When I was a kid in the late ‘80s, before I even knew what video games were, I would spend the summer holidays at my grandparents’ farm. They lived in a small village, nestled in the European countryside, where people were mostly self-sustained. We had a bunch of animals that I would help take care of, including sheep, cows, chickens, pigs and even horses.
We also grew most of our food, so one of my earliest memories was of my grandma and I plucking the season’s harvest of carrots out of the ground. I remember giving one of them a shake, rubbing it on my shirt a bit to get rid of the remaining dirt, and then proceeding to indulge on its sweet, delicious crunchiness.
As a result of these experiences, I naturally (no pun intended) have an affinity for games that include some sort of farming. So, when I was asked if I wanted to review Harvest Moon: One World, I thought to myself, “hells yeah!” and eagerly jumped on it, especially since I’m a huge fan of Stardew Valley which drew its inspiration from the original Harvest Moon game.
Well, did the latest instalment in the Harvest Moon series manage to scratch my farming itch? Spoiler alert: No, it didn’t. In fact, it turned out to be more disappointing than my dad leaving when I was seven.
The premise behind the game’s story is pretty simple. For some reason, everyone in the World has had some sort of amnesia, and they’ve forgotten how to farm and grow crops. So, they’re all just eating potatoes and surviving on coffee. More on the coffee a bit later, as it’s quite relevant to another part of the game.
As the bright-eyed and bushy-tailed protagonist of the story, you’re tasked with travelling the World in search of non-potatoey food for your mother. At the same time, after what I assume is a deleted scene where you ate some magic mushrooms, you also meet a friendly Harvest Sprite that only you seem to be able to see and converse with. The sprite asks for your help to collect some Medallions from other Harvest Sprites you need to awaken throughout the World to revive the Harvest Goddess. Don’t expect a Christoper Nolanesque plot twist here. It’s a pretty standard questing affair that takes you to various locations across the game ‘world’, where you have to solve some inane problem the locals have which they’re too stupid to solve themselves, likely I’m guessing because their brains aren’t getting the right nutrients from all the potatoes they’ve been eating.
Doc Jr., who lives next door, conveniently offers you a thing called an Expando-Farm to help you on your journey, which is this magical thingymabob that allows you to pack your whole farm into the palm of your hand and then re-establish it again somewhere else. And whilst this sounds like a handy thing to have, and it certainly is, this is where my first of many gripes with the game begins: your farm has no permanence. Because you can pack it away and move it closer to your next quest objective, you never feel like you should care much about your farm, the animals you’re raising, or the crops you’re planting. And when it comes to crops, unlike other similar games, you can only plant seeds on specific, pre-defined tiles in various locations that are generally next to where you set your farm up.
Where do you get the seeds to grow the multitude of crops on your farm, you ask? From your friendly local seed shop, you say? Nah, you get them from these things called Harvest Wisps, which appear as small glowing orbs on the map. Different seeds appear in specific locations, at certain times of the day, and that’s pretty much the way you get seeds in this game to grow your crops. I seriously don’t know why the developers thought this would be a good game mechanic, especially when you’re tasked with a bunch of fetch quests that require a specific number of a certain crop, that in turn, need multiple in-game days to collect, then plant and eventually harvest. By selling a certain amount of a crop to the store it does unlock the ability to buy those seeds, but they’re so expensive that you’ll probably lose money growing them this way.
Speaking of money, you can waste a lot of it on the animals you can get in the game. Some, like cows and chickens you can purchase from the store, while others you can tame in the wild. Not long into the game, I had Barry the brown bear, Cowy the cow and Harold the horse in my barn, as well as Harry, the hare in my house. Unfortunately, it became too expensive to feed them every day, so I had to get rid of all but my trusty steed Harold because the others were chewing into my precious and relatively hard to obtain cash. Something that’s not exactly easy to come by in this game, mostly due to the aforementioned silly way you collect seeds to grow the crops you need to sell then to make the mola.
As you’d expect from a Harvest Moon title, the game has four seasons, and it took me a full in-game year to finish the story and experience them all. But besides seasons which only alter a couple of the areas as they change, the game also has various parts of the map with distinct features, such as a beach area, a cold snowy mountain where you need warm food to stop your stamina from draining the moment you get out of your house, as well as a desert location. One character describes the desert area as something that “stretches as far as the eye can see”. In case you’re wondering, it only takes all of about 30 seconds to cross this mighty desert. But hey, the various locations are a nice change of scenery.
Crops can also mutate in different places, and you can, for example, plant tomato and obtain a variation of it which can sell for more money. However, this isn’t explained particularly well, and I obtained mutated crops in locations that didn’t make any sense.
Speaking of locations, whilst they’re varied in how they look and feel, they’re also largely quite empty, extremely dull and feel pretty lifeless. The game world is confined to relatively narrow paths you can traverse between the various towns, which themselves are mostly just a collection of copy/paste buildings. The various characters you come across, some named “<insert random adjective here> Man/Woman”, are meant to have their own routine. However, all that amounts to is them appearing or disappearing quite literally in front of your eyes, at certain times/locations throughout the day. You could be next to a character ready to hand in your 50th repetitive fetch quest, only to have them vanish right before you can give them what they requested. This feels like sloppy game design and is not up to the level of the series that started the farm simulation genre.
A lot of this stuff, which felt almost like it was an asset flip by an unknown developer, didn’t make any sense to me while playing. Until that is, I did some digging in an attempt to be less ignorant about the series and found out the history behind Harvest Moon.
Long story short, from what I gathered, the game series started in Japan back in 1996, where it’s known as Bokujō Monogatari (translation: Farm Story). Originally developed by Victor Interactive Software which was acquired by Marvelous Entertainment in 2003 (now Marvelous Inc.) A company called Natsume localized the games for the US and European markets until 2014 when Marvelous Inc., who were the ones actually developing the games, decided to part ways with Natsume and started to publish the games under their own Xseed Games brand as Story of Seasons. Natsume, in the meantime, retained the rights to the Harvest Moon name in the US/European markets and began publishing their own farm simulator games. So, Harvest Moon: One World isn’t really the successor to many of the beloved games from people’s childhoods, but instead something created by an entirely different company.
This probably also goes a long way in explaining how unoptimized the game seems to be. Whilst the game didn’t crash once for me, the performance was sub-par, with frequent sound stuttering, assets sometimes not loading quickly enough while traversing the ironically relatively empty landscape, and framerates plummeting in certain parts such as my coffee tree orchard, where it felt like I was getting single digits.
After the first five odd hours of the game, it felt about as much fun as eating a bowl of unsalted broccoli. But I persisted because even with all these flaws, I’m a sucker for the addictive game loop of planting and harvesting crops. And one thing that, of course, I also had to check out, was another core part of the game: romancing. There are 5 eligible bachelors and 5 bachelorettes, which you can attempt to woo with your charming personality daily gift-giving. I picked Ahina, who’s a barista that lives by the beach. Admittedly, I picked her because her favourite gift was coffee, which seemed much easier to obtain in the game than what the others wanted. So, I bought 16 coffee tree saplings and in my relentless pursuit to win over Ahina’s heart, I started role-playing as a coffee lord.
I would give Ahina a daily dose of 3 or 4 coffees (they only need one gift a day) until eventually, she found me and my coffee empire irresistible. I then needed to scrounge together 75,000Gs to upgrade my house, which after a bit more farming, I managed to do. But that’s when I hit a major snag in my attempts at virtual marriage because Ahina wasn’t happy with my tiny shack, and instead, I needed another 350,000Gs to upgrade it before she would move in.
Sorry Ahina, but at this point, I decided to put the game away for good, content with the knowledge that I had done as much as I wanted to do in the 25 odd hours I spent with it. I finished the story, solved all the World’s problems, mined, set up a farm in every location and even romanced a cute barista. My farming itch wasn’t scratched, but the job was well and truly done.
So, is Harvest Moon: One World worth getting? Not at the current price point, which in my opinion, is absolutely ridiculous. Stardew Valley offers more for a quarter of the price. There’s also the Story of Seasons game out at the end of the month. Perhaps picking this up on a discount might make it worthwhile.
Harvest Moon: One World has a few good things going for it, but ultimately it’s a disappointing entry in the farming RPG genre.
Rating: 2.5/5
Predictions time once again.
More than 450 games added this final week.
What a year.