Nope! Stop! Cut! Not this time! I am not doing this review like I usually do. I will not break down this game's fundamentals to see if this game is good or bad. Cause regardless of what I or anyone says, this game is BAD!! I forgot what made this game terrible until I plugged it in once again. The horrors of the game went away for a time, but now their back. I hate this game, and doing a classic review is not gonna explain why.
What makes this game bad is not the story, cause the story is just fine. The gameplay is just fine. The graphics are crap, but that's not what makes this game crap. The glitches are annoying, but the game is playable for the most part.The robotic characters I am used to by now. But what makes this game give me nightmares is the overall experience. This game makes the basic fundamentals of Harvest Moon into a long drawn-out aggravating excuse of a game. If you break down the game into it's individual sections, the game is okay. But this game is NOT okay. Allow me to review the game James Rolfe style. From the moment the game begins,to the moment this game supposedly ends.
Okay, you start off the game in a new file. The Harvest Goddess and the Witch Princess are having a battle.Then it ends in a stalemate, and everyone goes home. Then the Harvest Goddess appears before the Witch Princess again with her sprites.Witch Princess gets mad, and accidentally turns the Harvest Goddess to stone. Freaking out, the Witch Princess then accidentally sends the Harvest Goddess to another world. Concerned for her rival, she sends the Sprites to that world to undo the stone spell on the Harvest Goddess. She then picks a farmer to help get the sprites back to Forget-Me-Not Valley and bring back the Harvest Goddess.
So far so good. But at this point, we see the first problem in the game. Where the hell is Jack? And why is Pete in this game? In case you don't know, Pete is the farmer from Harvest Moon: 64 and BTN. While Jack is the farmer from Harvest Moon:AWL. So I ask, where is Jack? You might answer that he is dead since this game takes place 100 years after AWL, But then why is everyone else alive? And if everyone in Mineral Town is alive, then who is working in the Mineral Town farm if he is in Forget-Me-Not Valley?Even Pony from Harvest Moon: AnWL is alive for some odd reason.
Despite my complaining, the REAL problem comes soon after, where the hell is the farm? Am I really supposed to look at that pitiful house with the empty field behind it a “Farm”? Where's the barn? Where's the chicken coop? Where's the mill? Where's the silo? Where is everything that makes a farm a. . .Well. . . Farm?
I wouldn't have this much of a problem if this game wasn't taking place 100 years after AWL. Last time I checked, you started AWL with a barn, a coop, a silo, a shed, and all you need for a proper running farm. And when the game ended, wasn't the house the size of a mansion? Why is it so tiny?
But I digress, maybe there is a good reason why there are no buildings. The idea to raise the farm by hand is not a bad idea. Games after this was a fun experience to do. But how much should I pay for a barn? 10,680g??? And that's for the cheap barn made of fodder. For the best barn made of gold lumber is . . .50,130,000. That's right, over 50 million gold for one building. Holy**** that's a lot of gold. Okay, gold is too expensive, but cheap material to make a barn will not do. So we'll need a good material that's in some way affordable. Lets see stone Barn. . . 101,300 gold.And you start of with only 500 gold. You could just prepare the material yourself, but you need 500 pieces of stone to make this barn. And even then, it's still insanely expensive. It'll take about an in-game year to save up that much gold, and you still need a silo, a chicken coop, a pond, and the mushroom shed. Plus the barn only holds four animals, so you might want another barn or two. You'll literally be spending millions of gold to build this farm.
Okay, lets pretend that you had the time and patience to harvest crops, pick up every last bamboo shoot, grape, mushroom, and herb that ever grew, and spend your hours digging in the mines for ore, you'll have your farm in about a few real life weeks to a real life month (Maybe longer). Now you have to do the next task, leveling up them tools. And I couldn't get enough of leveling up tools from. . . I don't know. . .Doing it in Harvest Moon: BTN and Harvest Moon: FoMT, and Harvest Moon: MoreFoMT. Seriously, I hated doing it all those times before, I sure as hell don't want to do it again! But you have to, why? Cause the game makes you do it. Never mind that in AWL, you never had to level up tools.
At this point, NOW you can START playing a Harvest Moon game. Trust me, you were not playing a Harvest Moon game until now. You were only building the game, and it took you months to do it. Now you have to do the next task, get those goddamn sprites. Because why should you go and do something fun like (I don'tknow. . . ) getting married? Nope, no point, and you hardly have any business trying either. You could do everything you need to get married. Buy the big bed, get the blue feather, see the marriage events. But all that won't matter until you get 60 sprites. Now you're forced to do stuff you might not like to do in order to unlock a feature you want to do.
Lets say that you spend more untold hours grinding those damn sprites, and how are you supposed to know where they are without some sort of guide is beyond me. But assuming you do, now you have to get married, and trust me, it's not like BTN or AWL. It's not even as easy as FoMT, and trust me, FoMT is hard without a strategy guide. The problem with this game is that for each girl that exists, you have some absurd list of requirements you will never know unless you own a strategy guide, or looked it up on the internet. Some girls will require you to be at a certain place within a certain time-frame within a certain season, within a certain specific weather, while owning something the character wants or needs. The magical girls have even worse requirements, and the immortal girls have the worst. Not to mention the Mineral Town girls only appear once a week. So good luck getting married, cause unless you cheat and use a guide, it's just plain not gonna happen.
Assuming you do the smart thing and find a guide, marriage is pretty boring. The wife does nothing for you, and you just have to continue farming and keep looking for those damn sprites for no reason cause you already met the 60 sprite requirement to get married in the first place. The wife gives birth,and the kid grows up, and nothing really spectacular happens. Some of the characters grow up, and some new characters come into town to open up a circus.
In conclusion, this game is not a Harvest Moon game, it's slavery. The game wants you to spend untold amounts of months attaining a goal that is lackluster when in reality you just want to marry one of the 14 eligible brides to complete the game. The game technically ends after your wife gives birth, or you get mad and burn the game on a cross, whatever comes first. Thankfully, there are ways to cheat and get money fairly easily, and another cheat that makes leveling your tools a 3-hour chore rather than a week long. I know some people hate cheating, but after I went through, I don't feel guilty.
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