Harvest Moon: Friends of Mineral Town Review (no fat)

Game Description

Left with a farm and some tools as inheritance, you aim at making it into a prosperous life for yourself...and your future family.

Your task is to build a farm, take care of it and protect it from harm. When you start the game, you have to work a lot to build an operational farm from scratch. Initially you have to do a lot of trading and make tons of money. In the end, you have to reach your life's dream: A beautiful home, and an obedient wife and children.

Harvest Moon: Friends of Mineral Town Gameplay

Once you cross the initial stages of seeding and learning the ropes, you can do anything you like. But you have to learn how to use tools for their purpose, to trade successfully for your benefit. You can use hammer and axe to clear stones and branches from your farm, cultivate the field with a hoe, water the field with a watering can. For harvesting you need a sickle. As you progress you can get new tools, like brush, fishing poles, etc. You have stamina controlled by a clock and the actions you perform influence the amount of overall work you can carry out during the day.

As you play to improve your skills, you can upgrade your tools. Of course, upgraded tools work faster and more effectively. You can use your money to improve your lifestyle, i.e. purchase hundreds of items, varying from farm tools, to milk, to refrigerators, kitchens, fireplaces, beds if you have enough money saved you can even purchase a new house.

Being on a farm does not mean you are alone; you have a whole town to deal with. There are various festivals and other occasions you can participate in. You can hire harvest helping hands to take care of your farm activities for a week, giving you enough time to carry out any social activities you’ve been longing for. The more the helpers work, the better they get, but there are also mini-games to train them as well. The mini games involve training of watering land, feeding chickens, uprooting crops, harvesting. And when you're away, you can visit shops as buyers… or just do some window shopping.

It is important that you act well towards people, as they develop opinions towards you. In the game you have 6 girls in town that you can befriend, flirt with and marry too. They all have different personalities and, by giving them gifts, you can change their attitude about you, ultimately leading them to feel for you. You can gauge feeling by the way they talk to you, and by the love indicator that turns from black to red when she's in love with you. But you can only marry one of them, so don’t get carried away.

Once you have a kitchen, and a queen sized bed in your home. You can decide what she does after wedding, and what you do to her after the wedding matters too. If you harm your relationship with her, she marries a different guy and you get to witness the whole marriage.

Harvest Moon: Friends of Mineral Town Graphics

The graphics are simple, at times detailed as well. The light of the day and the dark of the night create a brilliant effect. The characters involved are identifiable from each other, so you don’t mistake someone else for your wife.

Harvest Moon: Friends of Mineral Town Sound

The sound is nothing to write home about…the background music is weak and at times annoying. As the seasons change you hear new sounds, but on continuing, they sound monotonous because of repetition. But if you connect this game with "A Wonderful Life" which is next version for the series, you can buy background music from the merchant AWL who comes to Mineral Town

Harvest Moon: Friends of Mineral Town Summing Up

The game has no end. There are millions of things to do, so you can play it for hundreds of hours before you exhaust all its features. But you can build your own goals for yourself and see how you do at them. And you can even expect surprises from the townspeople after given time durations. So in all, you're leading your life, and you here can see each aspect of it brilliantly, and manage it, like your own life.

And if that’s not enough, you can hook this version up with ‘A Wonderful Life’ on GameCube and interact a bit there as well. All in all, its hours of RPG which should justify the price tag.

Harvest Moon: Friends of Mineral Town Cost

It is yours to own for only $29.99US at the time of writing.