#dumb things I make when my brain is lacking its minerals

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Well said, brutalrecovery

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Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life Review

Warning: Includes major spoilers for the story of the game, although, it’s been 16 years, you have had your chance to play it.

When I was a child, my father bought me a Nintendo Gamecube. I was too young to understand anything about the games as I didn't speak any English, but I remember enjoying endlessly watching my sister play games on it. One of those games was Harvest Moon: A Wonderful life, and to this day it remains as one of the most nostalgic games to me. When I got older, I replayed it and fell in love with it even more, but there was always something so fascinating to me about this game. I wonder how it managed to capture my heart despite my dumb child brain not even understanding what it was about. Now, as an adult, I hope to take a more critical look into this game from my childhood and what made it so different from the other Harvest Moon games for me, aside from the nostalgia.

Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life was published in 2004 for Nintendo Gamecube by Natsume and developed by Marvelous Interactive. In 2005 it got a special edition release on the Playstation 2 and the special edition port was later re-released on the Playstation 3 and Playstation 4. There was also a version with a playable female lead called Harvest Moon: Another Wonderful Life that was released in 2005 and its only difference from the original was the player character's gender and marriage candidates to choose from.

Harvest Moon Game play With a Twist

(Source: Harvest Moon Wiki)

Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life offers the player two save files and is, as expected, a farming simulator. This means the players basic game play consists of watering and fertilizing crops, taking care of farm animals and trying to earn money to upgrade your old plot of land. As in other games in the series, certain crops only grow during certain seasons, and aside from farming, the player can visit the small town of Forget-Me-Not-Valley to get to know its residents. While the game play follows the same formula as most farming simulators, A Wonderful Life proves to be a bit more difficult due to its connection to realism. No  matter which way the player prefers to go, both farming and ranching require a lot of effort and time from the player, not to mention money. In the beginning, the player is already offered a farm with a barn, chicken coop and three fields for farming, along with a cow to help them get started. However, since all necessary buildings are already in place, there is no way to upgrade the space or layout of the farm, meaning the player must work with what they are given. This means limited barn space and understanding of how the different soil types of the fields work instead of just planting whatever comes to mind during the seasons.

The game also encourages the player to choose between animals and crops. While it is possible to use both, completely devoting themselves to one is more rewarded in game play. Cows have several different species in the game, some producing more profitable products than others and naturally selling for more than a regular cow. Unlike in other Harvest Moon games, there is also a male counterpart for chickens and cows. A rooster and a bull are needed in order for the animals to reproduce and the player can either invest in their own bull to cut down fees or pay for a Miracle Potion meaning another farm's bull is used. The cows also don't give milk or stop giving milk if they aren't impregnated regularly, a feature that does not exist in other games in the series.

If planting is more to the player's taste, they have to be ready to invest in fertilizer and better watering cans. While the basic idea of buying seeds and planting them is present, the player can also invest in their own seed maker and create hybrid crops by befriending a talking plant in their neighbor's house. The more the player invests in creating their own seeds and raising their quality, the more profit can be gained from farming. Nevertheless, both farming and ranching have their own set of new challenges, and instead of upgrading their space, the upgrades mainly focus on bettering the original products like making milk into cheese or using quality crops to make quality seeds.

The more difficult and realistic aspects of the game are mostly a hit-or-miss. The more devout fans of the series might not appreciate the added difficulty taking away the simplistic game play of other Harvest Moon games. On the other hand, it can be fun to try something different for once, even though earning money for upgrades is more difficult. There is also a lack of several other usual Harvest Moon activities, such as mining and festivals. Instead, mining is replaced with the excavation site, that offers ancient fossils and crystals instead of gems and festivals are more like small events. This means no cow festivals or chicken festivals that, up by then, had been a very huge part of the Harvest Moon franchise. Other notable differences are that the seasons now only take 10 days to change and that the game is split into chapters, with some chapters having requirements. If said requirements (marriage in the first year for example) are not met, the game ends.

All in all, while there is a lot of good, the most frustrating mechanic is how long it takes to complete the game. In the original version, it takes 20 in-game years for it to reach the end. The special edition fixed this by lowering the needed years to fifteen, but even so, it can be hard to keep interest for long periods of time, as the game mechanic very much compliments the game's themes. This means that even though every day is meaningful in some way at the end, it can feel boring to go through them, running the same errands without any certain festivals or events to look forward to. This doesn't mean the game lacks content, but rather that the content is very much hidden and that there are no simple tutorials on how to reach it. Most of the game play outside of farming or ranching is trial-and-error based and requires the player to search for events and what the characters enjoy. It doesn't help that the relationship meters of all characters aside from the marriage candidates are hidden, so the player has to guess how close they are with the villagers.

The Story is A Lot Darker

A Wonderful Life aims to be more realistic in game play, and thus, ends up being a bit darker with its themes too. Like the title suggests, the main goal of the game is to live a so-called "wonderful life" and uncommon for a Harvest Moon game, A Wonderful Life has a story attached to it, and the story is most defiantly the game's biggest strength. Each chapter of the story progresses the player character's life, all the way to his death, and all the choices the player makes during their life finally come together at the end.

What A Wonderful Life is going for is a lot different from the staple of the series, but it also makes the game feel more alive. The town of Forget-Me-Not-Valley does not  have many villagers nor marriage candidates, but what it lacks in quantity, it makes up for in quality. The residents, along with the player character, grow older with time and depending on who you marry, befriend or choose not to befriend, changes what kind of events you can encounter each chapter. The amount of events very much replaces the lack of festivals as relationships with other characters feel meaningful and alive. I have personally played through the game many times and there are still a lot of events that I have not seen. Seeing them is not necessary to complete the game, aside from the heart events of the marriage candidates, but encountering them really feels rewarding, because it feels like being a part of the community.

The most perfect way to describe A Wonderful Life's story is "bittersweet". Getting to know the residents is surely rewarding and hearing them comment on gifts that they received from the player a day earlier is nice, but the game also makes it very clear that everyone has their own set of issues in life. Everyone has regrets and how all you can do is to try to live your best life with the choices you make. This feeling is perhaps the most apparent in who the player chooses to marry. In the original A Wonderful Life, there are 3 marriage candidates with a 4th added in the special edition. Each of them benefits from the player marrying them, with one getting out of a loveless arranged marriage, one receiving a home and third fulfilling  her dream of having a family as an aging bachelorette. Whoever the player chooses, they have to see how this negatively affects the other two, who most likely never receive what they wish for.

An odd addition to marriage is also the fact that neglecting the relationship with the chosen wife and child leads to long consequences. In the worst case scenario, the wife will divorce the player and the game will end and in some milder examples, the player's child might end up hating them for being an absent parent. In A Wonderful Life, it matters what the player chooses to do with their relationships. The friends the player makes influence their child and what the child does when the game ends. In the original version, the player can only have a son, but the special edition gives an option to have a daughter.

If the player also has a copy of the GameBoy Advance game Harvest Moon: Friends of Mineral Town, they can connect between the two, leading to the villagers commenting things about mineral town and bringing special goods with them. This can be a very nice feature for returning players of the series. Unfortunately, I did not have access to said feature so I cannot comment on it more personally.

Forget-Me-Not-Valley is Beautiful

The open world of Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life is not very big, but it feels homely. The town of Forget-Me-Not-Valley is covered in earthy tones and the lack of music actually works well for the game's benefit. While the graphics in the original version for Nintendo Gamecube are not top notch and you can see the game's age, the re-release on PS3 and PS4 cleared them a lot, making the world come across as beautiful as it was meant to in the first place.

As far as Harvest Moon games go, A Wonderful Life is certainly not the most colorful, but it has its own charm. The town takes after a rural Japanese town, with most houses being rustic and brown, and nature being the most attractive piece of it. Being in 3D, the player has an excellent view of the sky at any times during the day, and the game very realistically has a cycle, meaning fresh sunrises and warm sunsets, along with a sparkling sky of stars and grey clouds when it rains. Fitting to its world, the weather might change in the middle of the day and it might snow in the final days of Autumn, as in real life.

These changes make a big difference in the atmosphere of the game. They compliment its themes and story, and even if there isn't a large area to explore, there are certainly many things to find. The valley's colors change each season and it is worthwhile to explore the same places during different times of day and year. The lack of music compliments the rural, peaceful aesthetic, as it makes it easier to hear the ambient sounds that change depending on which area of the valley is being explored. At the beach, the sea can be heard slowly crashing against the hills, and in the forest birds are singing. All villagers have a signature sounds they make when talked to, giving them their own voice and making them feel real. The only area with music are the homes of other villagers and the player's farm. The player can unlock different records by playing and customize what kind of music they want on their farm or if they prefer no music at all, they can remove the record. 

To put it lightly, A Wonderful Life has its own idea of an aesthetic and it sticks to it all the way down to sound design. Once again, it is more of a preference question on what the player likes, but having it any other way would defiantly break the feeling the game is going for.

Verdict

While in no ways a perfect game, Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life has a goal and is successful in portraying it. Despite being an old game, its story has aged well and never fails to be relevant, as life may change from the outside, but at its core it will always have the same questions lying beneath. The graphics on the other hand do look a bit outdated for today's standards, yet can be overlooked and even be seen as charming to some. Other frustrating traits it has is its slow and repetitive game play, that ironically compliments the game's story, but fails to be engaging for long periods at a time. Still, the game is worth experiencing, even for players not familiar to the Harvest Moon series, for the exact reason that it is so different from the entries in the series.