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This is one of my favorite games for a very long time and one of the few games I’ve been seriously addicted to. The premise is that you’re a little boy who inherits his grandpa’s dilapidated farm and if you don’t save the town that it’s in within a year you’ll all be kaput! In the game you get to talk to woodland sprites, raise snuggly animals, and court piles o’ ladies. It’s really the last part of the game that’s a turnoff for me, the gender issues, but apparently the Harvest Moon series is notoriously misogynistic.

The gender issues I’ve found in the game are as follows:

1) You can’t pick the gender of your character, you have to be the boy with the hat that reads “Toy,” which is sort of funny :3 but still.

2) There are nine different endings that you can get, and by the end of most of them a woman from the town has fallen in love with you. In fact, if you try hard enough, and play long enough, the only woman in town who doesn’t profess her love to you is the old lady. That women are portrayed as so malleable, and that men are painted as able to easily be with any woman, really ticks me off.

One (gender issue) thing I will give the game credit for is that, if you don’t have a kitchen built onto your house, you’re going to have a hell of a time making friends. The way to everyone’s heart is through their stomach, and some people will never like you if you don’t cook for them. See that as “women’s work”? Too bad, bro!

There are lessons embedded in the game that I really like though, lessons that balance out the gender issues. There’s a strong emphasis on humans balancing their place in nature, as opposed to dominating nature and ruling it with an iron fist. If you aren’t very nice to your animals (dog, horse, cows, and chickens) you can’t do well at all. Several of the plots end with you protecting an endangered species to halt development of your town, all of which contain a loud ecology lesson. Even when you fish, the members of the town won’t accept the little ones as gifts; you need to either throw them back (which I do) or cook them.

If you’re curious by now the different plots are: Golden Sweet Potato I, Golden Sweet Potato II, Cake Baking Contest, Goddess Robe Contest, Azure Swallowtail Habitat, Weasel Habitat, Bluebird Habitat, Silver (Magical) Fish Habitat, and Horse Racing Contest. Yes, that was “magical fish,” you didn’t read wrong. The overall message of the plots is really what I love about the game, though unfortunately at the end of each year, everyone forgets they ever knew you. Your friendships don’t carry over from plot to plot, which makes sense logistically, but is still disappointing in a way. On the whole, though, it’s a charming game, and it’s easily the best of the three Harvest Moon games I’ve played, too.