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Tomorrow morning (Jan. 22), Marvelous USA will be showcasing Guardians of Azuma with voice actors Brandon McInnis (Subaru) and Suzie Yeung (Kaguya) and host Ovilee May in a special livestream at 8am PT/11am ET! You can find the stream on their Youtube page, linked below.

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I have all 3 ladies at full hearts - not sure which one I want to commit to!

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A friend to all in Mineral Town

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So much growth can happen in a year! 🌱

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Okay Mayor...keep it together!

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2017

the year of farming

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goober shaped :3

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a working sticker design of my favorite bokumono character Fertilizer Cricket do yall fw him

i’ve literally been putting it off for a year now so its currently my goal to get a shop up by the end of january I need money 😭🤞

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Fandom Memories: HMFarm

Hmmm. So, nearly a quarter of you whippersnappers wanna hear about the good ol' days, huh? Well, back in the day, you wouldn't just hang out on one or two big websites to try to find people who shared your niche interests among a million random users. Everything had its own dedicated site, with its own special pack of weirdos that you probably wouldn't find anywhere else. Home grown fandom, sprouting from the cement sidewalks of the freshly paved internet like so many weeds with pretty little flowers on top. So, let's take a little stroll down memory lane and visit one of the oldest fan sites with Archive.org's "Wayback Machine."

Ahh, just like I remember it. This here is "Harvest Moon Farm." 'course, we just called it HMFarm, like the URL did. This used to be the place to be. The prime progenitor of all farmin' fansites in the English speaking community. Maybe not the literal first, but up until around 2005, this was where you would go if you wanted to know anythin' about digital farmin'. It truly was a magical place to visit.

This screenshot isn't the oldest design, but it's the one I fondly remember. The majority of my time using the site was during the lead-up to A Wonderful Life, which was probably also when it was the most active as an information source. Seeing the screenshots, checking the forums, speculatin', wonderin', dreamin'... It's a warm feeling. I can't really describe how it felt to look at these shots for the first time. Granted, they were mostly sourced from various places like IGN or Newtechnix, but who wanted to go to THOSE messy sites when all the info I wanted was right here? IGN wasn't telling me how to revive the Vineyard in Harvest Moon 64 while I was waiting for AWL news either.

Our first look at the character we would come to know as Muffy, the sheer novelty of being able to go into the townsfolk's glorious, 3D-rendered rooms, the apparent misidentification of flowering tomatoes... The webmaster, Gamergirl87, would caption each one as well. Some of the captions of those screenshots ended up not being exactly true, but it was the closest thing to on-going coverage we really had. Who else was there to trust?

It's a little off topic, but I think at one point after learning about the GBA connectivity, I must have dreamed about this very gallery and seeing a screenshot of a Gamecube-ized Popuri with the caption that Mineral Town villagers would visit after connecting the GC and GBA together. At least, I'm pretty sure it was a dream. I've met some people who claim they saw the same thing, but none of us have been able to find that screenshot or comment again.

The one that would most catch my attention was the one on the left here. I didn't have a PlayStation 2, so I was coming fresh off of the GameBoy and Nintendo 64 when going into A Wonderful Life. The pond, the mysterious glowing plants, the mood and ambiance of their lighting, the little tree on the door... Naturally, I mirrored it on my first day the remake was available.

It's a real shame that the message boards are poorly preserved, since it doesn't look like there was a news post about the pre-order plush cow. I was hoping to find the name of whoever it was that convinced me to commit my first ever preorder. I still have the receipt, but without the forum post it's really only tangentially related to HM Farm.

'course, just learning about existing games and upcoming games wasn't the only good thing HM Farm was for. As I alluded to, there was a whole community here! While it's a shame that the message boards aren't well preserved by the Wayback Machine, you know what is?

The "ideas" list! This incredible time capsule was one of the first "interactive" parts of the site, starting in the year 2000. It's kind of fun to see how many of these ideas actually happened. Obviously, new characters and personalities were probably expected, but Animal Parade would eventually feature a honeymoon, several games have clothing and other customization, a mall, city, and pig would be added as soon as GBC 3, a goat would be in A Wonderful Life... It's actually amazing how prescient a lot of the suggestions are.

I'd share the whole thing, but the amount of e-mail addresses involved gives me pause. Still, there's a couple I wanna highlight:

Considering how often I still hear about people wanting to marry the moms and people attributing it to just "the fans getting older," it's funny to see Laserion lay out that, no, we've always been like this. Right down to using Manna's unhappy marriage and Lillia's husband never returning as valid reasons they should be available.

Tuan145, on the other hand, I just find extremely amusing because of the specific "2002 Escalade" part. Yes, this is clearly the ideal vehicle for all farmers in the Story of Seasons universe. This is now accepted headcanon. The boat was added in GBC 3 too, so obviously a 2002 Escalade is going to be added any day now.

Another thing that's amazingly well preserved is the site's fan art section. There's a few missing images here and there, but for the most part the entire thing is open to explore. People of basically all ages and skill levels happily submitted their creations, including original characters, digital art, traditional art, crossovers with popular series like Sailor Moon, a liiittle bit of drug use... Y'know, all the kinds of things you'd expect to see in a fan art gallery of the day.

Even better, some of the artists are still doing art today! Looking around, I quickly discovered one of my favorites, Rina Cat, is now on Blue Sky. I made sure to ask for permission to repost their art before including it here. Reaching out to everyone would be a bit much though, so I'll just encourage you to just browse the gallery using the Wayback Machine yourself. There's poetry and fanfics too!

There's a lot more to the site, including useful bits of history like keeping track of release dates for games, pre-release screenshots, and information that was only available on Japanese websites at the time, but I'll leave it at that for now.

Unfortunately, though the site continued to be updated until 2010 and stayed online until 2021, it's no longer available on the regular internet and the URL doesn't seem safe to access anymore. I wanted to include an interview with the former webmaster as well, but all their readily available contact information was tied to the website and I haven't had any luck so far in finding other means of contact. If I have any success, I'll be sure to make a follow-up! If you have any memories of HMFarm, or other fan sites, I'd be happy to hear about it.

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Krobus is enjoying the new waterfalls...

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a wonderful life

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A small amount of weight tugged on the wizard’s cape. He glanced back, letting out a soft sigh. Such clingy little creatures.

after 20+ hours im calling this done, take it from my hands

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Harvest Moon  (Natsume/Pack-In-Video, 1997)

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Haakon Davidson has released this amazing cover of Harvest Moon 64's Winter theme. Please give it a listen and show ‘em some support!

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Back on my SDV propaganda: I need y'all to hear me out about Gunther.

(dissertation below // Ginger Island spoilers?)

I feel like he's pretty much forgotten most of the time but he has so much potential and it's the one character that I would love to see becoming romanceable. He manages the library and the museum! He's into literature and archeology! Hello?? Long haired, bearded, bespectacled, curated vintage wearing, academic, classy af man??

Some personality headcanons: Gunther is hardworking and responsible (took on the museum and takes care of ancient books and artifacts all by himself, which is no joke), obviously not very extroverted or social, incredibly private and aloof but always kind, soft spoken, gentlemanly to the point of being a little old fashioned. He's very nostalgic and also a bit of a hopeless dreamer - something that he only lets slip once you get to know him better.

Also his story could be really interesting because what if he's related to Professor Snail?? His son, for example (this is out of pocket but they kinda look alike...from afar lol). Maybe Snail raised him surrounded by books and archeological collections, thought him all he knew, maybe little Gunther really looked up to him. But the professor made knowledge his biggest life mission, and kept traveling to different sites, staying gone for more and more time, until the day he didn't make it back home at all. That could be why older Gunther decided to come to Pelican Town and take on the hopeless empty museum, following his father's footsteps. Plus we get a wholesome reunion once Snail is freed from the Ginger Island cave and they can meet again 🥹

(Bonus regarding in-game ships - HE NEEDS TO DATE PENNY, PENNY NEEDS TO DATE HIM. please. She deserves someone reliable and gentle that buys her books, come on. He would secretively gaze at her while she teaches the kids and feel very guilty about it, ignoring the fact that she got a massive crush on him since the day he arrived in Pelican Town 🥺 AUGHH they would be such a cute couple)