Harvest Moon The Lost Valley- Maxi-Geek Review

The Harvest Moon series has been running since the Super Nintendo days and over the years it has found itself quite a dedicated group of fans, but it has always had a deeper learning curve that has kept newcomers away, The Lost Valley aims to remedy that.

You start out by selecting your character and giving them a name, then you are dropped in the world, well dropped is perhaps the wrong word, you are seen walking through a blizzard, an unknown voice tells you to take shelter in the house nearby and in the morning, when the storm has passed, a series of tools are found around the table and upon collection another voice calls for help. Once you make your way to the larger space, you follow the hints and help free Rowan, a sprite and he asks for your help in making a path to the Harvest Goddess’ Spring, where you discover that she is gone and as such Winter is a constant.

This is the first Harvest Moon game that really attempts to tell a story, the previous games have had a plot, but it was never that important, here there is a lot of focus on it and while the story is not that interesting, it does help move the game along. After your first few days in the valley, Sam the travelling merchant will appear in your house, at first it is because he thinks no one lives there, but then he decides to hang around out the front to sell you things and buy from you as well. This is important is unlike other Harvest Moon games, there is no town to visit, all the shopkeepers will appear in front your place. The biggest problem with this is when you need a specific item, flower seeds or even fertilizer and the person selling it is not around, you need to wait for them to appear and in that waiting the games lack of things to do is evident.



As you progress through the game, when you sleep, occasionally you will get dreams of events that will happen soon, sometimes it's about the upcoming arrival of a new person around the area, birthdays of the people you meet or even hints to help progress the story. These events will help drive you to do something, planting and growing some flowers will bring forth another sprite, but you will need to ensure you plant them in the right spot. Planting anything in the wrong spot will make it harder to grow and it will take a lot longer to achieve the results you want, the problem with this system is it's not really explained all too well in the tutorial, you need to read about it from the book shelf in your house. But you won’t need to go to the other side of the map, in order to find the right ground to plant in, you can shape the land as you need.

You have the ability to raise and lower the terrain, by simply digging it up. If a tree is in the way of your master plan, you can chop it down and even the mines around the place can be covered by dirt, which means you need to dig your way down to it. The game is offering up a lot more freedom to how you approach the farming then it ever has in the series past, but the problem with this, is the controls are fiddley. When you open the context menu, a grid appears around you character, this shows the space you can work with and then depending on your action if it's possible. The problem is, if you are a fraction to close to the square you want to dig, till or water, the game won’t let you, meaning you have to move back and try again. There were many times when the game would actually have me complete the action on the next square, causing me to waste some materials and frustrating me.

The interactions with the characters don’t fare a whole lot better either, while they are able to say what they want, your character simply nods along and only shows emotions through large question marks, teardrop icons and such, the conversations are pretty one sided, which also does make it feel like it's on auto-pilot somewhat. However the charm that the characters you meet show does help break that up a little, what is also interesting is that they will from time to time, have quests they need help with, obtaining enough of a vegetable or milk, will net you some better equipment to build a better farm.

The other social aspect from previous Harvest Moon games, Marriage does return here as well but it too is different from what players know. The lack of the town means that you can only woo selected members of the opposite gender when they are around your house and in past games you could purchase something nice to gift to them, but this time you just need to complete a quest for them. The changes have stunted the growth that the series has been known for, which is a real shame as given the smaller pool of potential partners, removing the freedom to woo your own way makes it an almost pointless system.

The game does sport a nice visual style, it is nothing new of course, the games have had a chibi art style for some time, but with the more open farm space, things are given a little more to expand. The farm space itself is actually quite interesting, as you start it's covered in snow and offers very little for your eyes to behold, but as the seasons change, the landscape does as well and things can look very different. Each player will of course see things differently, depending on how much they have changed the farming space, how many trees they have removed and so forth, but until that snow melts it's a bland space. From an audio point of view, it's nothing to write home about, the music plays a very minor role here and there were times, I turned the volume down to nothing as the repeating field melody was too much to take.

Harvest Moon The Lost Valley is really only Harvest Moon in name only, it is made by a different developer than the other recent games and it shows, it keeps the core farming in place, but almost everything else has been changed. Couple that with the much steeper learning curve and the very slow pace at which the game gets going and it is hard to recommend to anyone who is thinking of taking their first steps into the world. Fans will like and dislike certain aspects, depending on what they like about the series, but there is little doubt that this game is not a true Harvest Moon game.

Thanks to Nintendo Australia for supplying the game for review.