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IGN Review of Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life Special Edition
The Harvest Moon series attracts a very specific type of gamer. Like SimCity and the Sims, Harvest Moon takes a bunch of everyday (read: mundane) chores and whips them into a compelling game experience. In Harvest Moon, the objective is to raise a family and run a farm. Both objectives require you to perform a string of tasks, ranging from milking cows and feeding chickens to playing with your kids. Obviously, this kind of thing doesn't appeal to everyone.
The release of Harvest Moon: Another Wonderful Life, which shipped last year for the Nintendo GameCube, didn't change the formula. To those who loved the series, Another Wonderful Life remained quirky and undeniably charming. That's the way it has always been in the Harvest Moon universe. With Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life: Special Edition, you'll notice a few changes here and there, but primarily it's the same deal. That is to say, it's identical in terms of game mechanics, but you will notice a few dips, especially in terms of visuals and framerate. Not only that, the load times are pretty long. The game even loads considerably when opening and closing the village map. Simply should not happen.
The game starts with your arrival in Forget-Me-Not-Valley. The first thing you do is tour your new farm. Your guide on the tour, a crabby farm hand by the name of Takakura, gives you the skinny on just about everything, from the local townsfolk to running the farm to purchasing animals from local merchants. After the not-so-brief introduction, Takakura leaves you alone to fend for yourself. Life in, err, Another Wonderful Life splits between a number of chapters, each with its own set of requirements. The first chapter ends when you get married to a lass from town, for example. Having said that, you can spend 100 hours on the first chapter if all you want to do is milk cows.
Of course, there's a lot more to do than raise chickens, milk cows and sow plants. You can also purchase sheep to sell their wool. Raising sheep brings its own set of complications, however. If you want the best wool, you need to bathe the sheep. Plus, you can't sell wool nearly as fast as you can sell milk, but sheep also require less of your attention. It's a decent trade-off. Furthermore, the more animals you have on the farm, the harder it becomes to feed them, wash them, take them outside when weather permits and also sticking them in the barn when it's rainy. Beyond this, you still need to cuddle them and talk to them to make sure they're happy. And as everyone knows, happy cows produce excellent milk.
Fishing and cooking represent major pastimes in the game as well. After purchasing a fishing rod from Van, a roaming merchant, you can set off fishing to make dishes or to sell on the market. Like most aspects of the game, fishing can be as simple or as complex as you want. You can fish only once in the game if you want, for example, or spend hours at a time searching for one specific class of fish. The same goes for cooking dishes. You can simply cook with whatever ingredients you have or you can spend whole days searching for that single, elusive ingredient.
Just as in real life, you'll find there isn't enough time in the day to do everything you want to do. In addition to raising livestock and tending to plants for cash, Forgot-Me-Not-Valley features a cast of oddball characters and locations to explore. Interestingly, you can now choose the gender of your child and guide them through a mini-career path. It's not as complex as it could be, but it does add a little something to the mix. Fans will appreciate it, anyway.
©2006-02-23, IGN Entertainment, Inc. All Rights Reserved
The release of Harvest Moon: Another Wonderful Life, which shipped last year for the Nintendo GameCube, didn't change the formula. To those who loved the series, Another Wonderful Life remained quirky and undeniably charming. That's the way it has always been in the Harvest Moon universe. With Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life: Special Edition, you'll notice a few changes here and there, but primarily it's the same deal. That is to say, it's identical in terms of game mechanics, but you will notice a few dips, especially in terms of visuals and framerate. Not only that, the load times are pretty long. The game even loads considerably when opening and closing the village map. Simply should not happen.
The game starts with your arrival in Forget-Me-Not-Valley. The first thing you do is tour your new farm. Your guide on the tour, a crabby farm hand by the name of Takakura, gives you the skinny on just about everything, from the local townsfolk to running the farm to purchasing animals from local merchants. After the not-so-brief introduction, Takakura leaves you alone to fend for yourself. Life in, err, Another Wonderful Life splits between a number of chapters, each with its own set of requirements. The first chapter ends when you get married to a lass from town, for example. Having said that, you can spend 100 hours on the first chapter if all you want to do is milk cows.
Of course, there's a lot more to do than raise chickens, milk cows and sow plants. You can also purchase sheep to sell their wool. Raising sheep brings its own set of complications, however. If you want the best wool, you need to bathe the sheep. Plus, you can't sell wool nearly as fast as you can sell milk, but sheep also require less of your attention. It's a decent trade-off. Furthermore, the more animals you have on the farm, the harder it becomes to feed them, wash them, take them outside when weather permits and also sticking them in the barn when it's rainy. Beyond this, you still need to cuddle them and talk to them to make sure they're happy. And as everyone knows, happy cows produce excellent milk.
Fishing and cooking represent major pastimes in the game as well. After purchasing a fishing rod from Van, a roaming merchant, you can set off fishing to make dishes or to sell on the market. Like most aspects of the game, fishing can be as simple or as complex as you want. You can fish only once in the game if you want, for example, or spend hours at a time searching for one specific class of fish. The same goes for cooking dishes. You can simply cook with whatever ingredients you have or you can spend whole days searching for that single, elusive ingredient.
Just as in real life, you'll find there isn't enough time in the day to do everything you want to do. In addition to raising livestock and tending to plants for cash, Forgot-Me-Not-Valley features a cast of oddball characters and locations to explore. Interestingly, you can now choose the gender of your child and guide them through a mini-career path. It's not as complex as it could be, but it does add a little something to the mix. Fans will appreciate it, anyway.
©2006-02-23, IGN Entertainment, Inc. All Rights Reserved