Harvest Moon: Skytree Village, the Review Platform played on: Nintendo 3DS By TheChurchOfYoba (TeddieSage)
You play as a boy or a girl who stumbles upon a decaying valley, where a mysterious deity called the Harvest Goddess begs you to restore her land by showing you care about nature, crops and animals. She sends you on this quest with the assistance of her Harvest Sprites sidekicks that will often help you on your future farm if you ask them politely. This is an adventure to restore a part of the valley that has been dying after the Skytrees (giant trees inhabited by Harvest Sprites) of the land have been inactive. Your job is to wake each Harvest Sprites so they will do their job of keeping the Skytrees active. Afterwards, you’ll be able to live a happy life, even marry a bachelor or a bachelorette depending on your gender and start a family.
If you played “Harvest Moon: The Lost Valley”, you probably already know what to expect about the controls and the 3D map. However, if you’re a newcomer, let’s just say you’ll have to you’ll have to rise, lower and till the soil with the A button as you collect tools from the Harvest Goddess to help you in your journey. You will also receive some ax and some hammer as you progress in the story to slam rocks, mine ores, cut some trees, etc.
It sounds easy at first, but you’ll soon realise that this Harvest Moon has been streamlined to the point you don’t need to go back into your inventory all the time to select your tools and items. Instead, the game has been programmed in a way that it will allow it to recognize if a field has been watered, and ask you if you want to fertilize your crop, etc. Let’s just say, on paper, it’s a great idea. However, the moment you start experimenting with your farm, things get messy with the A-button. You’ll find out that you’ve been wasting some Fertilizers by accident or you’ve been planting the wrong seeds, etc. It’s a good thing you can mess around the camera modes, so it will help you seeing the farm better. To me, this was a part of the game that has been bugging me and I’d love it if the programmers made it better next time around.
Another thing I find frustrating about this game is that there’s practically no way to know how to mutate most of the crops to collect some specific vegetables you might want to keep in your bag, in case someone from the village requests those. 30 hours in and I’m still trying to figure out how to spawn Petite Onions on the map.
You know what’s great about this game? The skills system feels somewhat rewarding. The more you water crops, plant crops, harvest them, interact with things, the more the Harvest Goddess will reward you with better tools, making things even faster while you’re farming around your map. That was a great addition to this game and I’m glad it’s there.
Something else that bothered me as I’ve played this game is the lack to jump over animals or bounce on the bigger ones, which would help you, a lot inside barns. Walking into those buildings filled with animals gets very frustrating sometimes. I’m also upset that you got to wait until they’re done eating to milk your cows or sheath their wools.
As for the music and the general ambiance of the game, I’d say it’s pretty cute, relaxing and I enjoy the soundtrack so far. I’ve played until Fall Season in the first year and I’ve waked about five Harvest Sprites in total and expanded the Farm Map quite a lot.
Unlike other Harvest Moons and Story of Seasons, you don’t need to give gifts to your townspeople. Instead, you’ll be given many opportunities to fulfill some of their dreams and requests by collecting specific items for them. This allows the characters to develop more as you do their sidequests and sometimes you’ll learn cute and silly tidbits about their lives. I think this way of handling relationships is good, not perfect, but good. You can still talk to the characters every day to boost your chemistry (friendship level), but it will give you smaller amounts of chemistry rather than completing their quests.
This way of handling the franchise surely is new for Natsume’s current team who’s trying to make their brand of ‘farm simulation role playing games’ feel more unique, but I feel they should keep things simple next time around and just focus on the classic gameplay everyone loves. However, I think they could bring back some elements like the requests and the chemistry system with characters. I can’t wait to see how the story unfolds so I’ll be playing a lot in the next few days, trying to figure out how to create more crops mutations on my own.
Bottom line is, you might enjoy this game if you’re a hardcore Harvest Moon game, but the controls and some of the changes might put you off. It’s a decent time killer and it shows how the new programmers for this franchise got a lot of potential to revive their franchise. One can only hope that both Harvest Moon and Story of Seasons will find their places in many gamers’ hearts, out there. I sure am expecting a lot of good things from both companies and I’m also looking forward news about Harvest Moon: Light of Hope.
Final Score: 3.5 Turnips on 5.
PS: I hope this review wasn’t too harsh.
