Well, shows how much you know, because this society that failed to develop agriculture has mastered miniaturization technology you know, it's like when you play Civilization against someone who researches nuclear fission before they've discovered the wheel. The reasonable question to ask at this point would be "How does one combine a farming sim with a game about journeying around the world?" the one certainty about farms is that they kind of can't go anywhere. I mean, for fuck's sake, there are fruit-bearing trees everywhere! What did everyone think those were? Unusually taciturn people with very delicious haircuts? Anyway, as the one weirdo who still thinks crops grow from seeds, you are tasked by the Goddess of Spring (or someone like that) to travel the world and reintroduce the concept of growing things and yes, every character in this game does come across as about as stupid as this premise. That's one of many ways this game comes off as insubstantial another way is how most of the world is an empty corridor maze of repeating grass texture dotted with the odd house or tree that all look like inflatable pool toys, as do the characters, especially the protagonist with their glazed expression and permanent "village idiot" grin that looks incomplete because they forgot to add the line of drool at the corner of the mouth. I say "village" it's more like two houses on the edge of a cliff. It's actually a standard RPG rural village, where I guess the inhabitants have subsisted up to now sucking the dew off the grass every morning. "Oh, so it's like a dystopian future where technology's taken over and everyone eats manufactured nutrient cubes?" Well, that sounds like an interesting concept for a light farming sim, and as such, too interesting to be anywhere near this game. There's no such thing as "bronze ore", you shitwits! It's an alloy it doesn't occur naturally! It's like telling me to go harvest a cupcake bush.Īnyway, the starting premise is that you're a dude in a world where everyone's forgotten how seeds work. I enjoyed Harvest Moon back on the SNES and have clocked in enough hours in Stardew Valley to raise an actual child or moderately-sized dog, so I was curious to see in precisely what manner Natsume was buggering the franchise's reputation over a feeding trough quite heartily, it turns out! Harvest Moon: One World is the game, and while it seems to have had some noble intention to sprinkle a little more adventure into the concept so you're not just waking up and urinating on potatoes day in, day out, in doing so, it loses sight of the core appeal of these games, and there's a general air of wrongness about the whole thing, which first started sinking in when it told me to go to the cave and mine some bronze ore. Well, just dip a biscuit in my skull, because I tried out the new Harvest Moon on Switch. Okay, I looked this up, and I think I've got the details square: The popular and influential Japanese cutesy farming sim franchise Farm Story was published by Natsume in the West under the name " Harvest Moon" in 2014, the developer switched publishers, and its games have since been released in the West under the name " Story of Seasons" because Natsume reserved the rights to the name " Harvest Moon" so that they could make their own rival cutesy farming games and call them " Harvest Moon", because they assume those fat, ignorant Westerners have reservoirs of cream gravy instead of brains and won't know the difference. But apparently, there's a lot of copyright fuckery going on in the world of almost-spherical livestock. Jeez, I thought the world of light farming simulators was a gentle, uncomplicated place where turnips always come up in three days and baby cows spontaneously materialize inside barns when the other cows are happy enough, with none of the grim realities of getting plowed up and down the feeding trough by a randy bull. This week on Zero Punctuation, Yahtzee reviews Harvest Moon: One World.
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