Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life (GameCube)

Reviewed by

Ryan Davis

on 03/25/2004

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What really makes the Harvest Moon experience so engrossing is its almost obsessive-compulsive level of detail. Just take the weather, as an example. There's a dynamic weather system in place, and if you face toward the ocean when it's about to rain, you can actually watch storm fronts come and go. The game puts you through the four seasons, though at a highly accelerated rate. The different seasons will impact what you can actually do on the farm, and certain types of fruits and vegetables will grow only during certain seasons. You won't want to let your animals outside to graze when it's raining, which means you'll need to make sure they have plenty of fodder in their troughs, but the upside is that you won't need to individually water all your plants by hand. The game is absolutely brimming with touches just like this.

One could spend pages describing all the different activities you can take part in and events that will occur as you play A Wonderful Life, but we'll leave that to the FAQ writers. Suffice it to say that the game manages to keep the day-to-day routine of farm life interesting for a long, long time. There's probably an optimal way to get peak performance out of your farming, but you can't really say that there's a "right" way to play A Wonderful Life. Like with The Sims and Animal Crossing, or in a greater thematic stretch, Grand Theft Auto, you can take from the game what you want, without any real terrible consequence.

The whole Harvest Moon series has a visual style that's best described as quaint, but A Wonderful Life makes it look genuinely great. The inhabitants of Forget-Me-Not Valley are nearly perfect 3D interpretations of the cute 2D sprites that the series began with on the SNES so many years ago. The valley is rich with detail, and going from the beach up to the waterfall will take you across a nice variety of environments. The game makes excellent use of real-time lighting effects, which look kind of pixelated on close inspection, but the fact that virtually everything casts a shadow--people, animals, trees, buildings--gives the world a very dynamic look and makes the fidelity issue forgivable. There are a fair number of graphical elements in A Wonderful Life that don't look so good up close, but it all works really well when you just take in the big picture. Generally speaking, what the game lacks in technical prowess, it makes up for with a unique and endearing sensibility and plenty of care.

Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Lifescreenshot

It's not for everyone, but if you like open-ended non-violent games, A Wonderful Life is probably for you.

The sound of Harvest Moon is something you could easily just let fade into the background, because most of the sound effects are cute and a little pedestrian. There's some craft there, though, and if you pay attention, you'll notice lots of subtle ambient sounds that help establish the game's rural feel. Some simple, upbeat tunes also help fill in the background, and the music you hear will change dynamically based on where you are in the valley. You can even change the music that plays around your farm by slapping another record on the turntable in your house, though most of the music you can choose from has a similarly breezy, upbeat theme to it.

It's a little bit more structured, but fans of low-key, open-ended games like The Sims or Animal Crossing will likely find a lot of what they liked in those games in Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life. Established Harvest Moon fans already know what they're getting into here and probably could have guessed that A Wonderful Life is a fun and potentially addictive game that, if you let it, will gladly consume any free time you choose to give it.