Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life (GameCube)

GameSpot editors' review

• CNET editors' rating: 4.0 stars Excellent
  Detailed editors' rating
  Overall score: 8.7 (4.0 stars)

• Reviewed by:
  Ryan Davis
• Reviewed on: 03/25/2004
• Released on: 03/16/2004
• Originally published on GameSpot: Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life (GameCube) Review

Natsume's Harvest Moon series is one of the greatest long-running anomalies in video games today. Despite being a series of farming role-playing games that offer pretty modest improvements from game to game, and with almost no marketing muscle behind it, Harvest Moon has garnered a fairly large and fiercely loyal following. The whole thing is pretty easy for onlookers to dismiss, but an hour spent milking cows and planting tomatoes makes it clear what keeps the fans coming back. Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life, the latest entry in the series, doesn't fix what's not broken, and it delivers the same addictive gameplay the series is known for in a prettier package.

In a peculiar game like Harvest Moon, the fact that the underlying narrative is one of the most peculiar parts is saying a lot. Though you'll actually be playing the game as a young boy, the narrator is an older man who is helping you maintain the farm, and he's actually telling the story to the memory of your father, who left you this farm in the first place. As an odd combination of second- and third-person perspectives--which you could safely call anything from fourth- to sixth-person--the technique is more interesting than just about anything the narrator actually says. It's all pretty ancillary to a lot of the actual game, but it's eccentric touches like this that really define the feel of the game.

Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life is an RPG, but not in the save-the-world-from-an-absolute-evil way. Your character doesn't really have personal stats to build, but rather, the fruits of your labor are quite literally fruit. And vegetables. And milk, and eggs, and wool, and fish, and, ultimately, children. The game basically lets you play out the life of a farmer, which, admittedly, sounds like a dull, tiresome undertaking, but there's a satisfyingly meditative pacing to it. Once you get familiar with the particulars of caring for livestock, cultivating crops, and getting paid for your efforts, you'll get into a groove where it's dangerously easy to just let hours slip away as you take care of your day-to-day chores.

There are aspects of the game that take on a certain clockwork quality. There's the aforementioned groove you'll get into, and you can always expect Van, the traveling salesman, to show up on specific days, but if you grow tired of just milking your cows, collecting eggs from your chickens, and watering and harvesting your crops, the game offers plenty of other activities. You can focus your energy on fishing, animal husbandry, archeology, cooking, or even cross-breeding your crops, and each of these activities is like a unique subgame in and of itself. Or, you can just spend an afternoon hanging out in the local bar, having drinks and chatting with the locals.

Social interaction with the other residents in Forget-Me-Not Valley, the area where A Wonderful Life takes place, is vital to the experience, as you'll need to court one of the three available girls in the area to keep things going. Each has a very unique personality, and each will respond differently to your advances. Which one you end up winning as your bride will impact the personality of your child, as well as various aspects of your farm. The romantic portions of the game are surprisingly well realized, and you'll find yourself really stressing over which girl to pursue.

If you're already invested in the Harvest Moon series, you likely own a copy of Harvest Moon: Friends of Mineral Town for the Game Boy Advance. Anticipating this, Natsume has included GBA connectivity in A Wonderful Life, and if you connect the two games, you'll be able to travel from Forget-Me-Not Valley to Mineral Town and interact with the people there. It's little more than a pleasant aside, though fans who have already put in work in Mineral Town will appreciate it.

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