Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life

Moon shine

This morning, Roy the farmer got up at 5am. It was raining, and the TV didn't have anything encouraging to offer on the subject (even the horoscope was depressing), but by the time Roy made it to the cattle shed and milked Ellie he was munching on some Royal Fern he'd found growing wild behind the dog kennel, and feeling all the better for it. With the milk deposited in the storage room for Takakura to take to Mineral Town and sell, he marched over to the henhouse with an extra spring in his step and put some birdfeed out, before making the short trip across the bridge and onto the neighbouring farm to say hello to his fiancé Celia. She was pleased to see him of course, and seemed extremely happy when he surprised her with a strawberry picked just a few hours earlier.

Harvest Moon may be about farming, but it's also about living. It's a simplified version of a rustic lifestyle, stripped down to a number of well judged and balanced tasks that complement each other and more than fill up the hours of the day, which tick by at a rate of one every minute. Having inherited a small farm from your father, you set about building it up with the help of his friend Takakura, who will take your dairy produce into town every day and return with cash. In the meantime you'll get to know the people of Forget-Me-Not Valley, most of whom have something interesting and pertinent to say. You'll carve out mutually beneficial relationships with them; relationships that may be of use way down the line - like when you're trying to help your offspring pick out a career - and you'll generally live and learn, plying a demanding trade without feeling pressured, and every night going home satisfied that even if you made a few poor choices, there's always tomorrow to make amends.

You'll find new revenue streams for your farm. You'll realise that while growing fruit and veg and selling it on a stall in the centre of town can earn you a few hundred G, catching a few exotic fish by carefully researching the best fishing spots will make more money in the short term, allowing you to save up and buy the kit that you need to produce and sell your own seeds and earn more cash that way. There are mundane tasks to complete, but even as you literally toil away at a field, turning over the soil of each square individually, planting seeds and watering them, and then returning to top them up when the soil looks parched, you're strangely motivated to keep doing it. Perhaps not at first, but by the end of the first couple of seasons in Forget-Me-Not Valley you'll be growing and watering your crops whether you really have to or not.

Time to fill

Leaving Celia to her chores, Roy walked up the hill, smiling ear-to-ear, and started fishing under the waterfall. Someone in town mentioned that fishing spots varied in their effectiveness, and after a few days supping on the rather sickening Colombo fish from under the bridge, the taste of Huchep and Rainbob was welcome - and they ought to go for a decent amount in town, too. Strolling back to the farm, fish slung in his expansive rucksack, Roy noticed the sun coming out. So the forecast was wrong. Oh well. Bringing the chickens out one by one, his spirits were raised again by the sight of a pair of eggs, one of which his freshly purchased rooster had managed to fertilise.

It helps that you share your farmer's goals in your own life - you'll courteously pursue one of three potential brides, lavishing them with attention, and listening to them so that you'll be able to woo them most effectively. With each extra heart in a girl's diary, she'll be more likely to say yes when you eventually propose, and when she says yes you'll feel like the king of the world. She may only have a few choice things to say in a given season, but somehow the gentle pace and tranquil setting leave your imagination free to run riot and fill in the blanks. It's hard to believe that you won't bore of the same lines of dialogue, but you won't, perhaps because Harvest Moon is the sort of world that you really wish you were living in. It paints a picture of a lively and engaging way of life. You'll envy the simple pleasures, all the while Forget-Me-Not Valley's natural equilibrium means you're never too well off, but you're also never that close to abject poverty. Animals can die if you ignore them, and you will make mistakes, like planting seeds in the wrong season, or accidentally leaving the cows out overnight, but you're always safe from real disaster.

That's not to say it's a game without challenge, however. Turning the ranks of cattle into a thriving dairy business, for example, involves lots of hard graft and careful attention paid to each animal, and on the social side courting a young lady is really only the beginning. The game is split into six chapters, some of which are spread over several years (each of which encompasses about 20 hours of gameplay in four 10-day seasons), and there are certainly more things to worry about in the latter years, including your wife and child. Cleverly though, the added task of raising the nipper and helping him choose a path in life is offset somewhat by the refinement of your farming - investing in an automated milking room could take a lot of the donkeywork out of the early hours, and cows actually learn when they're meant to use it too, if you establish a regular routine for them. Time management is a regular concern, but pretty soon you'll realise that everything is carefully balanced, and the routine will be stripped of potential trepidation as long as you're conscious of the time, leaving you to enjoy the journey through life.

Friends and relations

With the cows and horses also out to pasture and the turnips and strawberries watered, Roy wandered into town, stopping off at the local Inn to say hi to former squeeze Muffy, who had had to go once he realised she was flirting with just about anybody who would listen. Still - no reason not to be civil. Pausing outside again, he decided to set up a stall next door and try and sell a few fish, and maybe that old sickle he wasn't using. Nobody wanted the sickle, but the polite young business-lady Chris happened to buy some flowers on her way home, which was nice.

What a varied and memorable journey it is, full of quirky and intriguing characters - like Flora, who lives with the archaeologist Carter in a tent further inland, and constantly muses out loud that her completely platonic relationship could be misconstrued; or the pyrotechnic twins who live in a hut-on-stilts, and are always happy to play a little puzzly game of triangles to test your wits. Between chapters things change, too - people you know will die, people who stop by occasionally in the first year will actually move to the valley, and apart from simply having more options you'll also start to feel more like the valley lives on without your input. In your second season, Takakura even surprises you with a horse, enabling you to get around with greater ease on sunny days, and it's only the first of many changes that play a key part and help liven up an already spellbinding existence.

There are problems, of course, as there are with anything this ambitious, but they're all easily forgotten. With movement and camera controls split between the two analogue sticks, having to hold the A button and a direction on the left stick to push an animal whilst simultaneously tweaking the camera to move steadily is a peculiar concept; and some of the context-sensitive actions (dictated by the icon arrangement in the top right) could do with a little inertia - trying to milk a cow twice in a row upsets it, so it can be a pain when you hit A to brush her down and realise the function actually changed to 'milk' while you were lowering your thumb. The soundtrack also quickly loses its charm, and despite the ability to change LPs on your farm's player from time to time, you're unlikely to use it much beyond the first season.

There's also a nagging suspicion that this is quite a lazy PAL conversion, with some silly borders and no 60Hz mode, and it almost goes without saying that surround sound and widescreen options are off the menu. Fortunately it's not a game that lives or dies based on its technical competency, which is just as well, because it's not the best looking Cube game either. That said, the visuals certainly have a charming, cutesy sort of appeal that will likely resonate with most Nintendo fans, as borne out in the screenshots spread across this page. The developer's use of so many different levels of weather effects to simulate life in Forget-Me-Not Valley is far more worthy of praise though - very few games manage to nail so many different kinds of rain, from the light drizzly stuff right the way up the scale to blinding, thunderous rain that feels like it's going to wash the entire community out to sea. And then it starts to snow.