| NINTENDO DS |  USA |
Got a Tip?
RSS
AtomHarvest Moon DS
The harvest was a little later than anticipated, but the seeds sown in November of two years ago with the game’s announcement finally cropped up this past September, yielding copies of Harvest Moon DS a-plenty, and a promised land of touch screen functionality for city-slickers anxious to get their styluses dirty. Set this time round in Forget-Me-Not Valley, this interactive country living sim comes replete with land to till, crops to grow, mines to spelunk, and girls to woo – and as always, there’re bushels of fun in between.
‘Kay, so it’s fun. We’ve had fun with farming ten times before! What’s it look like? Well, the DS has played host to eye-candy and eyesores alike, and within that range Harvest Moon DS sprouts snugly in the middle. The visual detail in either screen, but particularly the top display, suggests a GBA project retooled for DS — functional animations, invariably earth-tone colors, and the occasional special effect, the best of which is day turning to night in a seamless color fade, but scant more. At least on the bottom, we see anime portraits of a speaker during dialogue, the menus and the volumes of help therein, and – in one of the title’s main attractions – pets and livestock as they get a good rub from the Touch Screen Glove (sold separately… nah, just kidding, but you have to buy it in-game.) Funnily enough, what screenshots make to look like polygonal representations of the animals in these petting minigames are actually static sprite-swaps, which, for some reason, really aren’t half as exciting as fully-reacting, life-like models. Dang.
In terms of audio, HM DS is pleasant fare with a mind for the melodic and mellow, and which substantially surpasses the graphics in general quality, achieving something of a Playstation 1-level. Sound effects are less inspiring, with the whistle for Rover seeming particularly gritty, but they get the job done.
As fate would have it for the medium-time developer in a big-time world, there’s also evidence of some localization cutbacks. The wide open town welcomes you into the homes and haunts of a customarily colourful populace, including a hungry beggar, a musician, and a palaeontologist, and on top of that, the helpful, chore-happy harvest sprites lay hidden in unsuspected places that take an enterprising eye to find. So, while HM: DS leans more towards the RPG than some of its kin, a troubled translation metes out grammatical injustice at every turn and makes talking to your neighbours a stimulation-free exercise, and the clunky control scheme will demand much self-familiarizing from the novice player. With these considerations and others, it’s obvious that most of the missing resources were dedicated to the Gamecube’s Magical Melody of earlier this year, to the PSP’s Innocent Life, and perhaps to the upcoming Harvest Moon Wii.
So too is there a sense that the finicky, semi-organized interface was developed under constraints of time or otherwise. Left of the bottom display are buttons for each of the menus: the Diary (with space for up to two files, or a primary save-plus-copy for emergency screw-up recovery), the Rucksack (sweetly-spacious because, with no toolbox present in your house, it has to hold all your farming implements), the Map (that segregates the town into littler districts and lets you pan over them without actually being there), the Assets Chart (that graphs your seasonal finances), and Harvest Sprite TV (Jack must have invested in one of those ever-popular TV cell-phones to have this.) Of these screens, the Rucksack is the most useful, as its tight and precise drag-and-drop style makes cycling through those tools and crops – considering it takes the four face-buttons in just as many combinations to do the same task – a lot smarter. But take the particularly relatable process of managing stacked items as exemplary of the menu malaise in Harvest Moon DS.
Say you have seventeen stacked Toy Flowers, and of these you want to ship half and keep half (and because you’re a little money-hungry, you’ll round up and ship 9). Now because tapping full force on the touch screen will highlight the whole 17 for dragging, you have to instead tap with a lighter pressure that will highlight that slot more dimly, and result in your dragging just one away. So, ensuring you have 3 slots free, you would have to do this 8 more times, dragging each separated flower to the new stack in between. Not only this, but nothing short of a fly landing on the DS is light enough to highlight just one flower and not the whole kit and caboodle. In time you’ll get accustomed to it, but the overall effect is clumsy and frustrating …especially since you can take all 8 of those flowers in hand AT ONCE, and actually give them to someone by mistake. And when it turns out they don’t even like flowers, you’ll summarily commence kicking yourself.
Be that as it may, there’s plenty more where that stock came from – the bountiful outdoors and the lucrative mines serve gainfully in levelling off the difficulty curve, and since the time runs short and the town runs big, you’ll be thankful that gifts, grub, and gold-getters so generously litter the Valley. Forget-Me-Not is chock full of forage-able freebies that get renewed every day, so netting a tidy profit in the early goings is as easy as taking a stroll around the block and dropping stuff off at the shipping box. Frequent festivals and events provide some much-needed diversion as well, rewarding lucky participants with free fodder or other materials, or better output in eggs, milk, and other ranch shipping for pageant-winning animals. And when you’re questing for your quintessential wife and those elusive Sprites, loads of plot development promises new places, faces, and challenge around every turn.
So, beneath the tenuous aesthetic adequacies in this newest addition to the family farming business, Natsume and Marvelous spare few expenses with regards to the all-important gameplay. Seed-planting is still the name of the game, and now that you can level up your produce by overlapping two sowing sites, there’s a new onus on cultivating your lands outside of the characteristic 3×3 patterns. More tree varieties mean more fruit and more culinary options, as well, and a constant connection to Mineral Town shops via telephone means you have access to seeds, as well as all other things buyable, from the convenience of your own living room.
Version Covered: North America
Release Date: 09.12.06
+ Pros: The experience you’ve come to expect from the big-screen adaptations of virtual farming are miniaturized and given new tactile life in Harvest Moon DS.
- Cons: A little technically-weak, Harvest Moon DS takes little advantage of the DS hardware. Presentation could stand to be more uniform and intuitive.
Overall: Harvest Moon DS presents the near-ideal experience for the fan in need of a portable farming fix, one that emulates admirably the advancements of its console counterparts and contributes its own firsts to the series to boot.
< Screenshots >
-
MCB
Gaming Map
