TBT Harvest Moon

I'm not sure I even remember the first time I picked up a Harvest Moon game, or the reason why for that matter. If you've never played any Harvest Moon before, it's pretty much a farming simulator, nothing more. Thinking about it now though, it is the ultimate RPG: you become the farmer, deciding which crop to grow or livestock to amass, and you even get to pick a wife.

When it comes to this series, I played a lot of the SNES and N64 versions, which were the first and third games in the series respectively (the second one was a Game Boy game). I did indulge in the GameCube game a bit, but not with the sheer amount of enthusiasm I had for the earlier versions. Nowadays Harvest Moon is still around, but it's almost exclusively released on handheld devices, something I don't happen to take much interest in. Even if I did own a 3DS, I found the series has been moving away from the simplicity of the originals, and added all kinds of random fluff/filler.

Fluff or filler can mean a lot, and it's not always a bad thing. I always enjoy doing side missions in RPGs or exploring to collect stuff in any number of other genres. When it comes to the Harvest Moon series, the first few games were incredibly simple: straight-up farming. There was a bit of story (nothing crazy) and you go about your farming life. The basic plot in general was you inherit a farm and have 3 years to turn it around. I could be wrong about that, but it's so unimportant and that is what I'm trying to stress here. The key was how simple it was, and it made the game charming.

It's kind of sad actually, as I don't think a real Harvest Moon game—real in my mind at least—will ever be released on a home console again. It's just not where the industry is going. As I said before, they're almost exclusively being released on handhelds, you actually have to go back 5 years before you find one that was released on a console, and that was Harvest Moon: Animal Pride for the Wii. Unfortunately, in regards to the Wii and handheld devices, they just are not the way I like to game. I can see an indie title coming out with the same simplicity and addictiveness of the originals however, and as luck would have it, there is one! It's called Stardew Valley and if you were a fan of the old style Harvest Moon games, you should go check it out. There is no release date however, just whenever it's finished.

All in all, I will always be very fond of the Harvest Moon series, and even though I don't ever see it happening again on console, I eagerly await a new entry in the series with both great hope and fear.