A New Crop of Harvest Moon Previews

Ever since the original Harvest Moon on the Super NES in 1997, Natsume has been releasing new games in the series almost every year. This year was no different, with four new games being revealed, two for the Nintendo DS, one for the Wii, and one for WiiWare. Gaming Union hooked up with Natsume for a look at four of their upcoming Harvest Moon games.

Harvest Moon: Frantic Farming is a puzzle game for the Nintendo DS. It is a spiritual successor to Puzzle De Harvest Moon, which was released two years ago. It plays like most other Panel de Pon games, having you move similarly colored blocks together in a grid. However, like in the regular Harvest Moon games, each block represents one of the crops in the game, so you have to wait till it fully matures before the Harvest Sprites can collect them and remove the block from the field.

New to Frantic Farming is a story mode that has stories specific to each character, as well as a more fine tuned multiplayer system, allowing for 1vs3 instead of just 2vs2 or a free-for-all. Like the previous game, the multiplayer is local-only.

Harvest Moon: Sunshine Islands is also for the Nintendo DS, and builds on the advancements in Harvest Moon: Island of Happiness. The previous game relied entirely on the touch screen for movement, which annoyed many of the fans. This has been rectified in Sunshine Islands, so you can use the directional pad like you would in the previous games. After getting access to certain islands, you can also call on the Harvest Sprites to do their usual chores of working on the farm, but new to this game is the ability to have them do other things such as dropping the price of goods in the town. They are all in one spot instead of spread out like in Island of Happiness, which leaves more time for other things, such as traveling to a island that lets you give food to animals in exchange for them finding rare treasures or other items.

Harvest Moon: Animal Parade is the next main Wii Harvest Moon game after Harvest Moon: Tree of Tranquility. Unlike previous Harvest Moon games, you have complete control over how your character looks by changing their outfit in your house. More emphasis is put on the animals this time around, allowing you to have access to more of them and even do things like ride around on your cows (before, horses were the only animals allowed to perform that action). Harvest Moon: My Little Shop is for WiiWare, and is aimed more for children due to the simplistic minigames that take place.

It was obvious that the builds of the games were we shown were not finalized, since most of the games had minor text issues like text running outside of the textbox, as well as spacing issues in Animal Parade. Animal Parade also took quite a while to load a simple area like the player�s house. As long as these minor issues are taken care of before the games are released, fans of the Harvest Moon series should find a lot to enjoy this year.