Harvest Moon Added To Japan's Switch Online Super Famicom Library

Ouch. I LOVE Earthworm Jim, but I SO wish I could get Harvest Moon on Nintendo Online. It struck a chord with me that no other game in the series could ever quite match.

tis a sad day to see, I have a vendetta against that Earthworm.

A real shame we don’t get this one. Such a classic and it’s a genre severely lacking on the service.

I'm happy we got earthworm jim, but no harvest moon? I have been wanting to play the first one, and thought, "It would be great to have on the NSO service" only to hear JP players get it, dang!

Um... Nope.
Reasons:
For Harvest Moon, I can consider Friends of Mineral Town remake on PS4. Also, I want to woohoo the guys, not the girls.
For Mappy game, I can consider from Namco Museum NDS.

I'm seeing Nintendo tends to focus on bringing games that didn't make it to VC.

Honestly, I don't understand though, since we can't buy Harvest Moon on Wii anymore.

Maybe there are problems with branding considering harvest moon is now called story of seasons??

Will be playing later on. So many fond memories of this game.

I'd been hoping we'd get this. To get so close and then it be Japan only...? I'm pretty gutted honestly.

Hopefully our version of the app will get it as well. At some point...

Huh… I have mixed feelings, but it makes sense that we don’t get Harvest Moon. Wish they could just relabel it Story of Seasons and call it a day.

@valharian @Wilforce Natsume should be able to submit their version of the game just fine, as far as I know.

I have always hated farm sim games, but the art style of the original SNES Harvest Moon has always had an incredible appeal to me.

There's so many Japan-only NES & SNES games that could be translated & brought over that'd add so much more value to the NSO service, but just won't. I'd love to see those SMT games the Japanese NSO has translated, but then again maybe they'd screw it up like with Fire Emblem and just make more people bitter.

@shoeses : Was there a problem with the Fire Emblem translation?

@Pak-Man then download it. It's REALLY easy to make a Japanese Nintendo account to download the app. Nintendo Life has a step by step guide too. Would take you 5 minutes. 👍🏽😉

@Silly_G The translation itself? I don't think so. But they randomly made the game darker, charged $7 instead of making it part of the Western NSO, & made it a limited-time digital-only release.

Might end up on there eventually in the west since Natsume has some of their own things on there, plus there are old Harvest Moon games still available on PS4 (and through PS Now) so there's clearly some kind of distribution possible there. Though really I less want Harvest Moon on the SNES and more want Harvest Moon 64, I'd play that on the Switch constantly.

@shoeses I've got a feeling the game is a remake/port, reusing the original 8-bit assets, rather than an actual ROM translation.

NSO's only value is convenience. Whatever reason Nintendo has for not releasing this outside of Japan doesn't apply to emulating it yourself.

@KingMike Either way, it's still disappointing.

@Purgatorium The reason is that Marvelous, owner of the series, doesn't own the Harvest Moon name and can't use it anymore.

@Eel It was brought over under a licensing agreement. They no longer have the license to the Story of Seasons series. The question would be if they have a perpetual license to all games in the Harvest Moon franchise or just the name Harvest Moon. If they have the franchise then absolutely, but I’m not sure. Were the Harvest Moon games ported to Wii U for the VC? That’d be the best litmus test we have, unfortunately I can’t check since my Wii U died a few days ago.

@Wilforce I am by no means an expert, or able to speak for them, but I am under the impression based on things I’ve read online and their past activities (the virtual console games), that they still have some sort of ownership over the games they localized and sold as part of their own Harvest Moon franchise.

So, while they don’t own the super famicom title it’s based on, they’re still able to distribute the SNES title named “Harvest Moon”.

@Wilforce Yes, there were a bunch of Harvest Moon games on the 3DS and Wii U eShops. SNES game, GBC games, 64, FoMT... No DS for some reason though. Maybe just because of how absurdly buggy it is?

Thankfully I still have my original SNES cartridge. This game will never see a rerelease outside of Japan.

@Wilforce They were on 3DS and Wii U VC (notably, the Wii U had Harvest Moon 64 which was omitted on the Wii) but it's likely that Natsume could still sell those since they were launched before the license changeover.
(oddly enough, Natsume was also able to sell the GBC Lufia game on 3DS VC, while the other three have not been released. Well, the GBA one was released to Japanese Wii U but maybe because S-E only supported Japanese VC that gen, and Atlus continued to not want to release VC games outside Japan as well, they very small number they even could sell.)

@Pak-Man you can download the Super Famicom app from the japanese eshop and play it

As per usual Japan gets the better ones.

@Pak-Man If you don’t know how to do what @CodyMKW suggested, you have to create a Japanese account and then link it to a profile your Switch first. Then download the Japanese apps and play them using your main account that has the NSO access (no need to pay for NSO twice)

I think you can change regions on your main profile; but it’s a pain; so having a secondary Japanese account is always helpful.

OR
"How to give WC Earthworm Jim 2, but make them feel sad about it."

Not sure this is any issue at all, if you want the Japanese games just simply create a new Switch account, and set it's region to Japan.

Thanks for everyone recommending a Japanese Switch account, I surely love playing farming sims in a language I don't understand. I reckon it really makes me feel like a poor immigrant to a new land.

@KingMike

It's a rom, actually the OG rom, being translated live via LUA scripting. Same as Earthbound 0 on Wii U, or so I heard. Not sure about Earthbound 0 on Switch tho.

This is my favorite SNES game! I wish we were getting it.

At least we have the option to download the Japan Switch Online apps if we make a Japanese account. And I've played this game enough times since the late 90's to probably get through without the translation.. but I'd love to have the release here.

I'm sure it comes down to licensing issues with the Harvest Moon/Story of Seasons split here in the west.

Toriyama artstyle, is that you?

From a time when the Harvest Moon franchise was awesome.

Harvest Moon for the SNES - Back to Nature on the Nintendo 64 were some of the best.

A Wonderful Life was fairly solid also but would really benefit from a 60fps boost with a remaster or something.

Yeah, I did the Japanese account thing to see if I could struggle through Fire Emblem back before we got a nifty English copy. I was using Google Translate on my phone while I played through. It was kind of fun, but Harvest Moon is way too text heavy for that to be practical. I also finally changed the Japanese account back to English because I was tired of getting Japanese news updates.

@BLD EarthBound Beginnings is an actual ROM translated. They translated it in 1991, it was shelved, a copy leaked to ebay and then the Internet in 1998, but not officially released by Nintendo until 2015.
As to Fire Emblem, I can say at a minimum that font is not hardware-accurate and has to be either a port or emulator magic.
I can say as one who experimented with fan-translation in like 2005 (before even the DS remake).

Sad, I really love that original Harvest Moon as well but with Marvelous and Natsume not playing nice with the Harvest Moon trademark this is a lost cause to us older HM fans.

@CodyMKW yeah, but the article says it's in Japanese only, do won't be as enjoyable to play if you can't read Japanese.

@Anti-Matter I’m almost positive the game has far more to offer than that.