PushingPlay

PixelPlay is a review of downloadable console games, both classic and contemporary. In either case, PixelPlay brings you a fresh perspective, untainted by nostalgia.

Harvest Moon starts off just like any other fantasy RPG: You take on the role of a teenage boy in a quiet rural village who has recently inherited a small farm and then monsters burn down your farmhouse and kidnap your sweetheart, setting into motion a grand and epic adventure you get married and tend the farm for the rest of your life.


Arguably, this is the game that gave birth to the entire genre of sim-chore-doing games including Animal Crossing and The Sims. Harvest Moon itself has spawned a whole series of sequels and spin-offs (many marketed only in Japan) and the SNES original’s high standing on lists of the “Best Super Nintendo Games” is only superseded by its even higher standing on lists of the “Most-Overlooked Super Nintendo Games”. I have to be counted among the original overlookers myself. Despite being a dedicated Nintendo fanboy in 1997, when Harvest Moon was first released by Natsume, I recall being only peripherally aware of it. Growing up in rural Ontario and working on farms through most of my adolescence, I had difficulty imagining myself enjoying a game where had to harvest the virtual corn and keep the virtual chickens fed. In the years since however, long lost hours spent gleefully washing dishes in The Sims while my own real life dishes fermented have rid me of that prejudice against the simulation of the mundane. So I booted up my Wii and 800 Wii Points ($8) later, I was ready to till some digital fields.

The opening sequence—some sort of incomprehensible pantomime involving an old man, a rice ball and several barnyard animals—fails to communicate anything meaningful about the plot or purpose of the game, but does make it immediately clear that the game has hit its aesthetic nail on the head. It looks exactly like an early era Final Fantasy or Zelda game, with every pixel lovingly crafted and a simple artistry that simply doesn’t exist outside of Adventure/RPGs from the 90s. Sadly, I was quickly disabused of this nostalgia filled positive first impression upon being forced to sit through perhaps the most frustrating “tutorial” I have ever experienced.

It’s worth mentioning at this point that the game is comprised mainly of two different gameplay zones. At your farm, you will do all the rough work of actually clearing fields, tending crops and minding the livestock. In town, you simply walk around, talk to people and buy stuff at stores. Of course, I was itching to get into the farming part, but was instead immediately confronted by my shipping agent and manhandled into her truck so she could drive me into town. This might have been okay if it weren’t for the fact that every shop was either closed or out of stock.

Instead, I had the joy of walking around and talking to everyone in town while they had the audacity to tell me how to tend my farm. Finally, I had had enough and went to make my way back to the old homestead, but the frigging shipping agent was guarding the exit to the town. “I suggest you talk to the villagers a little more,” she said. Fine, I’ll talk to all the goddamn villagers and listen to their stupid hints. This is just what I wanted, to have Natsume sitting and watching over my shoulder to make sure I read the entire manual before I could play the damn game.

But it doesn’t end there. I dutifully hauled my overalled ass all around the town and talked to everybody, but still, she wouldn’t let me leave. “I suggest you talk to the villagers a little more,” she said. I suggested that she shove her head up her ass, but she didn’t budge. So I did another orbit and found that there were a couple of people hiding in the back rooms of some of the shops that I had missed the first time around. But that’s still not good enough, some people have more than one piece of advice for you, so you have to talk to them until their messages repeat and the shopkeepers say different things depending on whether you talk to them across the counter or from behind it. I think it took four or five rage-filled circuits of the town before I was finally allowed to return to my farm at which point my avatar promptly yawned and fell asleep. I couldn’t blame him.

The travesty of an introduction conquered, I got down to farming proper. You start the game with a handful of gold pieces, a bag of grass seed, a dog and a rock-strewn wreck of a plot of land. There’s a strong and simple satisfaction to be gleaned from the early stages of the game as you break rocks, pull weeds, move fences and chop up old tree stumps. The farming part of the game does quite well at triggering that strange industrious reward centre only tickled by simulation games (at least for those of us who avoid doing actual work), though the limitation of only being able to carry two tools and one object does render some tasks more laborious than they should be. And the sun goes down faster than you might expect. I found the hated shipping manager arriving at my door to chide me for not having anything to sell before I had even managed to plant my grass seed. This is a common theme throughout the game. In fact, though it takes a little while to realize it, the primary mechanic of the game revolves around time management. Much like on a real farm, there are far too few hours in a day to manage everything that needs doing.

This only gets more pronounced as your farm gets bigger. By the time I had a few chickens and a nice big plot of tomatoes and corn, the game was a constant question of prioritizing. A sunny day meant spending every second watering the crops and feeding the birds before the sun went down. On the days when the plants weren’t bearing fruit, I would occasionally have time to quickly go fishing in the mountains or run into town to chat up the local girls after my chores. And on the days when the tomatoes were ripe, do I let the birds go without feed, or do I leave some of the fruit on the vine. I’ll be frank, none of this was what I would call “fun”, but it was strangely compelling. And when I caught myself cheering out loud when the TV weatherwoman finally forecast rain, I realized that this game had really captured something of what it’s like to run a small farm.

And there’s a whole second aspect to the game that might surprise some people. Tucked inside Harvest Moon is a full-fledged dating sim and, in the North American market at the time, this concept was almost as strange as that of a farming sim. There are five eligible bachelorettes in town who can be wooed with flowers and dances and gifts. The girls of course all keep diaries and with a modicum of discretion, the hero can sneak a peek at them from time to time to see how he’s doing. If you play your cards right you can wed and even knock up the girls, starting your own little family on the farm. The game even allows for the girls to become disillusioned with farm life and leave you if you work too late, stop showering them with gifts, and generally take them for granted once you are married. This is definitely a game that pulls out all the stops when it comes to emulating the mundane.

The game’s biggest problem is that it seems like an eternal wait for something to happen. The gameplay itself is strangely addicting, but it never seems to lead anywhere. Your farm grows slightly bigger, you get another chicken, all your cows make it through the winter; these are small victories but, the dating aspect aside, the overarching theme seems to be simply maintenance until, eventually, your father returns anticlimactically and either lauds you for your industry or scolds you for your sloth.

Is the game worth $8? I wish I could say. On the one hand, it’s frustrating and tiring and nothing exciting ever happens. On the other hand, once I picked up the controller I couldn’t put it down.

And it’s pretty.