Harvest Moon: One World - Review
While your aunt may have gone crazy over Farmville and all the kids are about that Stardew Valley these days, Harvest Moon was the original farming game. One World is one of their most unique settings, because it lets you move your farm to multiple regions, giving you flexibility to farm where you want, but is that enough for this aging series or is there more to promote renewed growth?
The game starts out, after you have defined your character, at least with the options provided and once you wake up in the world, you soon discover that no-one knows what farming is. The entire world somehow survives without knowing how to grow their own food, they scrounge up potatoes and other things that grown naturally, but they know how to fish. Anyway, you are someone who wants to explore the world, learning how to farm along the way, even though the only source of information you have is an old book, that reads more like a fairy tale, at least according to those you show it too. But, your perseverance pays off, because once you attempt to plant something, you managed to revive one of the Harvest Spirits, little pixie folk who used to live in the world, with one revived, they join you on your journey and it is off you go.
The first region you enter holds the town of Calisson, which is made up of wide-open grass planes, perfect for growing simple foods and raising cows and chickens. Here is where you will discover that people of the world have no idea what food is, as the first person you help, has cows and has no idea that he needs to feed them proper grass, in order for them to be healthy. Once you clear up some of the towns issues, you will revive another Harvest Spirit and then from there, you venture to the next location and so on. The big thing is that you don’t have to restart your farm when you move on, you can just pack it up and setup somewhere else, at least as long as you feed Sparky enough of anything to allow him to do it. Each region is a big change for the game, because you can grow most everything in the grasslands, but by the time you venture to the desert, the extreme heat will impact anything that is fragile, so you have to grow what is right for the region.
The regions can also impact your stamina as well, should you venture into the desert or the snow-capped mountains, without preparing your stamina will drop extremely quickly, and if it does, you are done for the day. Plus, should you faint from overworking or due to location, it takes you a few days to recover fully, so for the next day or so, you sleep later and then have to deal with, not only shorter days, but also stamina that drops faster than normal. Stamina is really the only thing you need to worry about, at least for your character, you only need to eat for effects to provide protection against the harsher climates, which is nice, but outside of that, using your kitchen is pointless. The upside to moving your farmhouse around is that all the crops you are growing in one region remain where they were, in fact you don’t even have any buildings nearby, basically if there is a farming square, you can plant there.
That brings up some issues though, getting around and the farming locations, though really those are just the tip of the iceberg. There really isn’t any nice way to say it, but the game is old, not old in terms of time, just all the mechanics it uses, sure there are a few attempts at using some modern elements, but they are few and far between. Getting around is mostly done with walking, which is fine when your area of space is just one location, but once you start exploring, you can easily waste half of your day getting to a place, let alone doing anything once there. Once you clear a few tasks for some folks in each location, you will revive the Harvest Spirit in the area, which gives you a medallion, letting you warp there, but you still have to walk to locations. If the game let you run, that could help out greatly, but it doesn’t, you are stuck moving at the same pace when you are on foot, that however is not the worst thing.
That honour is given to the map itself, there are twisting pathways all around the place, some of which go nowhere, but as you can’t move the camera in any useful way, you won’t know until you follow it. The map also suffers from having almost nothing to do in it, there are houses and shops you can visit, but the shops either sell very little or if they do sell things they can be quite costly. Outside of a few mines and some fishing, other activities are seasonal, meaning they only happen once or twice a year, so the rest of the time you need to just farm, which yes, that is the point of the game, but when farming is so slow and limited, it becomes tedious. I say that the farming is limited simply due to the fact that you can only farm where the game already has squares of dirt you can dig into, you can’t just go around and til the earth wherever you choose, which is a pain. The further into the game you get, the more spots you can work at and there is nothing stopping you from warping around the place to update your farms daily, but there is no fun in that.
The other issue with the game is the lack of interaction with the people of the land, that is of course assuming you can find them. Unless the folks have a task for you to do, they will only repeat the same phrase one day, then maybe a different one the next, before repeating their initial phrase and if they have a task for you, once the cutscene has played out, they are again locked down into one single saying. But again, all of that is dependent on you actually locating someone, the game will highlight core individuals and they tend to live in the same space, but other people wander around. This would not be a problem if they were able to remain in the world, one of the earliest requests I got, were for a pair of flowers and while I was eventually able to grow them, when I went to where I knew the requestor to be, he wasn’t there and after spending two full days wandering the town, I could not find him. More concerningly is that folks just vanish and appear, as if they are teleporting around the world and all of it ties into the clock, once it hits the required time, people just appear in their spots, which breaks the immersion of the world.
I mentioned before about how the world is not that well laid out and you can see it from the earliest moments of the game, when you leave your little corner of it and start to explore. While you are on a path, the rest of the world remains off limits to you, there are countless fields that you can see, just no means of accessing them. I can understand not letting people go everywhere, but when you call your game One World and then limit the places people can go, it feels like the name should have been One Path To Follow. The reason why this annoys me, is because as I was trying to discover where I could go, I kept noticing the visual cheapness of everything, nothing is inherently bad, just assembled in a way that make it look crap. It is easy to spot in locations where there is grass around you, because the grass will run alongside the embankments of rivers and higher plains, and if you take a moment to look at it, you will see the textures are different between the regular grass and the edging grass. This is not the only visual issue the game struggles with, there are countless textures that appear blurry as if they were taken from an earlier game in the series, and then scaled up in order to fit on a new building, but as not all of those textures suffer from this, the ones that do stand out a mile.
There are issues with the audio as well, not in the tracks themselves, each of the regions has a few to hear and most are pretty good. They are a little earwormy though, being repetitive and generic, but whenever I popped into a menu, hearing the music play there, wasn’t an issue, I wouldn’t go out and buy the album, but it suits the game. Generally speaking there is one track for your farm space, one for the town and then one for the region, while they are all unique, there are threads that connect each of the tracks in that area together, so you don’t have three vastly distinct tracks for the desert. The issue with the audio for the game, is that there are countless times when it struggles to play and I don’t mean that it cuts out, I mean struggles, like when you have a CD in a discman and the batteries are low, you hear things play slowly. That is what was happening here and there never really seemed to be a reason for it, there were times when in the middle of a village, just running around, the game would do it and then there were times when I would be entering a new region and it would do it, but then the next time, it wouldn’t.
Harvest Moon One World is a difficult game to recommend, for those that love the series, they will likely enjoy the new setting and options, but for those returning to it, or coming in for the first time, it has little charm to make you want to stay. The gameplay has a few moments of modernism, but the bulk of it is still stagnant, as if pull from the series history and when you combine it with cheap and uninspired visuals, along with music, whilst charming at times, but is mostly humdrum, it is hard to stay invested. Farming is by nature a challenge, but as games are meant to be fun, given the choice between playing this longer or heading out to til a field, I would pick the latter.
The Score
5.0
Review code provided by Natsume
The Pros
+Being able to move your farm around does help you stay connected to it
+Quests are ok, at least the main ones and can take time to complete
The Cons
-People vanish or appear at random, even if they have tasked you with something
-A few modern touches, don’t save it from feeling stale and cheap
