10 Years of Harvest Moon: Two New Games

by Emily Balistrieri on July 19, 2008 at 6:12 pm

Can you believe it’s been ten years of planting crops and milking cows in Natsume’s cute farming sim, Harvest Moon? We got to check out the two newest additions to the “stable”: Island of Happiness (DS) and Tree of Tranquility (Wii).

Island of Happiness (DS)

The latest portable Harvest Moon begins with four characters stranded on an Island– but it’s happy, since you’re all farmers. By building up exports (including some different types of crops than you might normally expect, like trees and soybeans) you can attract up to 100 characters who will open up shops or just be friendly neighbors.

Island of Happiness features a new quality rating system for crops, depending on how much sun and water they get. Casual players don’t have to worry about it much, but for the hardcore it’s an extra layer of strategy to deal with–if you use a better quality crop in a recipe, you’re more likely to win the cooking contest, for instance.

There is also a new system for upgrading tools. Seven different colors of “wonderfuls” exist, each with their own purpose–green lowers stamina cost, orange is a level up, indigo just adds extra slots so you can add more wonderfuls to a given item. They can only be bought in winter, but a cool way to win them anytime is to compete on the Wi-Fi leaderboards. Each week there are ten categories (5 fixed and 5 rotating) to see, for example, who racked up the most steps on the pedometer, or who shipped the highest quality tomato.

Tree of Tranquility (Wii)

The first Wii Harvest Moon game has more of a story than you might expect, dealing with the planting of a new Mother’s Tree so the Harvest Goddess will return. Of course, you’ll still be doing the traditional animal raising and crop planting, but you can also build a house with functional appliances, befriend a pet penguin (or other animal, including dog, cat, panda, bear cub, raccoon…), and make clothes from silk that your silkworms provide. Once you’ve completed the storyline, you can keep playing the open ended farming game, but there is also a new game + option that passes on your rucksack to your child.

Being a Wii game, Tree of Tranquility does incorporate quite a lot of motion control for watering your plants or harvesting, but if you get lazy it’s possibly to just use button presses. There are also mini-games for up to four players unlocked during festivals. We didn’t get to check any of them out, but look out for horse racing, stone skipping, mole bashing, and insect collecting, among others.

Both of these games ship August 26, and pre-ordering earns you a cute cow plushie (with the Wii game) or chicken plushie (with the DS game). They’re also releasing a special DS Lite case kit with seven different skins– the cow is pretty cute.

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