Review by George Bailey
Harvest Moon: It's a Wonderful Life, is a good example of what Nintendo does best- deliver a good game that the whole family can enjoy. This game is a combination of a lot of genres...RPG, simulation, and strategy. You are basically put in charge of running a farm and turning it into a successful business enterprise. Along the way you acquire a wife and a child, animals, and material possessions. You wouldn't think planting crops and milking cows would have much appeal but the way the game is designed, it really gets to be quite engrossing at first. Also, it's one of the few games out where you don't have to use violence to solve your problems. How fresh is that?
How it Plays…
Harvest Moon is easy enough to get into. You start out as a small boy, inheriting a farm. Your goal-make it prosper. You have some fields, a pasture, various buildings and a farm hand to give advice and help sell the farm produce. You have a milk-producing cow so selling the milk gives you an early income. With that, you can purchase seeds and start planting crops. Later on you can buy tools, more animals and more seeds to keep things going. You are located near a small town so there are lot characters making the rounds to get to know, although they mainly just say the same things over and over again.
There is an on-screen clock to keep note of your progress of time. Your hours are minutes and minutes are seconds so everything moves along at fairly fast clip, which I must admit does feel a bit, rushed. You'll find your labors proceeding late into the night.
On the positive side it does help keep things from getting too mundane as watering crops and collecting eggs and so on can get a bit dull. But then each day is how you make it. You can do more than just farming chores to earn cash. You can go see the local archeologist and dig up items that he'll let you keep for resale later on. There's a river and several ponds for fishing in. Fish can fetch a good sale price. After a while it's easy to earn enough cash to buy the things you need to keep your farm going.
There is lot of characters around town but interaction with them is the weakest part of the game. Actually, in RPGs, communicating with characters has changed little from the old Zork text adventure game days of 20 years ago. In Harvest Moon the interaction is so limited that it's a waste of time to even try to chat to them. I find myself ignoring them and just going about my chores.
It's too bad this part of the game couldn't have seen more polish.
Look and Feel
Graphically Harvest Moon looks good. While the graphics have a cartoonish look to them, never the less there is a high quality maintained throughout. The character animations are well done and very expressive. Probably the best feature is the lighting effects. Since this is a time relevant game, the rising and setting of sun and moon are a regular occurrence. The sunrises and sunsets are gorgeous and the real time shadowing is very nicely done. It really is very cool to see the shadows lengthening as the day progresses. Equally impressive is the changing of seasons. You start out in spring and slowly the blossoms turn green, fade into the colors of autumn, but only turn white in winter. Too bad the leaves can't fall off, but then this world is an altered version of our own. The rain and snow is nicely done too.
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Fortunately, the camera in the game is will done. As you 3D gamers know, most viewing systems in games are a mess. The developers opted for the Halo set-up, of one thumbstick to view, one thumbstick to move. Really, this is the only thing that works in third person perspective games. Another help is object transparency, so if anything blocks your view, such as trees, or buildings they go transparent so you can see your character on the screen at times in all situations. There is a first person view using the "Z" button but you may find little use for it.
A Few Quirks
Don't all games have quirks? Well Harvest Moon has its share. One really odd thing involves the saving of game files. When you return to a saved game, the time is never the same if you save from the sleep option. The only solution is to select the diary (which is right under sleep) and save from there.
And then there is Van. When the character Van comes to town if you are at your farm you'll be told Van is set up to do business. If you are away, say fishing down at the river you won't be told of his arrival. So if you are not careful you can miss a chance to sell anything you may have in your storage shed since Van only comes to town twice in a season. Fortunately, there is a calendar marked with his arrival days to you have to make a note of that and be on the watch for him. It's important because sales of vegetables, fish, and collected items can add greatly to your income. It's just too bad the announcement of Van's arrival isn't better implemented.
What? A farming simulation with no hogs? No corn or grain to plant?
The music is about the weakest part of the game. You have different styles of rather dull music but at least you can turn it off. The sounds effects are
much better and feature accurate sounds of sheep bleating and cows mooing.
Summary
As I stated earlier, Harvest Moon is a great family oriented game. It's a fun, cheerful game with few idiosyncrasies to complain about. It's very engrossing and draws you in for a long spell of managing things where achievement is measured over time in all things great and small. This game is long and drawn out and after a while it can get monotonous, but I find myself still enjoying it because it's such a relaxing game experience that is free of the usual frustrations one finds in games these days.
4.5 out of 5
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