Topic: The Harvest Moon Love Thread

As the title suggests - this thread is for all things Harvest Moon.

I was given the first Harvest Moon game that I've played since the GBC/ SNES days for Christmas: Harvest Moon: Tree of Tranquility - and I absolutely love it. Having had that big gap in-between, I can see the series has developed really, really well through the years.

Now I think I shall have to pick up one of the DS ones.

I'm fairly new to the Harvest moon craze having known about it since the snes version and always meant to give it a try, but didn't get around to doing so until recently. Starting briefly playing Harvest Moon 64 but was only playing it on an emulator on my computer to see what the series was all about. Got Animal Parade played it briefly and was very entertained by it was kinda turned off by the "kiddy" design.
Than I realized that a Rune Factory had come out for the Wii and I somehow didn't know this, got the game and have been hooked ever since. I would have to say it is one of my favorite games of all time and feel like it's way overlooked when talking about great Wii games. You should def try it out, I will warn you though it is hard to find and you may have to get it off of ebay.

I wasn't involved at all until this past October. I bought Magical Melody, new, for $17, just to see if I would like this type of game. 250 hours later, my other games have been virtually untouched in two months, and I'm totally hooked. Can't wait to catch up with all the Harvest Moon games I've missed. I have Tree of Tranquility and Animal Parade warming up in the bullpen, er, bookshelf, waiting for after I collect the last nine notes of MM. The quest continues in about an hour.

I have Friends of Mineral Town. Also Rune Factory for DS.

I played a lot of FoMT, it was thoroughly amazing, but I ended up doing most of what I wanted then moved on.

Rune Factory is great, although I've never gotten too into it since I have little desire to go back to sinking tons of time into it again.

So basically I had one excellent experience, but I'm not too keen on repeating it.

It was fun at first, but after getting everything it gets really boring. I haven't played it in about a year. I was going to sell it, but my niece likes it.

I'm a huge Harvest Moon fan, having spent far too long on Friends of Mineral Town and A Wonderful Life, but I've been really disappointed with this generation's entries in the series. Tree of Tranquillity I found to be immeasurably slow even by Harvest Moon standards, with shoddy animation and muffled audio. Magical Melody I liked even less - it looked like a PSOne game and, again, was stupidly slow. If these games received quality translations and PAL conversions I'd be much happier about it, but it seems it's taken a real generational leap backwards, which upsets me.

I feel the series hasn't developed much in recent years - sure, since the Super NES version it's got much more complex - but the actual issues at the core of the gameplay are still present. Perhaps I was just ignorant of its problems in the past, but this generation has really disappointed me.

That said, I still get the same excitement about a new HM game as I used to. Rune Factory on DS is fantastic and I can't wait to play the Wii one (not out in the UK yet), and I have yet to play Island of Happiness. Fingers crossed.

I was obsesed with the GameBoy Color version, had it 100%ed and had an efficient farming plan and everything.

I've never played a Harvest Moon game before but I like the look of Rune Factory so I may get that.

I like the simpler, retro offerings... so Im off to the Wii Shop Channel to purchase the SNES version for VC.