Harvest Moon: A New Beginning Review

by Illusivebroker on Jul 7th, 2014

 

Harvest Moon. It’s a series which has gained quite a large fanbase and has provided a wide array of games for many consoles since its early days back on the SNES. Granted it’s not a game that will suit everyone’s tastes but it’s hard to deny the games do have some unique appeal to them that keeps its current fanbase returning for more. So I’m here to review the latest in the series; Harvest Moon: A New Beginning for the Nintendo 3DS. While this game may hold a slow and repetitive chain to it, the title is warranted as this game is all about offering a new beginning for the series, on a new console.

A New Beginning has you playing as your own customised boy or girl farmer. You’ve just moved over to Echo Village in order to help run a farm that your father was supposed to take over; but due to his relationship with your mother his roots are stuck to his own town. After arriving and meeting up with the wise tutor Dunhill you learn that Echo village is…well…an echo of its former self. Its residents have moved out and there are very little people living in the village at its current state. So after setting you up with your own farm, you end up finding yourself with the responsibility of restoring the village and bringing to it its new and old residents.

Now for the start of the game, the tutorials do seem very excessive, and the pacing earlier on feels a bit slow. You’re barley aloud time to breath until Dunhill finishes giving you guides on how to pick things up, cut things down, grow crops, jump up and down etc. Don’t get me wrong this stuff would all be worthwhile for anyone new to the game, but then again even for someone new to the series all these tutorials do seem far too much to follow. If anything it would draw off newcomers due to the fact they have so much to remember and follow. The first couple of weeks of the first season tends to drag too, at first it’s hard to gain much in the terms of currency as you have to grow crops, explore the woods for resources, and buy recipes from the store.

It’s all a bit of a drag at first; but as soon as you gain your stride into making meals from your crops, tending to your farm animals and selling off the produce for profits you can gain the hang of the game quite easily, the only issue is the time it takes to get into it all.

Farming itself is a bit more linear, to grow crops you have to till a 2×4 set of soil with your Hoe, then you have your seeds which cover 2×2 square with every use. After sowing the seeds you are required to water each square separately, which can tend to drag on a bit and even more so when you’re going back for water every now and then. If you don’t keep your crops watered each day they stand a chance of wiltering down and you will have to replace the crops with new seeds. Each season offers new seeds and crops to grow, so it’s vital to keep a timely mind when coming to the end of the season.

To tend to your wildstock you will need to purchase new animals from Neil, the animal trader for Echo Village. Once you have them within your barn you are required to feed them with fodder you grow and clean up any mess they might make. While cleaning them up and retrieving any produce from them like milk or wool. It’s all quite easy to get the hang off, but again it’s something you find you have to do each passing day within the game.

There is a really surprising amount of customisation within the game itself, with the ability to customise your own appearances as well as the general design of the village and your farm. It adds a great sense of personalisation to your character and the village you live in. Although to customise your character and the village to the way you want it, you will need to acquire a good amount of resources, including rare ones which might take a few in-game years to collect.

Friendship and Relationships between the villagers and your character are based on how often you talk with them and offer them gifts that they enjoy. It’s a bit of a limited system if anything as you find yourself hearing the same lines again and you can only offer gifts to villagers once per day. But it’s a nice enough thing to do, as it gives you a good sense albeit limited sense of interaction with the people of the village.

Relationships and Marriage are also part of this system, as you can forge romantic relationships with six bachelors and bachelorettes that accumulate within the village over time. You can track the level of friendliness you’re at with your romantic interests as a heart appears beside them indicating with colours what level of friendliness you’re at with the character. As the hearts change colour as your relationships grow you experience heart events; personal events that show your character and the romantic interest growing closer. While I like them, there’s only a limited amount when compared to heart events from previous games and there doesn’t seem to be any rival heart events; which I liked in the previous titles as it helped make the village feel a bit more alive. After you grow your relationship together you have the option to marry the character and have a child with them. It’s all very nice but takes time to carry out.

To help make the village a better place you’re given your own personal workshop in which to build different buildings and lots to place on your farm and in the village. Again acquisition of materials and resources is necessary to build more advanced creations in your workshop but it gives a great amount of customisation on what you can make and where about you can place it.

The story doesn’t follow much, as it gives you the objective and the tools and initivitive to go and find the resources and build the village into a better place. That’s all there is to it really, it just expects you to work towards building the village to a better place, while getting help from the Harvest Goddess and her two Harvest Sprites.

Graphically the game is a step up from the previous portable Harvest Moon games. It’s a really impressive game considering it was built for the 3DS. The 3D isn’t too impressive, it just makes the character portraits and images appear in 3D. As for bugs and glitches the game plays rather well, there were no crashes during my playthrough of the game and an odd pop-in texture here or there but the game played pretty well for my liking.`

Overall A New Beginning warrants its own title, it does offer quite a lot of new features and improvements on the usual Harvest Moon formula; but the slow start and heavy tutorial load during the start can be overbearing. It takes a bit of time to develop into, but the game offers a decent amount to enjoy with addictive gameplay. It’s just a question whether you’re willing to invest the time and effort to get into it or not.

Rating: 4/5

Categories: Reviews