Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life for GameCube Reviews by Gamers

This game is a travesty to the Harvest Moon series, as is it's partner, "Another Wonderful Life". It takes you through about 30 game years of the same old stuff. The town is small and useless, and there are only 3 bachelorettes. There are none of the classic Harvest Moon crops, fruits or flowers. The animals are now uber-realistic. They have to have had a calf to give milk, need a male to breed, and can get pregnant without your consent if you keep a male around. You need a rooster and a hen to breed chickens. The music is monotonous. You only start with 2 music choices, and both get old pretty quickly. You also have no music if you leave your farm. The fishing is worthless and it takes forever to catch anything. The characters are sub-par at best. The graphics are good, but they don't make up for the horrible gameplay. This game was very ill-concieved.

All right, you might ask how entertaining did I expect a farming sim to be? Well, this is the first Harvest Moon game I've played, so maybe I was expecting to much.

The actual farming bit was all right. Milking cows and raising crops is an easy routine to fall into, and I found it repetitive but enjoyable. My problem came with what to do after I had finished farming for the day.

I found fishing to be overly simplistic and pointless once your farm starts yielding. Digging for fossils was basically just mashing the button at the right time to get the chore done with as fast as possible. And then there was the character interaction.

This is the bit I expected to be most interesting. The build up about all the people you can marry sounded good, and the houses and such seem to have a real personality.... But the people don't. There weren't enough random events, and each character has about three lines they spit out over and over again. I was hoping for a little more variety in the social events and such, but all I pretty much did was give one crappy gift a day to the girl of my choice and waited for the hearts to build up.

I hear Magical Melody is better. I plan on trying it next month.