How the original Harvest Moon showed us the beauties of rustic life
Harvest Moon (1998)
Harvest Moon (1998)
The farming life isn’t exactly one that appeals to me. I’m sure, at some point in your life, you will have driven past green fields full of cows and sheep, and smelt the fresh mess coming in through your closed car windows. Well, farmers are quite accustomed to that smell. Some of them actually live for it, except they dress it up as “the fresh country air.”
Can you believe that? I’ll take carbon monoxide fumes over cowpat gas every time. I’d rather stay as close to electricity as possible, actually. And while we’re at it, I’d rather my farming fantasies were restricted to video game pipe dreams. It’s in this way that I discovered Harvest Moon for the SNES, and I began tingling in my wellies.
Allow me to quickly come clean about something – I never owned this game as a child. Nobody did. Well, probably zillions of people in Japan had it, and six or seven players in North America. But it came out in Europe in 1998, for God’s sake. And at that point, what are you going to play? A twee little farming game for the Super Nintendo, or Metal Gear Solid?!
I even though a UK PAL version of the game was a myth, until I did some research and learned that only 5,000 or so copies were made for this region – and if any of those made it to Ireland and still reside here to this day, I’d love to know.
You could also pick up the Australian version of the game, with its half-English text, and much more appealing green box-art. But that’ll cost you a few hundred Euro, which is probably around eight-thousand Aussie dollary-doos when converted.
I say ‘half-English text’ because the translation in Harvest Moon SNES is a travesty as well. But at least this is one of those translations that goes past “incompetent”, and even dips in and out of the realm of “mentally disturbed”, before ending up at the bottom of the valley at “hilarious”.
I’m not surprised that the game didn’t get much love from localisers, publishers and marketers. Released as late in the SNES’s life cycle as it was, this game was probably projected to sell precisely zero copies. So naturally, they did the localisation as cheaply as they could, employing the most basic, old-fashioned, late 90s Babelfish translation available at the time. That’s understandable.
What’s not understandable is when your character examines a pot and suddenly bellows “Confirm the origin of fire!” Or, when it’s the middle of a profound scene and one of the love interests looks you dead in the eye before softly speaking the line, “I want to do garden forever”. You get the feeling that your character just wants to nervously smile and nod at the girls instead.
Ahh, yes, the girls. That’s what we’re really here for. In any Harvest Moon game, or Story of Seasons as it is now, the big interest lies in who you can marry. Now, heavens knows if the ladies in this game are even of age, so it’s perhaps best if I measure my words here. All the same, they’re all marriageable in this isolated, tiny, vaguely French and definitely inbred village, so let’s meet our unlucky ladies:
First off you’ve got Anne, the flame-haired inventor girl. Pretty much every Harvest Moon game comes with an Anne, or even an Ann. This particular Anne sits around hammering doohickeys in her father’s shop all day, until they inevitably blow up in people’s faces. Cute, but maybe best not to let her near your farming equipment.
Ellen is more tomboyish, and her father is a terrible drunkard. On the plus-side however, she’ll give you a little yellow dog to keep you company on your farm, although she never bothered to name the doggy herself. A farmer probably doesn’t need a lazy wife, so I’m sorry, but she’s out.
Nina is a pink-haired, wild-eyed nutter who talks about flowers and, I don’t know, discarding and consuming men like a Black Widow spider. I’m only going off sprites and artwork here, but you can just tell that Nina is the minxy sort, full of cheeky smirks and usually having that look in her eyes. You’ll have absolutely no idea what’s going to happen anytime you’re left alone with her, put it that way.
And then contrasting her is Maria – blue-haired, demure, church-going… but most desirably of all, she’s the Mayor’s daughter. Her being an only child, this is a no-brainer: get in with her, and the Mayor’s massive pad will one day be yours. He lives in this Uncle Monty stately home the size of a cathedral, while other folks not two minutes down the road live in log cabins, eating dirt. Which would you prefer?
I tended to end up with the fifth and final girl, Eve, for three reasons. Firstly, she’s that potent mix of sultry and blonde, and she looks knock-out in that red dress. Of course, I’m talking about a tiny 16-bit sprite, but let’s use our imaginations here. The other four bachelorettes are girls, but Eve here is a woman.
Secondly, she works in the bar, which means that she likes to dabble in a drink or six, and she’ll drink you under the table any day of the week. The characters in this bar all drink ‘juice’ by the way, which is odd considering how often the drinking characters hiccup, and how your little farmboy suddenly turns red and staggers about the place after a mere mouthful. But there you are.
The third sneaky advantage of courting Eve is that, curiously, night never ends in this game until you go to bed. The days themselves are dreadfully short, but once it hits a depressing sundown at 6PM and the music switches off, that’s it. Even Father Time goes home. This means that you can keep running to the nearby mountaintops, grab some respawning flowers and throw them at Eve as often as you like.
She never seems to get suspicious of this tactic, and in fact she seems rather enamoured by it, which means you can have her ready to produce nine of your glorious children by Day 2 of your agricultural prison sentence. And you’ll know if you’re having the desired effect on her by busting into her room and reading her diary.
Is that a terrible example to set or what? You literally go up to their beds, sniff them (well, ‘examine’ them, but it’s left ambiguous), and seemingly the only thing she’s written in the diary is a row of hearts. One heart means that you’re shoe excrement, five hearts means you’re on your way.
Ten hearts and you can give her the Blue Feather. No euphemism here, it’s simply an odd but strangely heartwarming method of marriage proposal that’s become a Harvest Moon series staple. I’ve even heard of real life couples proposing with a Blue Feather. Whether these relationships developed because the groom threw eggs and flowers at the bride-to-be every single day, I don’t know.
What’s disappointing is that, when you marry these women, they lose almost all of their personality and become quite samey. They all wear the same 18th century frock and do their hair the same way, just differently coloured. A comment on the futile monotony of married life and becoming an eternal housewife? Perhaps.
But it almost makes you want to throw stones and weeds at your better half every day, just to get some sort of non-robotic reaction from them. They can actually pack up and leave for their mother’s, you know, if you treat them too terribly. They can even take your bald little baby with them too, as you single-handedly set fathers’ rights back a few more years.
I seem to have forgotten that this is a farming game and not a dating sim, so let’s get back to basics. Your beaming father and tearful mother wordlessly leave you on a farm that’s in a horrendous state of disrepair, and that’s the last you see of them. Quite a tragic fate, really, but might as well make the most of it: it’s up to you to clean up the farm; integrate yourself into the local community; plant crops and grass; raise cows and chickens; and generally make a stack of cash from the fat of the land.
After two-and-a-half years, your parents suddenly remember that they have a son and fight their way back to the farm in a pompous panic, Home Alone style. Unlike future games in the series, there’s no way to keep on playing after this, so you’d better make those years count.
If your farm is a wretched, barren wasteland with your horse fit only for the knacker’s yard, then your dad will kick up stink and your mother will cry again. Ship zillions of turnips and make a fortune, however, and suddenly you’re the man and you get to retire early, with a big fat high-score to boot. Presumably this was a college gap year that went on for far too long, and it’s back to urban living and a future in big business for you, while the country girls miss you terribly.
There’s even an ending where you can be a ladies’ man, desired by all but taken by no-one. In this scenario, the five girls and possibly the wrinkly old fortuneteller serve as your personal concubines. After all, you own the most land out of anybody in this community, and that includes a hefty amount of road frontage. And any rural girl I’ve ever spoken to regards road frontage as being next to Godliness in the desirability stakes.
It’s not all good, though. Something that really grates in this game is the noise of the scrolling text – it’s nails on a chalkboard stuff. Some of the music doesn’t fare much better. Also, there’s hardly any text tutorial. And of course, any text that does exist is mangled horribly by the simpleton translating it. Hence you’ll probably spend half your time on the farm cutting up your own crops, ploughing your dog and watering your horse.
As the first of its series, Harvest Moon SNES feels very much like an experimental game. Several quality of life improvements benefited the series as the years went on, before the sequels became far too numerous to count. It was just as well that Stardew Valley came along and swept almost every other Harvest Moon aside. But this one is still worth looking at, even as a curious relic.
These days, Harvest Moon SNES seems ever more quaint, ever more quirky. But it’s a wonderful example of a successful gaming experiment. By all rights, it should have been cancelled or brought to a different system or completely destroyed early on in development.
But no, some madman in Japan decided that the Super Nintendo needed a farming sim in 1996, and more madmen thought the USA and Europe/Australia needed one in ‘97 and ‘98 respectively. And from there, the series grew into a frightfully large golden turnip – even if there have been a few cowpats along the way.
2 February 2024