Stem's thoughts on Harvest Moon GBC2
AKA how I ruined a perfectly good game for myself
The first Harvest Moon on the GameBoy was a port of a pretty simple game onto an even simpler console. The limitations involved meant that only the most basic mechanics could reasonably be left in. The farming gameplay loop still existed, but without any superfluous aspects like wandering the forest for forage or speaking to any of the NPCs. The town still existed of course, as you needed to have a place where you could buy more things for your farm. The compromise they made was to turn the whole thing into a menu where you could choose a business and go inside to buy things, but nothing else, which is disappointing but understandable for such a simple game.
The first thing that Harvest Moon GBC 2 does is put you in a conversation with an NPC, and then makes you run around the town– a place that you can actually walk around in, with buildings and people outside –to talk to and meet everyone as you tell them that you’re going to take over the old farm.
To say this game was a relief to play is an understatement. I actually played this one immediately after GB1 because I decided to skip 64, so when I turned on the game and experienced its opening, I was still extremely raw from how awful GB1 felt. The first time I played it, I actually had to stop after day one, I didn’t even get to do any farming yet, because I was reeling so hard from how absurdly different this one was– and how COMPLETE! The excuses I made in my mind for GB1 were a complete and total sham!
The first thing that you see when starting a new file is something of a character creator. It’s a simple menu where you choose your name, your gender, pick a birthday out of any day in one of the four seasons (64 only let you choose a season), and then choose between a cat or dog for a pet. You aren’t told this in the selection, but a cat will bring home random seeds you can plant, and a dog will scare away wild animals, meaning that you can only leave your livestock outside overnight if you have a dog. I like free stuff though, so I chose the cat.
The next thing you’re exposed to is the town and what story there is, but I’ll get into that later. What I’ll instead explain next is your farm, which is a little weird compared to earlier games. In the first area, you have your house, a big open space, and then the usual barn, coop, silo, wood bin, with extra space on the left and bottom of the farm for a sheep pen and hothouse/greenhouse that you can buy in the future. You cannot grow crops in this area. Instead, there’s a different area to the south that hosts a huge, empty field where you’re expected to grow everything. This is also the only place where there’s an outdoor shipping bin, so you have to go all the way down there rather than just to the entrance of your farm if you have forage to ship. To the east of the farming area is a lake where you can catch fish, and a pond where you can save fish you’ve previously caught. The only thing to do with fish is sell them though, so the only reason I can really see for using the pond is if you caught something past 5PM, when anything put in storage will rot before it can be picked up. The lake is connected to a river that runs through the crop fields, and there’s actually a space to put a bridge so you can access the other half of the space for double the planting capacity.
You won’t use any of that space to plant grass though, as all of that is meant to go behind the animal houses. Each one has its own individual field behind it for planting grass, and the game won’t let you buy any animals to go in the corresponding buildings unless a certain amount of grass is growing in the field behind it. It’s pretty awkward to make sure the grass is actually cut, as a player who doesn’t go back there every day, but I see the logic behind it. They want to make people plant grass as an extra way to gatekeep animals beyond just money. It also works pretty tidily with the mechanics they have for putting animals in and out, which is that you get special tools for each of them that automatically sends them in or outside. I didn’t use these things because I didn’t have a dog, so putting my animals outside was equivalent to throwing them to the wolves… literally. And as you may have already theorized, individual items for three different types of animals turns into an inventory disaster because of the way tools work.
In your house is a tool chest that opens a menu when you interact with it. The chest holds up to 20 tools, each with a designated slot, and it has an additional page for all the different types of seeds you can buy. You’re able to carry four different tools or types of seeds on your person at any given time, with the ability to swap between which one is equipped quickly via the START button, or more precisely by opening up the inventory menu via the SELECT button, which is pretty nice in my opinion! It works quickly, and four tools is more than any other game has let you carry so far, but that only means so much when the game has such an excess of tools, while most others only have about six– not including seeds. Navigating the tool chest also becomes something of a pain because there are so many items, so it’s desirable to only keep the absolute necessities on your person.
Included in the excessive amount of tools is an exciting new item: the bug net. See, this game has reincorporated the forest as a foraging area, but it’s a little more than that. While it has the usual seasonal wild plants, a daily-replenishing supply of lumber, and a hot spring, it also has a myriad of insects that wander or fly around in short, predictable loops. It’s no Animal Crossing– the bugs always spawn in the same place and do the same thing for a whole season until the next one, where they’re replaced by a different kind of insect doing the same amount of nothing, but I think that’s appropriate for a game on such a short schedule. Bug catching is less about skill and more about remembering to bring your net with you on days and times that you haven’t gone bug-catching before. The fishing mechanic is similarly simple– it’s less about waiting and more about timing, as the rod will bob in the same pattern every time you cast it, you just have to catch it at the right time. As a result, if you get the timing down, you can always reel it in at the first bob and catch fish extremely quickly. This strategy ended up being my favorite during the time while I was getting started and didn’t have a lot of cash for seeds or animals yet.
But what do you do with these things you catch? You can sell fish but you can’t sell bugs. Instead, both are recorded in collections that you can access at the library in town! The function of the library is to let you access your collections of bugs and fish, view photos that you collected through experiencing events (kind of like what was in 64), and connect to the save files of your friends who have the game to share information and trade items. See, this game took a little inspiration from Pokemon in that while there aren’t separate versions, you only get access to certain things if you’re playing as either a boy or a girl. You get different crops, different bug and fish spawns, and there’s a certain quest that requires making a connection. It’s very cute! But inaccessible if you aren’t playing a physical copy of the game on original hardware, unfortunately.
Other than the library, the town has a carpenter, clinic, church, restaurant, ranch, tool shop, and flower shop. My making a big deal about how the town isn’t a menu this time feels a little disingenuous getting more into it, because while it is a space you can navigate and where people walk around, once you go in a building it’s almost exactly the same– no interior, just a portrait of the shop owner and their wares, but all of this is preceded by an option to talk to them this time around! Not that they have much to say, but it’s still a difference. You get another chance to talk to the shopkeepers and give them gifts (because you can carry items between rooms this time) on Sundays when all the shops are closed, which is another unique feature compared to GB1 where every day was exactly the same.
To the north of the town is a little square with a fountain and bulletin board where everyone who isn’t employed usually wanders about during the business week. At the start of the game, the bulletin board is loaded up with handy tutorials on how to play the game (yet another thing GB1 severely lacked). Later on, it fills up with dates for town festivals like the cherry blossom festival and horse races. The festivals usually aren’t much, shops don't even close for the majority of them, but they give the world a little more life and variety and the horse race gives you the ability to purchase a minigame from the tool shop that you can play anytime you want! There are several minigames which are all unlocked to replay by doing things like going to events or completing certain objectives.
The last new thing in this game is that if you press SELECT twice, instead of giving you the option to turn on Harvest Sprite helpers (no sprites to be found here), you get a more detailed menu with information about your animals, possessions, and then a long FAQ list with information like “weeds are back!” and explanations on how to get sheep or grow flowers inside the hothouse.
The Story
The premise of the story is that there’s an old farm in town that’s going to be replaced by an amusement park. It opens with your character trying to talk the mayor out of agreeing to any deals, saying that you’ll take over the farm to save it. He agrees to give you three years to do the best work you can and then you’re sent on your way. The first thing you have to do is announce the deal to everyone in town, who all happen to already know you… and apparently very well! The town doctor confirms that you grew up in this town, and everyone around is your childhood friend. I’ve never personally seen any farming sim take this angle, and I think it’s pretty fun! The game doesn’t do a ton with it, but it at least has a different vibe. It works well for a game where you do have relationships with these people, but they’re not in a ton of depth and they don’t go anywhere in the end because marriage doesn’t exist here.
This entry is also the first in the series that we see a wholly unique cast (almost). You could argue that 64 does it since technically the folks in town aren’t the same, but they’re awfully damn similar. Everyone here is a new character design unrelated to anyone we’ve seen before. Aside from Mary (librarian) and Ken (carpenter) anyways, who are both the same exact design as their counterparts in 64. While their personalities are similar, there’s nothing to indicate that these are the same characters in any way.
The stories to do with all of these characters mostly aren’t anything too special. There’s twin boys who run the tool shop and their narrative is tied to how you get tool upgrades. Whether you play as a boy or a girl, there are a couple events that indicate certain characters have a crush on your farmer. There’s also a marriage that happens once you make it into year three that puts a tiny change in the town where Rosie, who runs the restaurant is replaced by her sister. Some of these events have to do with little quests where just about all you have to do is go to a certain location when asked, others just occur. As I said before, the story’s all very simple, but it’s just fine like that.
For the most part, necessary events will trigger when the time is right, but other things only happen if you’ve made good friends with everyone by talking on a regular basis and occasionally giving gifts. You’ll know if you’re on the right track when peoples’ dialogue changes, which happens a few times as you become closer. There’s apparently all kinds of little events in the game, but I failed to see a good number of them.
As usual, the easiest way to get on everyone's good sides and progress the story further is by doing well on your farm and either giving people the appropriate harvests as gifts or just upgrading things further. Despite all the changes to your farm layout, the actual things you have to do to work the land and care for animals are the same as ever. It’s pretty simple and quick to get good farming work done, and a decent amount of options afforded to you in terms of how you want to focus your energy– be it crops, animals, fishing, forage, or friendship, so it’s up to you how you want to get to the finish line. While you’re not told the requirements very clearly, the game is pretty low-stakes and just wants you to take your time and enjoy the three whole years it expects you to play.
How I ruined the game for myself
So of course, without a clear goal given to me, I had to look up the endings as soon as possible. Which brings me to my problem with this game: the requirements it has for the best ending are completely absurd. Well, to be accurate, one of the requirements is completely absurd. The best ending in the game requires 70 or more Happiness Points, having 10,000 G or more, have at least 3 of each animal (cow, sheep, and chicken), find 10 Power Berries, and have the third home expansion built, which are all extremely reasonable to do. So reasonable in fact that I handily managed all of those things before the end of year two out of three. The final, problematic requirement is to ship 10,000 or more items. This is a ridiculous amount of items. This is a “fill your entire field to the brim and never let it run empty” amount of items. I knew this from the second I saw it, but… well, it’s three years of gameplay right? And you aren’t told this is what you need anywhere within the game that I saw, so surely the developers thought this would be a reasonable goal for people, right? I had to give it a try, right?
Saying this from the future where I succeeded, I wish I didn’t try at all. I spent the full three years of this game constantly on the grind, filling my fields as completely as I could, and panicking to rush everything to the shipping bin before 5PM hit so I would have more empty land to plant more crops that I would water in the dark of night before going to bed and doing it again. Fun fact, this game doesn’t make you reset until 6AM the next morning and without any real repercussions. I only found this out because I’d stay out all night weeding and watering. There was very little time left to talk to the people in town after that. I did manage to get them all up to their maximum friendships pretty early on, before I had the means to constantly be churning out veggies, so I had every opportunity to catch their events, I just missed them because every day, no matter the season, I was farming.
The funny thing is, I’ve mentioned before that I enjoy playing the games this way. That is still true, and I very well could have enjoyed my time much more if it weren’t for the damned horse and its awful AI. See, there may be four inventory slots for tools, but there are none for items. Every individual one has to be plucked and carried to the shipping bin, same as SNES, same as GB1. The saving grace in those two games, and technically this one as well, is that around winter-ish of your first year, a horse will appear on your farm, and when it grows up in a couple seasons, it either already has or you can buy for it a saddle bag which functions as a mobile shipping bin. All you have to do is ride your horse out to where you’re harvesting and while it wanders a bit, it stays put well enough for you to load it up with veggies as you run back and forth to harvest, which speeds up the process dramatically in the vast fields you have to work in these games.
This horse is not like those other horses. This horse will take off in a dead sprint with no warning in any direction it pleases. In my experience, this was usually in the worst possible direction that would put it the farthest away from me. And the timing of it was typically whenever I was about to throw something into the saddlebag. This aggravated the hell out of me not only because it was a huge waste of my limited time, not only because it wasted a ton of crops, but also because it was constant. Nothing I did, no positioning I tried was able to help keep the horse where I needed it, and this was how I was spending 80% of my time in this game, dealing with this horse. I could have been seeing fun events, I could have been peacefully farming at my own pace and leisure, even better this technique easily could have just worked out if the horse didn’t behave so erratically.
But I can’t judge the game on the merit of all the time I spent with the horse alone because that was my own choice to do. The best ending may require 10,000 shipped items, but all it takes to avoid the worst ending is to have more than 10 Happiness Points, more than 2,000G, more than four Power Berries, expand my house, and ship 100 items. With three entire years of game, the only way you fail to achieve that is by basically not playing the game. The vast space between the requirements for the best ending and the worst ending is to get a normal ending that accomplishes exactly the same thing as the best ending does, only the cutscene is different and you get a trophy for the best one. The cutscene barely stands out as anything special, which led to me having no idea what ending I got until I discovered the trophy was a thing I had to search for in my house. That’s it, you still get to keep playing the game either way, not that there’s terribly much else to do regardless of which ending you get, since there’s no special post-ending content.
I’ll still judge it a little bit though
While it makes sense to use your workable area to its fullest extent, having it be a requirement for the good ending to use all of it to the best of your ability for the whole extent of the game is excessive to me, especially since by year 3 it becomes completely unnecessary to try to earn money. I already had everything I was working for, and the requirement being to ship more things rather than better things meant there was no reason to get anything other than what was cheap and quick. No reason to make my animals like me so they’d produce better stuff, no reason to use the maker machines even though they weren’t obtainable until it got to the point where money had no meaning. I hardly bothered with the hothouses because they were both so confusing about what I could plant in each, and so tedious both to unlock and to harvest things since I needed a special tool that would take up a precious inventory space, lest I have to run back and forth between the tool chest. The hothouse might have been more useful if there weren’t winter crops, but there were.
What’s wild about my criticisms is that the game itself has something built in to mitigate everything that I struggled with. There is a tool called the miracle glove that automatically ships your crops the moment that they are harvested. But the only way to get it is via a link connection to a friend’s copy of the game– something near impossible in this day and age because you’d need to somehow find two working copies of this game with two functional GameBoys, and completely impossible if you’re using the magic of the 3DS eShop which doesn’t exist anymore and didn’t have functional multiplayer for most games anyways. That item alone would have solved the biggest problem I had in playing this game, and it was functionally DLC.
Closing thoughts
It took me a really long time to try and get to this review, and I’ve beaten two more games since, which has given me a new perspective. My original nugget for this one was going to focus on how much I hated the horse the whole way through and on how disappointed I was that the game was so hard for such little reward, but I’ve since realized that playing in a way that was no fun for me was my own choice. At any point I could have scaled things down and reprioritized to focus on the details of the game that are more fun like seeing events, but I just clung to that damn horse for 50 hours instead– which by the way, is longer than it’s taken me to beat any other game in this series so far that I’ve recorded my playtime for. The average sits around 25 hours.
If you don’t play like I did, it’s actually a really neat game!It’s not dissimilar to a scaled-down version of 64, with the way it focuses a little more on events and adds features to make the world feel just a touch more alive like the bug and fish collections. It’s not as deep or detailed as 64, but you still get to experience something of a sweet little story with a small set of characters in a game that feels very smooth and fun to play.On the bright side, even with the struggle I went through trying to get the perfect score, it was still a better game than GB1. It says a lot that I’ve found it more appropriate to compare it to 64, a fantastic game, rather than its actual predecessor.
