Harvest Moon: Connect To A New World Shows Us How To Get Started

I haven't enjoyed an Harvest Moon game ever since the Game Boy Colour one was released I so wish they remade it. Their games seem to get worst and worst…

@LostHeaven How so? I've only played the Tale of Two Towns and I thought that was a rather good game.

I've only played a wonderful life on gamecube and despite me never getting close to finishing it,I love it

@LostHeaven Do you have taste cancer? Harvest Moon DS was the best followed by it's sequels. Personally my favorite is Animal Parade.

I'm pretty hyped for this game it's revolutionizing the series with the premise they're going with now.

@PrincessEevee9 If I have cancer? What does that mean?

You'll have to speak up, it's hard to hear you over how awesome HM: A New Beginning is (once you get past Spring).

@LostHeaven
What makes you say that? Being a longtime fan I'm just curious whats stopping you from enjoying them. Is it the lack of a clear deadline or something?

I buy pretty much every Harvest Moon game on release (and I started playing it on the SNES), and I have to say... I've really been liking how they're handling the series now since New Beginning. Tale of Two Towns was a huge letdown to me (stale dialogue, the towns took insane amounts of time to travel between until you got the cave open). But they've really been turning the series around again in good ways.

Now if only a new company could pick up and continue the greatness that is Rune Factory, I'd be even happier.

@Zombie_Barioth @64supermario
It's a bit hard to explain in a rational manner. I guess the Game Boy Colour version (alongside the SNES one) was the one that defined what an Harvest Moon game should be about, to me. The game's mechanics were simple and addictive, as were the perfect controls. The graphics were beautiful and, despite the drawbacks that we now see in the Game Boy Colour's screen, it was pretty darned amazing and revolutionizing at the time to be playing an handheld game like that in colour. The sprites were sharp and pixel perfect. The best I've ever seen in the series. There was a simplicity in the gameplay (probably unintended and caused by the hardware's limitations) that actually made it feel more enjoyable than other iterations where the sum of all the new features and gimmicks just don't add up to a better gaming experience. Just like many other games in this generation, less was more.
I didn't enjoy Friends of Mineral Town as much as the GBC one, but this doesn't mean I didn't like it. It was a great game and an improvement on its predecessor in many ways. However, something that really bothered at that time with it were the graphics, which always seemed fuzzy and blurred, unlike on the GBC, where everything was sharp and clear. This is very likely a problem of mine because I usually prefer sharp, albeit jagged, visuals to smooth and slightly blurry. The biggest example I can give you regarding this is Advance Wars 2. I loved and adored the original Advance Wars game. Easily clocked more than 1000 hours overall and I'm just waiting to finish Fire Emblem Awakening to pick my GBA and start a new campaign. When Advance Wars 2 was released, which seemed to be pretty much a slight improvement on the first one, with a couple of extra units and a new story, one would expect I would be delighted with it too. Well, to this day, I still can't play the game. I felt the same thing with Friends of Mineral Town: something was made to the game's graphics that made them look extremely soft and blurry, like there's a coat of vaseline on top of the GBA's screen. I got used to it on FOMT (it wasn't as noticeable), and was able to enjoy the game. Never got to go past it on AW2, to much of my frustration, because I know there's an incredibly good game beneath the looks.
I was very excited when I bought A Wonderful Life but struggled a bit with the shift to 3D. I knew this was bound to happen, sooner or later, but I just never got the feeling I was playing an harvest Moon game. I also didn't care much for the game's visuals, which looked outdated to me at the time, adding to the feeling that switching to 3D didn't benefit the game that much.
Magical Melody (I only played the Wii version, not the original one. I think the only difference was the added suport for motion controls, though) was the closest I came to enjoy a HM game as much as the GBC version. I appreciated that they took a step back from the previous games and returned to the original art-style. I found the visuals much better than AWL's (again, not sure if it has something to do with it being the Wii port). It was a good game, it just didn't captivated me as much as the original.
I never got to play Tree of Tranquility. I think this was when I started losing hope on the series and became fatigued. I also feel the series art-style have been becoming increasingly more infantile, which has nothing wrong with it, it's just something I don't appreciate; others might.
As for the Nintendo DS version, I remember I got it almost at the same time as I bought Animal Crossing: Wild World (which was my first AC game and quite blew my mind, at the time) and, although surely being different games, they had some elements in common and I felt AC was more inovative in the way it approached them. Overall, it really made me feel I was playing a DS game, whilst HMDS reminded me of a slightly updated Mineral Town.
I didn't enjoy Island of Happiness at all due to the stupidity of making you have to use the stylus to control the character. I feel this was unneeded and didn't benefit the game at all. I found it made it needlessly harder and frustating, specially when you were trying to water a particular vegetable, or seed in a certain spot with precision.
The last game I played on the series was Hero of Leaf Valley. I bought it more in hope that a PSP version could mean an improvement over the last ones I had played, but I found it the opposite. It was the Harvest Moon game I enjoyed the least and sold it soon after I bought it. Again, didn't enjoy the artstyle, the full 3D and the controls.
I didn't play another Harvest Moon game released since Island of Happiness (with the PSP exception). Also didn't play the games released on Sony's home consoles, so I admit I might have missed a good one that would have made me change my mind.
Then again, some days ago I was browsing the 3DS pre-owned shelf at a GAME store, and found a copy of A New Beggining. I felt tempted to buy it but, as soon as I start paying attention to the art-style (really looks like bad manga) and screenshots, I become fearful of wasting money in something similar to my last experiences.

@PrincessEevee9 I'd still like to know what the hell does cancer has to do with this.

I thought ANB was a good step in the right direction. I've loved the series for as long as I can remember and buy just about every game. Things have gotten overly complicated in the recent games, but I can always go back and play the older ones to relive the glory days (HM64 is my favorite in the series and one of my favorite games ever...spelling and grammatical errors included!)

Ah, I forgot to mention Harvest Moon 64, which I never saw being sold in my home-country at the time, much to my sadness.

I see some positive opinions of ANB, might convince myself to play it, if the sequel ends up not being as good.

@PrincessEevee9 Animal Parade is my favorite too

Massive HM fan here! This reminds me when i was a young boy and i use to read the instruction manuals over and over again HM 2 on GBC was my favourite! sigh will never experience such joys again!

@LostHeaven
Yea, I get what your saying. Too much extra fluff added to the original formula. They've also spent quite a bit of time, perhaps too much, just trying to reinvent the series.

If you feel like trying to get back into the series Animal Parade and ANB might be the best places to start. Animal Parade is probably the closest to the original formula the series has been in a long time.

If you'd rather go old school theres Back to Nature which was the PS1's answer to HM64, they basically pulled a Majora's Mask with it. It'd recommend HM64 but its status as a classic has inflated its price.

Theres Rune factory too if you haven't played it yet, if you don't mind a bit of dungeon crawling with your agriculture.

@LostHeaven Friends of Mineral Town should be your starting point. Or perhaps the Rune Factory series.

Personally the only other thing they could do with the series is make it fully online co-op. The game feels the same with each entry. I have New Beginning which plays just like all the others it just looks different. They wont do co-op though. They will do some half baked sharing of items like they did for new beginning.