking them up and putting them down.

But this is a lot of complaining considering that I like the Harvest Moon titles a good deal. So why do I dislike this one so much? Outside of all that stuff I labeled above I just... don't think Harvest Moon has been progressing.

I get it, though. As we move forward, people want new and more exciting things and Harvest Moon is just a status quo. Farming isn't exciting (or new) and so of course players get bored with it. I mean, since Harvest Moon has appeared on the DS, I think only two games have been really original in the whole set. If we're talking about Wii games, don't even get me started-- Animal Parade is probably the best Harvest Moon game for the system and one of the better series installments, but I don't want to play Harvest Moon on a Wii, really. The creator of Harvest Moon, Yashuiro Wada, for some reason thought that the series itself was beyond saving (he called it a marriage simulator) and created a new game, Hometown Story. But that game seems to be suffering from the same flaws that this game is. It's slow, it's extremely boring, and after a while it becomes just... intensely annoying to play. It's like having a job on top of your real life job.

By the way, you can get married in this game, so... marriage simulator, this time without growing stuff.

But have you seen the reviews of that game-- have you played it yourself? I only played a little, but it suffers from Harvest Moon Syndrome hardcore, and it's worse off than the regular Harvest Moon games. Harvest Moon games start getting bad the moment you are no longer interested in the townspeople, romantically or otherwise. On top of that, without the nostalgic backing Harvest Moon has, it's very hard to want to continue playing Hometown Story. The character design took a step back and isn't as cute as Harvest Moon is, the characters are all bland and forgettable, the camera is ridiculous and the music is forgettable too. It's literally just Harvest Moon if you extract all the things that made you play Harvest Moon.

But we keep playing games like Harvest Moon and Hometown Story-- Why? It's a life simulator and we actually live lives, but Harvest Moon's charm comes from the small town closeness that it generates on top of the life simulation, in my opinion. The moment you stop trying to progress making the people in the game interesting is the moment that the game starts to stall. The way to make people continue to play Harvest Moon games is, quite simply, to keep giving them characters to learn about and to keep making the characters interesting. For example, after Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life, you never had to build a relationship with your child again. In Animal Parade, they touched on it, but not in the same way that A Wonderful Life did-- instead of watching your child grow and having a relationship outside of "Hey kid, good to see you're still mine, " A Wonderful Life had character arcs for your child (depending on the mother, but that's still a thing that occurs in game). I don't know why, but this function was completely dropped from the game.

And look at him. HE'S ADORABLE.

With new technology comes better ways to make Harvest Moon interesting again. Why not make it so that people in towns get married to each other again? Why not have small story arcs for your child? Why not make it so that the amount of time you spend with your child as a baby influences the way your child treats you when it grows older-- why not have an "ending" to your character's game and have the child take your place in a New Game + option? How about using the 3DS's DLC to add new characters or levels to an actual mine and not the crap we got in A New Beginning and A Tale of Two Towns? If you're really all about making the game fully customizable, how about finally making the kid look like both parents i.e. make it so that making a black or Asian character isn't just a skin and is actually something that has continuity in the game? They could update the things people say via downloads, or make the characters change clothes depending on the season (they do change their clothes in some games, so the technology exists). There could be downloadable festivals, or ones that only show up on odd numbered years or even numbered years. Maybe make the game so that we can visit a nearby city and open a shop and hire people to run the store? Or make tons of different town events for each year that actually impact the town in some way? How about having characters be indifferent to you, or become your enemy over specific events instead of everyone just being sugary sweet all the time? How about more events that have an effect on your town's look and feel? How about making same sex friends have the option of becoming "best friends" and that resulting in different scenarios and options for the player? In all of Harvest Moon I can only remember one character actually dying, like for real dying. They had a tombstone and everything. Why not more character progressions in that way? What happened to just living your life in a town, even if the town isn't one of your creation?

I need to feel invested in order to play a life simulator. When you really think about the genre of life simulation, gameplay comes in two forms: either you are a god or you are one of the mortals. When you're a god, your "gameplay" comes from your own sense of humors and so forth. For example, the Sims is a life simulator in which you are a god, and people play those games in vastly different ways. But Harvest Moon is a life simulator in a different way. You're no god, you're just a person who lives in a town. Sometimes, you befriend everyone because you love everyone. Sometimes, you just don't befriend people. That's just how it is. Your gameplay experience by and large has nothing to do with who you are, except for who you marry and what you design your house to look like. But investment comes from the same place. Why are you playing the Sims? Are you playing to design houses? You might be, but you're probably not. You're probably playing because of the people. You're probably playing the Sims and enjoying being an immutable, infalliable voice in the lives of computer people. And in Harvest Moon, you might not be a god, but you're probably not playing the game to run a farm. There are plenty of free Facebook games for that. You're also most likely playing Harvest Moon for the people. The gameplay is different, but the investment is the same. You play the game not for the bells and whistles, but for the "lives" that you have the chance of touching.

And you play this game if you want to litter your friends walls with nonsense and terrible art.

I felt invested in the lives of the people in Rune Factory 4, I was invested in the conversations they had, the festivals, the events... everything. I wanted to protect the town and so I played and played until I had done so. That made the absolute mundane chore of farming (which it was, I'm serious) less mundane. It was less about me making a nest egg for myself and more about me getting Princess Points to get more things for the town. I stopped playing Rune Factory 4 right before I had enough Princess Points to nationalize the bath houses, and it wasn't because I was bored but because I had a backlog of games I had yet to finish writing reviews for. That is crazy.

A new Harvest Moon graces the horizon and while I spent this whole article stripping the veneer off of the series and saying what amounts to "there's no forward thinking here", I'm probably going to buy it because Harvest Moon is a dying breed. Say what you will about it, Harvest Moon is not a game that holds your hand, it's not a game that makes things easy, and the amount of nuance put into each game is commendable. But I spent all of Rune Factory pretty much talking about the good things in Harvest Moon, because those good things carried over into Rune Factory as a series. I hadn't even touched on every single good thing. Crazy.

I want the next Harvest Moon to be good, I really do. I can see why the series creator sees it as a lost cause. But what I'd tell him as a fan of the series is that this particular series has only really just begun. I'm not sure that in the world where Call of Duty still makes money (you know, with their one game) that Harvest Moon will become the next big thing, but I think there's still some merit to it's existence and continued existence. If Harvest Moon does, one day, run out of ideas outside of "create more characters and make the world larger" (cough cough Pokemon) then it's probably time to think about calling it quits. But right now, while I don't recommend A New Beginning, I do recommend the series.