 |
Review
By:
Siou Choy
|
Developer: |
Marvelous
Entertainment |
Publisher: |
Natsume |
#
of Players: |
1 |
Genre: |
RPG/Simulation |
ESRB: |
Everyone |
Online: |
No |
Accessories: |
Memory Card,
GBA/GCN Link Cable |
Date
Posted: |
4-20-04 |
The Harvest Moon series may seem strange, to say the least, to gamers
accustomed to gory survival horror, violent shooter, and vaguely
“realistic” action/adventure games. Why would any sane person want to
blow several hours, even days doing something so mundane as farming,
taking care of animals and building relationships with people in your
village? Surely, a more eventful and exciting time could be had
fulfilling some exotic adventure fantasy, some chilling nightmare, a
deep-seated inner need to beat on and murder people under government
sanction? Who wants to relax to a quiet game where no one (absolutely
no one, no matter how hard you might try) dies a bloody death?
Thankfully, the folks at Natsume and Marvelous Entertainment were able
to see beyond the standards of the supposedly typical gaming
audience. Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life marks both the latest
installment of the Harvest Moon series and its first on the
GameCube.

Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life
continues the standard plot for the series: you take on the role of a
young man who has been brought to your father’s farm by his former
partner (a yat-chan tattooed dead ringer for Japanese yakuza
film legend Ken Takakura, cleverly named…well, Takakura). It’s
up to you to build your farm, befriend the people in your village, get
married and (God help us) raise a child. The timeline of
HM: AWL carries you through a 30-year life span. In a vague
approximation of the real world, neighbors grow old, move in and out,
and even check out permanently (as in the halo and wings option).
You can even, by taking certain actions and befriending particular
villagers, shape your child to become the adult you want it to be, be
it someone to take over your farm, an artist, musician, or even a
scholar (ooh, just what the world needed,
training for the next generation to become a fresh batch of
overachieving soccer mom/stage mother types).
Those familiar with the Harvest Moon series should notice a
number of changes, none of them particularly good, from the standard
formula that made the series a cult hit. First off, harvesting of
crops will not be your primary source of income this time around. In
fact, you’ll barely pull in any income whatsoever from that
department. Gone are the bags of seeds, large fields of vegetables and
attention to crop rotation techniques. Instead, each seed (and I
mean literally, one seed – can you picture charging by the seed? A
boardroom full of blue suited morons are working on it right now, I’d
hazard…) produces one crop (as in one single tomato,
potato, watermelon, whatever. Get the picture now?), and as
mentioned, the end profit doesn’t justify the time and effort taken to
harvest it. Livestock, at least in the more humane version the series
provides (no selling them off to the slaughterhouse for beef and
veal – it’s strictly milk and eggs for you, you faux farmer), will
supply you with most of your financial support. This lasts only until
you acquire a “seed maker”, a strange machine that somehow converts
fruit into seeds, which can then be sold off for a huge profit (go
figure). As in the newly revised HM’s
true progenitor, the execrable (but still somehow more appealing)
Animal Crossing, fishing becomes one of the better ways to
supplement your meager income.
Those are hardly the only big changes in store, my pretties, no
indeed. In point of fact, nearly everything that made a
Harvest Moon game what it was has been revamped, diminished,
and/or replaced. Remember how you were saving up all that cash from
your large crop fields to renovate and increase the size of your
house, barn, and chicken coop? That was so you could fit more
animals, equipment, and eventually a wife in your former bachelor
hovel. Not anymore, kiddos. In fact, you don’t touch so much as a
lick of your property – it’s all ready-made for your lazy ass. And it
would be pointless anyway, for several reasons. First of all, one of
the goals of polishing up your place was to accommodate productive
livestock, right? Well, surprise. While the cattle raising hasn’t
been overhauled to the degree the whole harvesting issue has, this one
merits a “vitally diminished” rating, given the extreme priciness of
purchasing said cattle (particularly given your decidedly low income
this time around). Even should you purchase a few, their productivity
is severely curtailed in comparison to previous HM entries:
sheep can only be sheared for wool once a season, cows produce only
after becoming pregnant and have a baby, goats produce for a short
time then just take up space for the rest of your game (and can’t be
sold off!). Dreams of stocking up on cattle? Forget it – you only
get space enough for 8 animals, period. This includes, mind you, any
cows, any goats, any sheep and your horse, all lumped together in that
rather meager total.

And how about the secondary purpose of all that remodeling? Yes,
besides trying to turn a decent profit, you had to spend a good
portion of your valuable time courting a girl to be your blushing
bride. Surprise again: this time you only get 3 choices (and no real
prizes among ‘em). Not only do you get…shall we say, less than the
cream of the crop and hardly your pick of the litter, but these
relatively faceless bimbos have no real distinct personality types
like last time – no “hottie”, no “fun loving type”, no “shy librarian
type”, no “dizzy flake”, you get the picture. Even stranger, they
seem to have no pointed likes and dislikes, i.e. how you had to ply
the cute one with gallons and gallons of liquor in Back To Nature,
while the librarian preferred stuff like flowers and eggs. And
remember how you just had to keep plugging away till you got enough
hearts from the girl of your dreams? Dream on, sucker, it’s time to
settle and be fascistically pragmatic. This time around, you simply
have to be married inside of a year, and once you do
get hitched, you find your mate instantly pregnant (there goes your
sex life, just like that – and don’t even think about getting a piece
on the side, because the other girls won’t take your damn gifts
anymore, and one even leaves town if you don’t bag her!). Hello,
Uncle Adolf, the breeding plan is going just fine, thanks.
On the plus side, a few new animals have been added to compensate for
all the (generally awkward and unpalatable) changes to the
HM paradigm. As hinted at previously, in addition to the usual
chicken, cow, and sheep, you get to raise ducks and goats, with the
weird eugenic sensation of mating roosters to hens and bulls to cows
taking the place of earlier entries’ generically sexless egg-laying,
milk producing livestock. In addition to the usual mangy dog with a
bandana, you also can get yourself a cute cat (who obligingly eats the
dog’s food).
Another weird change: a lot of the festivals of previous Harvest
Moon entries (not to mention Animal Crossing, which this
entry is clearly designed to emulate), with their little quirks,
cutscenes, mini-games and contests, have been removed, to the point of
nigh-total exclusion. Even if there is a festival per se going down
(which consist solely of non-participative cutscenes), no villager or
calendar will let you know, much less where to go to attend it - you
literally have to stumble across it by accident.
In another Animal Crossing-influenced cheap marketing scam, you
have to run out and buy a GBA and link cable, plus the GBA’s
redux of the PlayStation’s HM entry, Harvest Moon: Friends
of Mineral Town, in order to unlock some tauntingly mysterious
“extras”. Want to hear something worse? If you were obsessive (or
easily influenced by marketers) enough to go out and blow your hard
earned dollar so foolishly, all you get is the P.T. Barnum award of
the month, because the link-up between the two games don’t add as much
of an impact to the game as you might expect. At the risk of exposing
the scam, the much vaunted extras, which in Animal Crossing at
least included that whole cute “island” mini-game, don’t offer much
more than a few new recipes and some more records to play in your
phonograph. That said, if you’re inclined to blow all that cash for
something so banal, those two records they supply you with in HM:
AWL can get fairly tiresome, real fast.
The controls are a bit too sensitive and the slightest touch (or the
merest camera rotation) can leave you milking your bull instead of
talking to it (however, you can’t vent your frustration by hitting
them with an axe or hoe, as you could in the original PlayStation’s
far superior HM: Back To Nature, so go figure).
While HM: AWL may be one of the better-looking Harvest Moon
games, graphically speaking, it just doesn’t compare to most stuff out
there at the moment. Worse, Natsume seem to have abandoned the
cuteness of HM: AWL’s 2D forebears for a clunky sub-Animal
Crossing 3D modeling paradigm. You almost expect them to stand
there spinning drunkenly every time you stand still. Some may still
find this sort of I can almost see the spheres and cones you
modeled this on look “cute” and appealing, but to more
sophisticated eyes, accustomed to the sort of graphical mastery the
better Next Gen systems can provide, these guys just look weird and
ugly. Of course, some people actually find circus clowns
amusing, as opposed to sad and creepy, so to each his own.

So, you ask, given the obvious downplaying of the whole farming angle,
since harvesting crops, renovating your farm and accumulating
productive livestock (not to mention the whole courting bit) have all
been diminished to the point of near insignificance; what exactly is
the point of this supposed farming RPG? Once again, think
Animal Crossing. Think big hit, lots of cash inflow in the
coffers. Think, “what else can we make into an Animal Crossing
clone?” “Well, there’s this farming game…” Yep, that’s right,
banal, mindless interaction with characters that have absolutely
nothing to say (and in fact, tend to repeat their two or three
individual catch phrases to the point where you can predict exactly
which one they’ll spout) has taken the place of managing your farm.
But, as the game continually assures us, these “villagers are very
interesting!” At least in Animal Crossing, you got a lot of
mildly sarcastic grade school humor thrown at you. These
cardboard-personality drips might very well have been taken from the
set of The Stepford Wives.
If you were tired of the tried and true Harvest Moon paradigm,
Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life is the game for you. There have
been so many changes; in fact, you’ll hardly recognize the
place…unless you just finished playing Animal Crossing, that
is. Those who liked the whole farming, courting, and aggrandizement
of wealth and property through little more than the hard work and
sweat of your own two hands, forget it – it’s gone from the Protestant
work ethic to the hippie commune as filtered through Disney and the
religious right. Or to sum it up in one word: bland.
Highs:
-
Umm…it’s completely different from any
Harvest Moon games you’ve ever played…
-
More types of animals. I particularly enjoyed having
ducks and a cat this time around.
Lows:
-
It’s a bad Animal Crossing clone, without
any of that game’s pluses.
-
The “very interesting” dialogue of the villagers
-
The mediocre graphics and horrible character
modeling
-
Somewhat dodgy, imprecise controls
-
Look, guys, it’s supposed to be a farming
game. Farming, get it? Not raising a damn kid, not
talking over and over again to a bunch of soulless zombie types,
farming!!!
Final Verdict:
Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life,
despite its many imperfections and unwelcome changes, still remains a
perfect game for anyone who wants to get away from the hustle and
bustle of everyday life. A wise philosopher once wrote that the small
things are what make life worthwhile, and the Harvest Moon
series can always be counted on to deliver just that. While life in
postmillennial America (particularly under a reactionary, fascistic
regime [Her thoughts are her own! – Ed.]) can seem pretty
dismal and bleak, it’s nice to know that we can escape to our own
little fantasy world for a few hours, where a “wonderful life” awaits.
Overall
Score: 7.5
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