Quick Grade for Impatient Readers: 7/10 (suffers due to odd in-game glitch and some repetition, good game otherwise)
This one wishes to start out her official nerdette review with something near and dear to her fluid cycler: video games. This particular subject is from a series called Harvest Moon.
Original a game about fighting monsters in order to save a girl and get married, the games are currently a farming stimulation where you work to create a prosperous farm, start a family, and become friends with the local villagers.
This particular installment is interesting in that it gives you two villages to work with instead of just one. You choose whether you want to be a part of the animal-loving Bluebell, or the crop-fanatic Konohana. As the reader may have already guessed, the village you choose to live in determines the focus of your farm (though you may have a small amount of the opposite). In between is a mountain where you can forage for wild materials, fish, and participate in certain festivals.
The game starts with your character (a choice between a boy and a girl, with 6 spaces to put a name) getting settled in to a selected village and having the history of the two villages explained by the Harvest Goddess. According to the HG, the two villages were friendly and connected by a tunnel through the mountain- that is, until the previous mayors of the village got into an argument over which village created the best food based on their main exports. The two mayors bickered until the HG- being the benevolent entity she is- got annoyed by the arguing and collapsed the tunnel with the people in it! Luckily (or not, depending on the reader’s personal opinion) all the people escaped, but neither village ever bother to clear the tunnel and had been bitter cooking rivals ever since.
Your character comes in by working to make the two villages friends again. In order to do so, the character must clear out the tunnel with the help of Bluebell’s carpenter and participate in the many cooking competitions that are held on the summit of the mountain. Many other tasks are required to finish these two objectives, but how fast and by what methods are ultimately up to the player.
Pros: This one believes that this game offers a fairly fresh addition to the series by offering two villages to interact with rather than just one. Each area offers something different. Characters are also still delightfully varied, and friendship/love is easy to keep track of thanks to a flower meter that appears when your character talks with them. Crop selections have not changed much (personal observation actually makes this one think not at all), but the animals get the new addition with alpacas, though those are not available until the second year of game play. Wild animals can also be befriended, but it is not a requirement.
Controls are simple to learn and use, the graphics are colorful and somewhat detailed (if fairly standard for the series), and the music can be catchy depending on the song. Though the tasks are repetitive, you are never left with nothing to do, especially as you progress into the game. Upgrades are also set out so that you cannot obtain them as soon as you save up enough money and material- frustrating at times, but it allows the player to pace themselves and gives them something to look forward to each month.
Cons: Being a farming stimulation, observation has shown that games of this series can become repetitive. While some tasks are offered that helps to get your character out of a rut, the player will find themselves repeating the same movements over and over (especially when it comes to raising animals).
While the 3DS version offers the choice of the 3D view, this one’s personal observation is that the 3D effect is not anything to get excited about. Even up all the way, objects will only look layered on the screen. The best bet would simply to turn it off- the player is not missing anything exciting without it, and can save themselves some eye strain as well.
Finally, and most crippling for the game, is the sudden error that freezes the game and forces the system to restart. Observation has shown that this frustrating event often occurs while riding horseback up the mountain. This event does not happen too often and so long as the player remembers to save before the character goes to sleep, nothing major is ever lost. However, errors are an almost unacceptable feature in game (with the exception of certain useful glitches) and in a game where repetitive tasks are already a norm, having to repeat those tasks just to get back to where you were before can cause aggravation of the highest level.
Final Verdict: Much as this one enjoys this game and the series overall, errors that force a restart simply hurt a game’s enjoyment value, no matter how much one may enjoy it otherwise. However, this error does not cause any major damage besides some personal frustration of varying degrees. Repetitive tasks may also bore some gamers, making this a game for those willing to put time and patience into a game or wish for a game that is easy to pick up and drop as needed. Therefore this game is recommended for people who either enjoy the series enough to deal with the error, people who want a game lacking violence but still has great playability, or for people wanting a good game that’s easy to get back to after long periods away from it.
Robot Reviews 