Harvest Moon on Nintendo DS

 

Harvest Moon is a farm simulation video game for the Nintendo DS. The player plays a young boy who lives with his friend Takakura on a farm in Forget-Me-Not-Valley. 

The Witch Princess conjured up a prank that went too far! The player has to seek out all 101 Harvest Sprites as you plant fields, tend livestock and find the right wife to share your farming dreams with! As the player find the missing Harvest Sprites they can help with chores around the farm or unlock various activities or important information. 

This blog is going to analyse the visual style and game-play of Harvest Moon on Nintendo DS.

Visual Style . . .

This part of my blog is going to analyse and describe the visual style of the game. To start with I'm going to analyse and describe the style of graphics. the graphics on Harvest Moon are also simple, they are almost exactly the same as the game Pokemon on Game Boy Advanced as you can see below (Harvest Moon the the left, Pokemon to the right). The game designer may have done this to maybe replace the game Pokemon that was very popular back in the day. The game designers has also use bright colours to make the game more appealing for people to play.

As for the environment of the game it just consist really of lots and lots of farm land. In this farm land you can grow crops, raise animals or collect building materials (fodder, lumber (wood), stone and golden lumber). The town also consists of many places you can visit like the poultry farm, yodel ranch, supermarket, blacksmith saibara, carpenter gotz and church. I think the games designer has added these places to visit to break the game up a little so it just doesn't all consist of a farm which could become very repetitive and boring if played for a long time. 

Harvest Moon on DS includes many characters, as it would take me forever to name them all I'm just going to outline some of the main characters. All ordinary eligible marriage valley girls Celia, Flora, Lumina, Muffy and Nami. These girls are all available for your player to marry. All magical eligible marriage valley girls Leia, Harvest Goddess, Keira and Witch Princess. These can also be proposed to but are more special than the ordinary girls. All mineral town eligible marriage girls Ann, Elli, Karen, Mary and Popuri. These also can be proposed to but they come from a different town to yourself. All valley rivals Carter, Griffin, Marlin and Rock, these are all the enemies in tour Forget-Me-Not town. All mineral town rivals Cliff, Grey, Kai, Trent (Doctor) and Rick, these are also your enemies but come from another town.There are also ordinary villagers but there are to many to name. I think the game designer has produced many characters so your character isn't just farming all the time, he can socialise and get to know all of the people and even find the girl of his dreams. However i do find it bad how you can only be a boy in this game and you have to marry a girl, this shouldn't be limited to this as player may get offended and may not want to play a boy. Below is a picture of most of the characters. 

The game includes a cut scenes at the beginning of the game which shows the with Princess curse all the sprites. I think the was a good idea for the games designer as the game is quite complex and many things can be done while playing the games, so having the cut-scene gives a insight on what to expect from the game. 

Game-play. . . 

This part of the blog is going to analyse and describe the game play of Harvest Moon DS. I'm going to discus certain topics and how they are used within the game to enhance the playing experience. Firstly going to describe the goals of the game. Harvest Moon on DS has no specific goals that you need to complete however if you want to marry a certain girl then there is certain things you have to do to make them love you for example give them presents. You could set your own goals in your head if you want to make your farm really good, depending on how good your farm is the more likely you will get a girl to marry you. I think the game designer has done this to enhance the game play so the game is open to all ages of people, for younger children they may just want to farm they might not be actually bothered by marrying a girl, where as an older 'gamin geek' may want to achieve everything and get married to a girl.

As for your character there quite a bit you can do, as you run your character around the farming town you cane make friends, cook, mine, fish and hire sprites. By making friends with any of the villagers you can activate special events within the valley, you can do this by giving them gifts, talking to them daily and participating in festivals. To be able to start cooking you need the 2nd upgrade of your house, in this upgrade you can watch channel 2 on your TV where you can purchase a kitchen and all matching kitchen utensils. Once all this is purchased you can start cooking food. Another way to make money on Harvest Moon you can mine, you have to visit the excavation site in the north-est corner of the valley. Once inside you have to extremely careful when mining because your stamina levels will lower each time you mine. When you first start the game you will not own a fishing pole, to get a free one you can visit Galen. The valley consists of 7 different places to fish, each place contains different sizes of species of fish which change as the seasons change, below shows a map of the different fishing areas. In the game there are 10 teams of sprites, three of these teams won't be able to help you as they are busy doing other tasks, however 7 of the teams which have 12 sprites each can help perform a task so you don't have to. I think the games designer has done this to enhance the game play to break up the farming so it doesn't feel like your doing the same thing every time you play the game.

The sound design on Harvest Moon on DS just consist of background music which is very poor.  The music can become very repetitive and annoying as its the same music until the seasons change. This was a bad choice from the games designer, I tend to turn the music off or lower the volume down as it really is annoying music. 

Harvest Moon DS is not that difficult to play, but it does depend on what you may want to do on the games. If you want to marry a girl, so she can help out on your farm can be difficult but it all depends on who you want to marry. For example the ordinary valley girls are easy to make them fall in love with you than the magical valley girls. The game designer has done this to enhance the game so the game is open to more players, hard core gamers will probably want to marry the more difficult girls where as the no so harcore gamers might choose to not marry anyone or marry on of the easier girls.

The game can be very addictive, the more you play the more you want to do and the better farm you want to create. However if you don't mix the game up by maybe fishing, cooking or mining occasionally the game can become very repetitive which in the long run may bore you. The game designer has done this to enhance the game so player don't get bored of playing, however if still played for a long time it could still be come boring.


Overall, all the above has effected the visual style and game-play of Harvest Moon on DS.