#hm posting

I can’t say my appreciation of this game doesn’t come with a few caveats. I’ve intermittently played HM games all my life, starting with the GameBoy port (GB1) all the way to Pioneers of Olive Town, so while I don’t know exactly how the series has evolved, I’ve seen it at some of its earliest and at its latest. My vague childhood memories of GB1 (a game I didn’t own and didn’t play much of) were that it was pretty sparse and bland, so knowing that this original game was allegedly the same thing but with a little more content, I was expecting the bare minimum. I was prepared to never even be able to leave my farm, but the first thing the game did was shuttle me off to the nearby town and blocked the exit until I talked to everyone there. 

(Maps of the town, mountain, and farm via The Spriters Resource)

You learn everything you need to know about the game right here at the beginning; Firstly, that this town is small as all hell and has hardly anyone in it aside from the five girls you can marry and their immediate family members. The next thing you’ll learn is that there’s a fence on your farm, and you need to be taking care of that. Of the few repetitive lines of dialogue any given person in town has to share with you on any given day, a fair amount are devoted to reminding you to fix your fence, to make sure it’s in good repair. There was just a big storm so watch out! Remember to check it every day! Are you chopping enough wood? Because you’ll need it for that fence!

I’m being dramatic of course, you aren’t reminded about it that much, though the thin variation of dialogue means it comes up a lot. The emphasis on your fence does exist, and it isn’t for nothing: while it doesn’t matter as much if all you do is grow crops– if you keep animals, the game tells you that the ideal thing to do for yours and the animal’s happiness is to put the animals outside to graze. Animal feed bought from the livestock shop will keep them fed, but it's nothing compared to fresh grass grown on your farm. You can’t even buy animals without a certain amount of grass planted! And sure, you can cut the grass to store for later, but it’s at its best straight out of the ground. However, the way the game is programmed, the animals only eat when the day rolls over, so putting animals outside for the day and taking them in at night isn’t an option, and on top of that, there’s things that come out at night that can hurt your animals. This is where your fence comes in.

The Utility of Fences

At the entrance to your farm is a cluster of buildings: your house, a small lumber shed, a barn, coop, and silo, a tool shed, and an old, dried up well. Just barely surrounding all of these is a little wooden fence that looks more like a row of upright logs than anything else. Despite this farm having presumably been abandoned, the fence is in perfect repair. You’ll quickly discover that the fence as it is won’t work out; there’s hardly space to plant anything within it, and with the well dried up, you’re forced to hop it to get to a water source to fill up your watering can. It’s pretty clear that you’ll need to expand your fence, and it’s easy to do with all of the tree stumps littering the massive field that it’s blocking off. 

On top of needing to expand the range of your fence, the individual planks eventually will rot away and leave useless stumps. They show up more frequently after rain or a large storm. The posts don’t rot away completely so they have to be manually removed, but replacing them is as simple as smashing the old post with a hammer or ax and popping a new post in its place. It becomes a very natural part of your daily routine to run a lap around the farm’s perimeter before you go to bed to make sure everything looks safe and secure. It’s a good way to ensure your animals are put away and debris is cleared out, too! It slotted very nicely into my daily schedule until a certain point.

With how much time you have to spend hopping over the logs to get to the rest of the area too large to fence in, you might be tempted to leave one out of place for easier traversal. When night comes, it’s clear why that would be a mistake. Sometimes when you go to bed, you’ll hear your dog barking. It’s a small detail, one that took me a long time to notice because I didn’t always play with the sound on. There are wild dogs that prowl around the wilderness surrounding your farm, and only at night do they dare to come close. Your dog, if left outside, isn't able to do anything other than warn you of their presence if they show up. There’s nothing to notice during the daytime if it happens, unless you happened to leave one of your animals outside. There was one night that I left my chickens outside, having thought my fence was in perfect order and repair. I went to bed and heard the dog barking, followed by a horrible crunch. When I went out in the morning, I saw where my chicken had been before, it had been replaced by a pile of feathers. On the north side of my farm was a rotted fence post I’d failed to fix. 

The Reality of Fences

After losing my chicken, a cluster of pixels on my screen it may have been, I didn’t feel comfortable leaving my animals outside. I didn’t want to take a risk again, the sound and sight of feathers was upsetting enough. On a more logical note, the chickens didn’t even lay eggs if left outside so there was no value in it. Cows were a pain to put back inside the barn too, because of some silliness with the game’s collision. As much of a disappointment as it was to not have my animals roam around, it was just easier. At the time, I was focusing on upgrading my house anyways, so I didn’t have time to take care of my animals outside where time would pass when I could use that time gathering wood, and everything I had was being saved up for the house so I didn’t have any extra materials to repair my fence with. My fence was all rotting away. Because it was inconvenient for getting to my crops, I started smashing all the old posts as they went, too. That’s when I noticed something: the wild dog wasn’t coming anymore.

I didn’t pay much attention to it until I was looking up a completely different mechanic and discovered a forum explaining how the fences were broken. Rotted posts attracted the wild dog, they said. It didn’t matter if you had gaps in your fence, or even a fence at all–in fact no fence was the best kind to have because the mere existence of posts that could rot was a liability. 

I was hesitant at first to test this concept, after all there wasn’t much I could gain from it. My chickens wouldn’t lay outside, and my cows would be too challenging to get back in if the forecast called for rain. The thing that got me to finally try it was when I was trying to hatch more chickens. My coop felt like a nightmare to navigate due to its current population. I wanted less animals inside that I had to feed, so I threw a couple chicks outside–they weren’t laying yet anyways. Lo and behold, the dog didn’t come. More days passed and more animals were left outside, and it never came. My fence had rotted until there was nothing left at all. No dogs could ever come to my farm again. And I realized that the game’s own insistence on its mechanics was all a lie.

How You’re Told To Play - How The Game Lies

Of course, my animals didn’t stay outside. For a minute it was fun having a crowd of cows milling about while I tended to my crops, but letting them wander free and uninhibited made it impossible to find and milk all of them without any trouble, and there were the rainy days to watch out for. After the novelty wore off, they went back inside and stayed there. The thing is, that didn’t make a single bit of difference in how much they liked me compared to how they were living in the barn. On top of that, they didn’t seem to care whether I was feeding them grass or store-bought food either, though I mostly stuck to the grasses since they were cheaper and easier to get. Nothing about how I was told to care for animals really mattered past feeding them every day, petting it and maybe brushing it, if it was a cow.

It gets worse. The most basic aspect of the game is the fact that time passes. The story takes place over 2 and a half years, running through each day until the end, and these days last from 6AM to 6PM according to the game’s own internal time setting. After 6PM, all of the shops aside from the bar will close and you lose the ability to sell anything as you’re told it would rot in the shipping bin overnight, so there’s nothing to do but sleep until the next day. Issue with this is that when the days stop at 6PM… they just stop. Time doesn’t flow anymore. The game doesn’t give you any kind of clock to know the exact time it is until after you’ve upgraded your house, so all you have to go by before that is the color of the environment and whether or not your character has played an animation to eat something (you’re automatically fed when you wake up, at noon, and at night). I discovered this because I was curious if I could actually see the wild dog by staying out, and left the game running for probably 20 minutes in real life only for nothing to happen. Because of the time freeze, the time after 6PM actually becomes really valuable for farm logistics. You can’t sell anything, no, but you can pull up all the weeds on the farm, water your crops, fix your fences, feed and care for animals if you hadn’t already, and harvest wood for fences and house upgrades which would have taken a lot of valuable time to get during shipping-hours. The only thing that gets in the way of doing all that is you running out of energy.

Your energy is what allows you to use your farming equipment like your ax or watering can. Running out of it doesn’t mean you fall unconscious or anything, but your character will play an animation of them stumbling over and will fail to use any tools. The most obvious fix to this is to simply go to bed, as sleeping gives you a full recharge. You can also, however, recharge it by going to the hot spring on the mountain, or by eating food bought at the restaurant in town or foraged for in the forest. You can’t tell easily how much is refilled, as there’s no visual indicator like a health bar, but you’re able to eat more than once, and jumping into the hot spring seems to count whether you did it or not more than how much time you spend in there, so you can hop in and out a couple of times and call it good. 

Individually, time freezing at 6PM and energy being endlessly replenishable aren’t bad things. Even together, they’re not the worst. Having free time to focus on profitless chores is nice, and I think it’s important to be able to replenish your energy in case you have a limited amount of time to do things like for example, cut all of your grass before winter kills it. What makes an exploit out of these is the fact that the resources in the forest will never run out. Every time you re-enter the forest, all forage items and tree stumps are respawned. The infinite amount of forage makes for infinite energy refills, and could also make for an incredible money exploit if you didn’t have a very limited amount of time to ship things. You don’t have a limited amount of time to cut up tree stumps though. If you wanted to, you could run up to the forest after 6PM, chop every stump, then simply reload the area, and everything’s back. You can get all of the wood you would ever need to fully upgrade your house in one night. It’s a bit of a grind to do all at once, but it’s a grind you’d be doing over time anyways. It’s not the worst exploit in the world, since you still need money to pay for the house upgrade, but arguably because of how you have to focus your energy elsewhere for most of the game, the wood is the harder thing to get. Additionally, when the game has very little to do in both fall and winter due to the lack of crops, this exploit takes away just about any reason to play those two seasons other than to take care of animals. It’s an optional exploit of course–as all exploits are–but once you learn about it, it’s hard to resist the desire to get the grind out of the way all at once and mess up the pacing of the game.

The Charm of the Game

Learning that the fences were completely broken as a mechanic was a huge disappointment for me. From the moment I got a grasp on how the game was supposed to work, I wanted to eventually surround my whole field with fencing and keep my animals outside so I would have some life on my farm while I worked. I didn’t just want this, I was excited for it! This was something I’d never done in a farming sim that didn’t already manage putting animals in and out for you like Stardew Valley or newer Story of Seasons games do. My routine is always the same: I go into the barn and coop to tend to each of my animals, I take care of my crops outside, then run straight to town to talk to everyone, and go to bed. The change in routine that would come from taking care of the animals outside and patrolling the fence every night felt fresh to me. It made me feel that even though this was the first game of its kind, it was different and required new things of me. But in the end, I played it exactly the same.

Harvest Moon is still very different from all of the games that followed it, though. In many ways, it’s because it has less “stuff” in it– both in terms of items and things you have to do. But I wouldn’t say that it feels incomplete. Harvest Moon runs over the course of 2 and a half years before your work is evaluated. Until that happens, you have the ability to farm four different crops, you can raise both cows and chickens, you can upgrade your house to have more features, upgrade your working tools, build relationships with the townspeople to a small extent, go to town festivals that happen each year, and you can get married to one of the five girls living in town with whom you can have up to two children. Everything that you would come to expect as a fan of games like this is already here from the very first iteration. The most notable lack this game has, and one that seems to be completely unique to this game, is that there aren’t any crops in the fall or winter, which means that unless you have animals, there’s a whole half of the year that you don’t have anything to do. The game is clearly aware of this though, because in an average playthrough, this is where you’ll start to run into the story events.

There isn’t much of an overarching story in the game, past the general concept that you’ve run away from home to work on an abandoned farm. The conclusion rests on how good of a job you actually do. In between those two points are smaller events, usually tied to when you get tool upgrades or special ones for each of the romantic interests. The first event you’re likely to run into happens on the very last day of summer, where one of the woodsmen comes to your house in the morning to ask if you’re okay because he heard a huge crash at night and you should check your farm. What I found was that a tree in my field had fallen over, and its remaining stump had a big empty hole in it. When I inspected the stump, I was suddenly underground in a cave filled with loud and industrious music, and I was faced with two, little green people–Harvest Sprites, though I don’t know if they’re called that yet here. One asked me if my scythe worked well, and when I said yes, told me that they had made it and that I should check my shed tomorrow for a better one. Other tool upgrades are obtained in similar fashion; one comes from feeding a starving sprite a mushroom and another comes from another hole in the farm opening up to reveal another part of the cave system that has a couple of hints on how to unlock other things. 

The events for romantic interests happen at less scripted times, as they’re tied to how strong your relationship is with each girl. Each girl only has one event, and it only triggers when your relationship is high enough that you would ask her to marry you. The events usually take up a whole day, and don’t necessarily add much to each character. Ellen’s revolves around how she’s no good at keeping pets– something established on your second day at the farm when you get your dog from her, Eve’s hammers in her fraught relationship with her grandpa, and Ann’s is about losing the chicken weathervane, or “weathercock” which sits on the roof of her workshop and goes missing every time there’s a storm. Conversely, Nina and Maria’s scenes bring up entirely new events that bring up a number of questions while providing no answers. Nina disappears while looking for a medicinal plant because her mother is apparently sick, and Maria vanishes for days until you find her hiding away with the woodsmen for some reason. All of these events, whether they share new information or not, manage to add some greatly appreciated depth to each character by giving them more room to speak and be sincere than their short and repetitive day-to-day dialogues do.

The dialogue in this game is simple, to the point, and sparse– probably because there was only so much memory that could be reserved for approximately 15 people who all have multiple lines of dialogue, and only so much money to pay someone to write more. There is simple dialogue that doesn’t tell you much more than “hello, how are you” would, more dialogue that I’d label as tutorial text, and a few lines that I truthfully couldn’t understand well because of the sub-par translation this game received for english. The dialogue that exists to inform the world really manages to create a unique vibe though. Nina’s dialogue, almost always about plants, goes into forays about how they’re creatures with wills to live, too. Ellen’s uncle who runs the ranch shop tells you that it’s much better to feed your animals fresh grass if you try to buy any from his store, and if you decline to purchase he laughs as if he’s won something. There’s even dialogue referencing the silent player! Multiple lines exist to comment on him not paying attention, and inspection prompts have people telling you not to touch something rather than being an item description. It was the last thing I expected, to get the same level of personality out of the main character as I did from each of the girls, albeit very subtly. He went from a kind of nothing, self-insert into being what I perceive to be a hyperactive boy, akin to a border collie who was let out into a field of sheep for the first time–the exact kind of person crazy enough to take on an abandoned farm and succeed.

It’s these short little character details that bring life into the game. Each day, you’ll really only see one line of dialogue from each character, be it new or old, with that dialogue usually only changing if there’s a change in season or festival coming up. The repetitive, pretty mindless routine of the game can turn into a sort of meditation if you let it, where you spend your time working thinking about the folks in town and what they had to say to you the previous day. The developers took this concept in stride and gave the side characters loads of dialogue about life, about God and religion, and about… very basic morals, but morals nonetheless. It’s a children’s game after all. When you take the thoughts, questions and prompts the characters give you back to the farm to do your long and tedious routine, you have to ask yourself– what are you working so hard for? For the feeling of accomplishment? Recognition from your peers? For the sake of some higher power, if you worship one? For me personally, it was to write this essay, but it was also for a good grade on the high score screen at the end, so to be honest a lot of this stuff was lost on me until just now when I was reviewing the game to get screenshots.

Setting The Standard - Why You Should Play HM SNES

You may read all of this and still think, well, it doesn’t sound like the game has much in it. And you would be right, it’s a very small game, but it’s also extremely quick. On average, my days only lasted about three minutes of real life time. Everything flew by, and I think I finished the game in 20 hours or less. I barely got a chance to notice that there wasn’t much going on because every second of my day was spent busy doing something, and when I wasn’t busy, the break was appreciated. I didn’t start to run out of things to do until I was finished with the second year, and when I looked up what I needed to do to get a decent ending, I was already most of the way there. It was easy to push through those last two seasons to get to the end, and it was so, so worth it. 

As I mentioned earlier, the game ends with a high score screen, meaning it has to track all of your accomplishments. These include, but are not limited to: the number of things you ship, number of each crop you grow, number of animals you have and how much they like you, how upgraded your house is, who you married, how much all of the girls in town like you if you didn't get married, how many kids you have (which basically equates to how long you were married), your happiness score (increased by going to festivals and decreased by having animals die), and how many times you’ve pet your dog. In addition to these being tallied up and presented to you, you get special cutscenes not just for each one of these accomplishments, but additional ones for if you managed to do even better! I got a cutscene for having a cow, followed by one for having lots of cows, followed by yet another for having cows that loved me! Watching them play one after the other felt like taking a victory lap even without getting the best possible result. Seeing all of my numbers come up at the end made me want to try again to actually get those other cutscenes, not to get to see them, they’re so easy to find on Youtube, but because the game made it feel like an accomplishment! If I weren’t following this game up by immediately playing its GameBoy port, I absolutely would have started a new file right away. I’ve been playing the Harvest Moon series since I was a little kid and this was the first time I’d actually managed to beat one of these games. I struggle to think the finale of any game following this will feel as good as this one did.

I started writing this whole thing about the fences because it was an easy and silly entry point to get into my core issue with the game, and so I could have an opportunity to dig into game mechanics and the way the knowledge you have of them will completely alter your playstyle, because that’s all fun and interesting for me to talk about. Another reason why I focused on that was because it was near impossible for me to pick any kind of focus point when talking about this game. After all, I’m trying to study a whole series of games that spans multiple decades, and this is not only the first game in that series, but a game that created the whole genre of farming sims and defined that genre so thoroughly that you can see its DNA in every single game that followed.

 I didn’t expect much to come out of my experience with this game. My expectations for it before I even picked it up were that it was going to be basically featureless, as informed by my experience with one of the first games I ever played as a child, Harvest Moon GB, which I will get into next. This game was not that at all. I think that everything it did manage to get working right came together just about perfectly. Harvest Moon is exactly what it wanted to be, and where it wasn’t, it lied about how it worked to try and make you play the correct way anyways. When I believed that lie, my time playing was even more enjoyable. Maybe if farming worked just a little bit more like how you’re told it’s supposed to, and if there was just a little bit more story, those would cover the things I felt wanting for the most. But maybe a little flexibility and ambiguity is a good thing. Maybe actually maintaining a fence is just too hard, and maybe if the girls were more fleshed out, I wouldn’t be able to enjoy filling in their gaps in my head.

There are many more things I could say and wanted to say about this game, but this has grown far too long already so I'm cutting myself off here. I'm sure my later entries aren't going to get near this length. If you managed to get to this point, thank you so much for reading!

What’s new!

HM64, also called Harvest Moon 2 by HMGB2 and nothing else I’ve ever seen, is the direct sequel to HM SNES. It’s not a sequel in the usual way sequels are, where you’re continuing where you left off with the same character, but in that every main character is the descendant of their equivalent in the previous game. It’s not important to the story, in fact if you don’t already know this, you probably wouldn’t notice anything past some similarities. I played this game before I tried out SNES and it still took me a minute, plus having it directly pointed out to me to get it. Maybe I’m oblivious, who knows. 

Gameplay-wise, this iteration is home of a few series firsts: For one, your house can be upgraded to have a kitchen! You can't cook though, only collect recipes. You can also get a greenhouse where you can grow crops year-round. Sheep are introduced as barn animals that produce wool. You receive a fishing rod you can use whenever you want, but as far as I understand, the timing is nigh impossible unless you’re playing on a CRT (I am not, and never managed to catch a single fish). There’s a mine you can access in winter for something to do while you can’t grow crops (there are fall crops, but not winter) where you can find about two key items and garbage otherwise. Tool upgrades are no longer done by magic, but by leveling them up through use! Which I think is very neat and feels very natural, like you’ve just become more proficient with them as a farmer through practice. Characters can now come to visit you on the farm at random times, for either special story events or just to say hi! Your farmer can get sick from working too hard in bad weather, just like your animals, and there’s now medicine for that, just like your animals. And there’s inventory menus that I'll discuss at better length later.

What’s the same is… Most things in a basic sense. You’re on a farm with a dog, planting crops, raising livestock. You can make friends with folks in town by talking to them and giving them gifts. The livestock mechanics, as far as I could see and as far as I’ve been able to understand from online forums, are exactly the same as they were in SNES, the exception being there’s no wild beasts that can kill your animals but they’ll still get sick if they aren’t fenced overnight– and they’re not going to eat any grass unless they’re out overnight anyways.

As for your farm, you’re set up with the usual: a small house, a barn, coop, and fodder silo, a wood bin to store debris cleared off your farm, and a big messy field that you have to clean up before you can properly use it. It starts with three new additions though; a doghouse, a bowl that you can feed your dog with by putting edible items in there, and a mailbox that you’ll occasionally receive letters and notices in! They’re small additions, but very, very charming. The one thing that’s been removed is the toolshed, now replaced by a tiny toolbox by your house.

The world outside your farm is like an enhanced version of the SNES map. Imagine the town and forest now have one or two extra sections tacked onto them, one in the town for some extra housing, and a couple in the forest to let you explore the mountain more and get you deeper into the woods. The mountain still has a cave in it (this time with Harvest Sprites, who have been removed from your farm) and a summit you can climb to for certain events, but it has been upgraded with little wild animals that wander around and can be picked up and shown to people for a few friendship points, if they like the animal. (This applies to your dog too, there’s a well known exploit to max out Karen’s friendship in one day by repeatedly showing it to her in the bar where time is stopped.) The crossroads zone is also expanded by having three new areas you can travel to– the ranch that you buy animals at, a vineyard that’s more of a story-area, and a beach that mostly comes into play for a couple of summer festivals! 

On the visual side, this game is the series’ first venture into the new frontier of 3d graphics… kind of. The artstyle is made of isometric 3D models that are rendered into flat sprites and then projected onto the TV as if that’s not what’s happening. The game even lets you turn your farm around in 3D to face different directions, but it’s locked to only let you play in specific angles. Changing the direction made me forget where everything was and get lost on my own tiny farm, so I never touched that mechanic.

Due to the dramatic artstyle shift– not only being in 3D but also presented at a 45 degree angle, the game becomes a fair bit harder to play than either of its 2D predecessors. The controls are just a little clunky, and the bizarre shape of the N64 controller really doesn’t help. This makes the tedium of farming a little irritating to do, since it requires pretty precise inputs done over and over for every extra thing you’re trying to grow. Fortunately, you're not on the hook to ship everything before 5PM comes around like in SNES, so you get to move a little bit slower. The fickle farming experience also gets a little help from the new inventory menu that can be accessed anywhere and any time. It has multiple inventory slots for both tools and items, each type having a dedicated section so there’s no need to prioritize carrying tools versus turnips. Unfortunately, this actually ends up being a little more cumbersome than useful, as the menu takes a little longer than is comfortable to open and is pretty clunky to use. I mostly avoided it unless I was bringing gifts to people. But the addition of an inventory opens up the opportunity for something else which defines this entire game...

Key items– a set of unique, unsellable items –are most frequently found in random, secret places around the farm and town, and they give you a reason to scour every inch of the place. They can also be given to you by NPCs when you gain relationships with them, which is convenient because their entire purpose is to help you get even better relationships with each of them, and maybe even unlock little stories with characters. For example, there’s a music box you can dig up in your field that can be given to any of the girls for a decently sized relationship bump. There’s also an old weathervane in the shape of a chicken that you can find in the little mine. If you give it to Rick, he’ll tell you that it was a precious thing that belonged to his grandmother as a cute scene to deepen the town’s lore and connect it to the first game. Key items quickly become the most important and sought after things in the game because they act as a vessel to deliver that which the game is all about: stories.

Lots of people in a little town

The narrative premise is exceedingly simple: you need to fix up your grandfather’s ruined farm and make a new life for yourself in this town within a certain amount of time, just like its predecessors. Except, this game is a lot bigger than either of them, and it didn’t fill all the extra space with new things to grow on your farm. In my entry on the SNES game, I mentioned that the introspective style of writing turned the repetitive farming gameplay into something more like meditation on things going on in the town. This game takes that idea and runs with it! The town in this game may only be slightly bigger than it was before, but it has a lot more people in it, and every single one of them has a lot more to say, more to do, more festivals to go to, and more story events to take part in. There's even a new photo album that fills in with images for reaching special events or succeeding at certain festivals! Your given goal may be to successfully revitalize your farm, but that rapidly stops being the reason why you want to play. Farming is only a means to further the narrative of the town.

Story events are no longer a reward for reaching the highest heart level with a girl, but instead something that happens naturally in the world as you make better friends with people, or if you just happen to be in the right place at the right time. The world doesn’t only consist of you living it and things happening to you. Instead, you end up being a fly on the wall to other people’s conversations and life events, and you get to see how those events change the people around you. People will begin to say different things, go different places, live different lives without your input at all– often much better lives, as everyone in the town is pretty deeply troubled, whether they seem like it or not.

There’s an added depth, too. While the characters in this series have always been defined by their conflicts (in the first game, every big cutscene with each girl was exclusively about their major life conflicts), this game takes it further in multiple ways. Characters have conflicts with their families: you as the player have a conflict with your parents who can take you home if you fail to farm well, Lillia and Basil have conflict over their marriage and the fact that Basil leaves for half the year, and Karen’s family situation is…. A lot. Then, there are characters at conflict with things much more nebulous, like the Mayor who tells you that the town is going to die out but he can’t find any way to save it, or like the young boy Kent who wants to be a farmer just like you, but through a series of events is forced to learn that life isn’t so simple, people can’t just do whatever they would like, and it takes very hard work to get to do the things you dream of. And then there are conflicts that aren’t even necessarily conflicts unless they run into your long-term plans.

Instead of only having a bunch of girls in town who exist only as your prospective marriage candidates, there are also five boys in the town who will marry those girls instead of you, if given the chance. Like in SNES, there are 5 levels of hearts that the girls can have for you. Unlike SNES, each one of these hearts has a corresponding event you can have with the girl where there’s a chance of her liking you more afterwards, if you say the right things. In addition to that though, there are just as many events coming from the other side of the story, rival events that trigger if you happen to be good friends with the boys.

My favorite story by far is that of Harris the mailman who falls in love with the librarian, Maria, from just seeing her handwriting on the outside of all the letters that she would write. I frequently saw him in the bar at the end of the day and he would tell me the woes of his love, saying that he just needed to work up the courage to finally speak to her. Then one day, I happened to be outside of the library when he and Maria met face to face and she handed over a letter addressed to him. No longer did he sit in the bar forlorn every night, instead all he would do was excitedly tell me about Maria, and then when I visited the library, Maria would tell me about Harris!

While I’m on the subject of these characters, I think it’s worth going in a little more depth on who these people are past the grandchildren of the characters from the last game. See, you may be familiar with names like Karen and Kai and Gray, etc., etc. from a little recently remade game called Story of Seasons: Friends of Mineral Town, which is a modern version of Friends of Mineral Town on the GameBoy Advance, which is a port of Back to Nature on the PlayStation. These are not those characters. At all. While the basic elements of these characters are intact– Popuri is cute and childish, Ann is a workaholic, Maria is shy and a little oblivious –nothing else is the same. They all work different jobs and marry different people than they are paired with in later entries, and in my humble opinion, it all works WAY better in this game, probably because of the fact that these characters were designed for this specific context!

As an example, Popuri’s exasperated mother, Lillia, runs the flower shop and Popuri was named by her father, Basil, who loves plants. She’s childish and sweet and loves flowers, but can also be a complete brat. She eventually marries Gray, Ann’s brother, who lives on the ranch run by his father, Doug, who struggles to understand his children. Gray is an angry young man who seems to have a particular dislike for you, but you don’t learn why until you discover he was a promising young jockey until he got a bad injury and had to give up the sport.

Am I gushing a bit and letting the game design part fall to the wayside? Sure probably, but I can only gush because the game does a brilliant job of making a cast of characters who, while simple on their own, have interconnected lives that come together to give every one of them so much more depth than they would have otherwise. It all builds a narrative, and while narrative design is definitely something different than game design on its own, this game is far more about the narrative so it’s impossible to not focus on.

The problems

The trouble with these events is that I nearly missed the chance to see that letter be exchanged. You have some control over the progression of the events, because you have to be decent friends with the boys in order for them to trigger at all, but unlike the girls who have a handy visual signal of how much they like you, the boys have no such thing, so you can’t really know if a new event is ready to fire off. There’s no way of knowing where or when they’ll happen either unless you look it up, and even then you have to get lucky because sometimes they just don’t trigger when you want them to. I had a lovely moment in my game where I managed to accidentally catch a cold from working too hard in the snow and lost a day to being bedridden, followed by the New Years celebration which takes a day away from you, then followed by Kai and Karen’s wedding– something that I had missed multiple events for and therefore had no idea was coming, which also took a day from me. After that three day chain of no work, I think I was extremely lucky my animals didn’t get sick and die. 

This chain of events led directly to me never speaking to Gray again, even though he was the boy I was most interested in, because I wanted to marry Popuri and there was too much risk of him getting to her before I could. The reason why I didn’t go into more detail about the relationship between those two when I was talking about them earlier is because I straight up don’t know it, I couldn’t risk giving them a chance to get together.

The thing is, even if I hadn’t forced Gray and Popuri’s cutscenes to stop, I still wouldn’t actually know what their relationship is like, because I have not beaten this game. I know what the ending entails and I can reasonably expect I probably would not have gotten an excellent one, but I’m sure it still would have been fine. I stopped playing the game entirely before I even managed to get married. Why? Because I couldn’t get any of Popuri’s heart events to trigger. I had her hearts maxed out and had a blue feather ready to go in my pocket, so I could turn on the game and marry her right away anytime I wanted to. But I wanted to trigger the little events, even if they’re just a couple seconds of some pixels talking to me on a screen. They’re cute. And it made me sad that I couldn’t see them for some imperceptible reason. So I stopped playing and didn’t pick the game back up.

I don’t remember how close I was to the end of the game, I know I was at least in year 2, but I don’t even remember how much longer the game is after that. Probably a good amount. I had definitely gotten most of the events you could get at this point, since multiple other characters had gotten married, and the farming wasn’t something I really enjoyed so I can’t say I wasn’t at least a little bored by this point, but I wasn’t frustrated with the general mechanics of the game. The days were long enough, but not too long, that I had just enough time to go anywhere I wanted and do what I needed before night came. I could still talk to characters and go to festivals and play minigames. But I didn’t want to, because the game wasn’t doing what it seemed like it was supposed to for some arbitrary reason and that frustrated me enough to make me stop. When the fun of a game is found more in experiencing special events rather than anything else, the player feels cheated out of their good time when those events are too hard to find or can be missed outright, and that’s exactly what I experienced.

Parting Thoughts

The ending, according to what I've read, is very similar to the SNES endings, in that you’ll get different results based on all of the different things you’ve done. Whether you’re married, how many crops you shipped, how many animals you have, how well liked you are by the town… I imagine it’s not quite the victory lap that SNES’s ending was with its little cutscenes, since apparently all you get are comments on how well you performed by various people in the town, but it still seems nice and rewarding! At least like more of a reward than whatever the hell GB1 was trying to do. It seems like a perfectly good ending that it would be nice to see myself someday.

Despite all my troubles with this game, I believe HM64 is still the best one out there– at least that I’ve played yet. The events are plentiful and the content is meaty. The repetitive day to day dialogue still has the simple breath of life that SNES did, that manages to make the most out of a small amount. Don’t get me wrong, this game came out in 1999, I’m giving it a lot of praise but the characters still repeat the same line to you every day, and they still freeze in place until you leave the room. It’s revolutionary, but this is comparing it to a game on the literal Super Nintendo. Absolutely pick up this game to try it out, but keep those expectations tempered. That said, I never picked up this game nor knew a thing about it until I was well into my 20’s, but the moment I started playing, it hit me with a wave of nostalgia as if I’d known this game my whole life. At least to me, the look and feel of the game were like coming home to a childhood I never had.

To say this game was a relief to play is an understatement. I actually played this one immediately after GB1 because I decided to skip 64, so when I turned on the game and experienced its opening, I was still extremely raw from how awful GB1 felt. The first time I played it, I actually had to stop after day one, I didn’t even get to do any farming yet, because I was reeling so hard from how absurdly different this one was– and how COMPLETE! The excuses I made in my mind for GB1 were a complete and total sham!

The first thing that you see when starting a new file is something of a character creator. It’s a simple menu where you choose your name, your gender, pick a birthday out of any day in one of the four seasons (64 only let you choose a season), and then choose between a cat or dog for a pet. You aren’t told this in the selection, but a cat will bring home random seeds you can plant, and a dog will scare away wild animals, meaning that you can only leave your livestock outside overnight if you have a dog. I like free stuff though, so I chose the cat.

The next thing you’re exposed to is the town and what story there is, but I’ll get into that later. What I’ll instead explain next is your farm, which is a little weird compared to earlier games. In the first area, you have your house, a big open space, and then the usual barn, coop, silo, wood bin, with extra space on the left and bottom of the farm for a sheep pen and hothouse/greenhouse that you can buy in the future. You cannot grow crops in this area. Instead, there’s a different area to the south that hosts a huge, empty field where you’re expected to grow everything. This is also the only place where there’s an outdoor shipping bin, so you have to go all the way down there rather than just to the entrance of your farm if you have forage to ship. To the east of the farming area is a lake where you can catch fish, and a pond where you can save fish you’ve previously caught. The only thing to do with fish is sell them though, so the only reason I can really see for using the pond is if you caught something past 5PM, when anything put in storage will rot before it can be picked up. The lake is connected to a river that runs through the crop fields, and there’s actually a space to put a bridge so you can access the other half of the space for double the planting capacity. 

You won’t use any of that space to plant grass though, as all of that is meant to go behind the animal houses. Each one has its own individual field behind it for planting grass, and the game won’t let you buy any animals to go in the corresponding buildings unless a certain amount of grass is growing in the field behind it. It’s pretty awkward to make sure the grass is actually cut, as a player who doesn’t go back there every day, but I see the logic behind it.  They want to make people plant grass as an extra way to gatekeep animals beyond just money. It also works pretty tidily with the mechanics they have for putting animals in and out, which is that you get special tools for each of them that automatically sends them in or outside. I didn’t use these things because I didn’t have a dog, so putting my animals outside was equivalent to throwing them to the wolves… literally. And as you may have already theorized, individual items for three different types of animals turns into an inventory disaster because of the way tools work.

In your house is a tool chest that opens a menu when you interact with it. The chest holds up to 20 tools, each with a designated slot, and it has an additional page for all the different types of seeds you can buy. You’re able to carry four different tools or types of seeds on your person at any given time, with the ability to swap between which one is equipped quickly via the START button, or more precisely by opening up the inventory menu via the SELECT button, which is pretty nice in my opinion! It works quickly, and four tools is more than any other game has let you carry so far, but that only means so much when the game has such an excess of tools, while most others only have about six– not including seeds. Navigating the tool chest also becomes something of a pain because there are so many items, so it’s desirable to only keep the absolute necessities on your person.

Included in the excessive amount of tools is an exciting new item: the bug net. See, this game has reincorporated the forest as a foraging area, but it’s a little more than that. While it has the usual seasonal wild plants, a daily-replenishing supply of lumber, and a hot spring, it also has a myriad of insects that wander or fly around in short, predictable loops. It’s no Animal Crossing– the bugs always spawn in the same place and do the same thing for a whole season until the next one, where they’re replaced by a different kind of insect doing the same amount of nothing, but I think that’s appropriate for a game on such a short schedule. Bug catching is less about skill and more about remembering to bring your net with you on days and times that you haven’t gone bug-catching before. The fishing mechanic is similarly simple– it’s less about waiting and more about timing, as the rod will bob in the same pattern every time you cast it, you just have to catch it at the right time. As a result, if you get the timing down, you can always reel it in at the first bob and catch fish extremely quickly. This strategy ended up being my favorite during the time while I was getting started and didn’t have a lot of cash for seeds or animals yet.

But what do you do with these things you catch? You can sell fish but you can’t sell bugs. Instead, both are recorded in collections that you can access at the library in town! The function of the library is to let you access your collections of bugs and fish, view photos that you collected through experiencing events (kind of like what was in 64), and connect to the save files of your friends who have the game to share information and trade items. See, this game took a little inspiration from Pokemon in that while there aren’t separate versions, you only get access to certain things if you’re playing as either a boy or a girl. You get different crops, different bug and fish spawns, and there’s a certain quest that requires making a connection. It’s very cute! But inaccessible if you aren’t playing a physical copy of the game on original hardware, unfortunately.

Other than the library, the town has a carpenter, clinic, church, restaurant, ranch, tool shop, and flower shop. My making a big deal about how the town isn’t a menu this time feels a little disingenuous getting more into it, because while it is a space you can navigate and where people walk around, once you go in a building it’s almost exactly the same– no interior, just a portrait of the shop owner and their wares, but all of this is preceded by an option to talk to them this time around! Not that they have much to say, but it’s still a difference. You get another chance to talk to the shopkeepers and give them gifts (because you can carry items between rooms this time) on Sundays when all the shops are closed, which is another unique feature compared to GB1 where every day was exactly the same.

To the north of the town is a little square with a fountain and bulletin board where everyone who isn’t employed usually wanders about during the business week. At the start of the game, the bulletin board is loaded up with handy tutorials on how to play the game (yet another thing GB1 severely lacked). Later on, it fills up with dates for town festivals like the cherry blossom festival and horse races. The festivals usually aren’t much, shops don't even close for the majority of them, but they give the world a little more life and variety and the horse race gives you the ability to purchase a minigame from the tool shop that you can play anytime you want! There are several minigames which are all unlocked to replay by doing things like going to events or completing certain objectives.

The last new thing in this game is that if you press SELECT twice, instead of giving you the option to turn on Harvest Sprite helpers (no sprites to be found here), you get a more detailed menu with information about your animals, possessions, and then a long FAQ list with information like “weeds are back!” and explanations on how to get sheep or grow flowers inside the hothouse.

The Story

The premise of the story is that there’s an old farm in town that’s going to be replaced by an amusement park. It opens with your character trying to talk the mayor out of agreeing to any deals, saying that you’ll take over the farm to save it. He agrees to give you three years to do the best work you can and then you’re sent on your way. The first thing you have to do is announce the deal to everyone in town, who all happen to already know you… and apparently very well! The town doctor confirms that you grew up in this town, and everyone around is your childhood friend. I’ve never personally seen any farming sim take this angle, and I think it’s pretty fun! The game doesn’t do a ton with it, but it at least has a different vibe. It works well for a game where you do have relationships with these people, but they’re not in a ton of depth and they don’t go anywhere in the end because marriage doesn’t exist here.

This entry is also the first in the series that we see a wholly unique cast (almost). You could argue that 64 does it since technically the folks in town aren’t the same, but they’re awfully damn similar. Everyone here is a new character design unrelated to anyone we’ve seen before. Aside from Mary (librarian) and Ken (carpenter) anyways, who are both the same exact design as their counterparts in 64. While their personalities are similar, there’s nothing to indicate that these are the same characters in any way.

The stories to do with all of these characters mostly aren’t anything too special. There’s twin boys who run the tool shop and their narrative is tied to how you get tool upgrades. Whether you play as a boy or a girl, there are a couple events that indicate certain characters have a crush on your farmer. There’s also a marriage that happens once you make it into year three that puts a tiny change in the town where Rosie, who runs the restaurant is replaced by her sister. Some of these events have to do with little quests where just about all you have to do is go to a certain location when asked, others just occur. As I said before, the story’s all very simple, but it’s just fine like that. 

For the most part, necessary events will trigger when the time is right, but other things only happen if you’ve made good friends with everyone by talking on a regular basis and occasionally giving gifts. You’ll know if you’re on the right track when peoples’ dialogue changes, which happens a few times as you become closer. There’s apparently all kinds of little events in the game, but I failed to see a good number of them.

As usual, the easiest way to get on everyone's good sides and progress the story further is by doing well on your farm and either giving people the appropriate harvests as gifts or just upgrading things further. Despite all the changes to your farm layout, the actual things you have to do to work the land and care for animals are the same as ever. It’s pretty simple and quick to get good farming work done, and a decent amount of options afforded to you in terms of how you want to focus your energy– be it crops, animals, fishing, forage, or friendship, so it’s up to you how you want to get to the finish line. While you’re not told the requirements very clearly, the game is pretty low-stakes and just wants you to take your time and enjoy the three whole years it expects you to play.

How I ruined the game for myself

So of course, without a clear goal given to me, I had to look up the endings as soon as possible. Which brings me to my problem with this game: the requirements it has for the best ending are completely absurd. Well, to be accurate, one of the requirements is completely absurd. The best ending in the game requires 70 or more Happiness Points, having 10,000 G or more, have at least 3 of each animal (cow, sheep, and chicken), find 10 Power Berries, and have the third home expansion built, which are all extremely reasonable to do. So reasonable in fact that I handily managed all of those things before the end of year two out of three. The final, problematic requirement is to ship 10,000 or more items. This is a ridiculous amount of items. This is a “fill your entire field to the brim and never let it run empty” amount of items. I knew this from the second I saw it, but… well, it’s three years of gameplay right? And you aren’t told this is what you need anywhere within the game that I saw, so surely the developers thought this would be a reasonable goal for people, right? I had to give it a try, right?

Saying this from the future where I succeeded, I wish I didn’t try at all. I spent the full three years of this game constantly on the grind, filling my fields as completely as I could, and panicking to rush everything to the shipping bin before 5PM hit so I would have more empty land to plant more crops that I would water in the dark of night before going to bed and doing it again. Fun fact, this game doesn’t make you reset until 6AM the next morning and without any real repercussions. I only found this out because I’d stay out all night weeding and watering. There was very little time left to talk to the people in town after that. I did manage to get them all up to their maximum friendships pretty early on, before I had the means to constantly be churning out veggies, so I had every opportunity to catch their events, I just missed them because every day, no matter the season, I was farming.

The funny thing is, I’ve mentioned before that I enjoy playing the games this way. That is still true, and I very well could have enjoyed my time much more if it weren’t for the damned horse and its awful AI. See, there may be four inventory slots for tools, but there are none for items. Every individual one has to be plucked and carried to the shipping bin, same as SNES, same as GB1. The saving grace in those two games, and technically this one as well, is that around winter-ish of your first year, a horse will appear on your farm, and when it grows up in a couple seasons, it either already has or you can buy for it a saddle bag which functions as a mobile shipping bin. All you have to do is ride your horse out to where you’re harvesting and while it wanders a bit, it stays put well enough for you to load it up with veggies as you run back and forth to harvest, which speeds up the process dramatically in the vast fields you have to work in these games.

This horse is not like those other horses. This horse will take off in a dead sprint with no warning in any direction it pleases. In my experience, this was usually in the worst possible direction that would put it the farthest away from me. And the timing of it was typically whenever I was about to throw something into the saddlebag. This aggravated the hell out of me not only because it was a huge waste of my limited time, not only because it wasted a ton of crops, but also because it was constant. Nothing I did, no positioning I tried was able to help keep the horse where I needed it, and this was how I was spending 80% of my time in this game, dealing with this horse. I could have been seeing fun events, I could have been peacefully farming at my own pace and leisure, even better this technique easily could have just worked out if the horse didn’t behave so erratically. 

But I can’t judge the game on the merit of all the time I spent with the horse alone because that was my own choice to do. The best ending may require 10,000 shipped items, but all it takes to avoid the worst ending is to have more than 10 Happiness Points, more than 2,000G, more than four Power Berries, expand my house, and ship 100 items. With three entire years of game, the only way you fail to achieve that is by basically not playing the game. The vast space between the requirements for the best ending and the worst ending is to get a normal ending that accomplishes exactly the same thing as the best ending does, only the cutscene is different and you get a trophy for the best one. The cutscene barely stands out as anything special, which led to me having no idea what ending I got until I discovered the trophy was a thing I had to search for in my house. That’s it, you still get to keep playing the game either way, not that there’s terribly much else to do regardless of which ending you get, since there’s no special post-ending content.

I’ll still judge it a little bit though

While it makes sense to use your workable area to its fullest extent, having it be a requirement for the good ending to use all of it to the best of your ability for the whole extent of the game is excessive to me, especially since by year 3 it becomes completely unnecessary to try to earn money. I already had everything I was working for, and the requirement being to ship more things rather than better things meant there was no reason to get anything other than what was cheap and quick. No reason to make my animals like me so they’d produce better stuff, no reason to use the maker machines even though they weren’t obtainable until it got to the point where money had no meaning. I hardly bothered with the hothouses because they were both so confusing about what I could plant in each, and so tedious both to unlock and to harvest things since I needed a special tool that would take up a precious inventory space, lest I have to run back and forth between the tool chest. The hothouse might have been more useful if there weren’t winter crops, but there were.

What’s wild about my criticisms is that the game itself has something built in to mitigate everything that I struggled with. There is a tool called the miracle glove that automatically ships your crops the moment that they are harvested. But the only way to get it is via a link connection to a friend’s copy of the game– something near impossible in this day and age because you’d need to somehow find two working copies of this game with two functional GameBoys, and completely impossible if you’re using the magic of the 3DS eShop which doesn’t exist anymore and didn’t have functional multiplayer for most games anyways. That item alone would have solved the biggest problem I had in playing this game, and it was functionally DLC.

Closing thoughts

It took me a really long time to try and get to this review, and I’ve beaten two more games since, which has given me a new perspective. My original nugget for this one was going to focus on how much I hated the horse the whole way through and on how disappointed I was that the game was so hard for such little reward, but I’ve since realized that playing in a way that was no fun for me was my own choice. At any point I could have scaled things down and reprioritized to focus on the details of the game that are more fun like seeing events, but I just clung to that damn horse for 50 hours instead– which by the way, is longer than it’s taken me to beat any other game in this series so far that I’ve recorded my playtime for. The average sits around 25 hours.