Yeah, these random designs sound like band-aids to try and minimize issues they didn’t know how to deal with. Given how early ST was (and how limited the competitive scene could have been), that seems likely to me.
Harvest Moon 64 is one of my favorite games of all time, but after 20 years, it has started to lose its lustre, and the games that came after it weren’t so great. Harvest Moon’s characters also all only have like, a total of maybe 3 dozen lines of dialogue for the entire game, so, that always kind of sucked. I think the developers really dropped the ball with Harvest Moon because the games never really got any better beyond 64 and Back to Nature (Friends of Mineral Town is a port, doesn’t count!). As the years went on, they got jankier and considerably less fun. I don’t think it’s fair to diminish Stardew Valley for jumping in and trying to fill the niche that Harvest Moon created and then has continued to fail to actually fill (with anything resembling the quality of the series’ earlier years).
I agree, Stardew is easily as good as the best Harvest Moon (and really, 64 is the only one I loved). I don’t besmirch it any success or remuneration, just wish that it didn’t seem to eclipse its direct parent.
It’s similar to the way I feel about Threes and 2048.
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Threes kind of deserved to get cloned to hell though, they made, like, a hyper polished apple exclusive version of what was essentially a novel kind of minesweeper and got upset when that didn’t become canonical
I thought the gamecube Harvest Moons were the highlight of the series
the earlier games were perhaps too barebones but I feel like the balance was struck with Magical Melody.
If only the Rune Factory games were a bit better. That one I played broke my damn heart with an incredibly annoying subsystem that was poorly explained.
I gotta go with villain on this one. Harvest Moon peaked with 64, and it’s increasingly lost its way since
that’s what made Stardew Valley so good. It cut out all the tacked-on trash that made the later HM games suck and just stuck to being a nice little farming-based RPG-lite
4 is pretty, pretty good, and its gonna be on switch soon
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I might give Graveyard Keeper a go, first.
I just haven’t been able to or willing to give stardew a chance because it just looks like “harvest moon with ugly art”
i played a ds harvest moon where you could double jump and even regular jumping didn’t serve any purpose
it sounds absurd, i’m wondering if i dreamed it rn
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Stardew Valley can be played like a calculating and intense economic+time-management sim if that’s how you roll – it’s not like Harvest Moon at all despite the superficial similarity.
Graveyard Keeper is definitely to be skipped though. You kind of slackly wander around aimlessly a lot and grind points for a big but samey tech tree. The input latency on Switch is also abysmal, which shouldn’t matter for this type of game, but it’s that bad.
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Isn’t that just people responding the built-in goals (finish the Community Center in a year)? Similarly, Harvest Moon 64’s 4-year schedule and seasonal events set up moments to check in; the time optimization loop is identical as far as I can see.
Maybe, I never played Harvest Moon 64. I only tried Harvest Moon SNES and bounced off on it after an hour or two of tedium (I mostly remember lots of scripted plot events – perhaps not representative, but I’d still note Stardew Valley has a much lighter touch with them – it makes them largely voluntary and doesn’t frontload them), then avoided the series afterwards.
I do believe a lodestar goal is an essential element of sim games, so that’s a nontrivial innovation even if it’s the only thing Stardew Valley did. A lot of the mechanics are optimization-oriented, and optimization only has meaning if you are optimizing for something. Making the player choose what is only a good answer in the “postgame” because that’s when the player already has gained enough sense of the mechanics to know what will be interesting to aim for.
I’d argue that those goals are well-served in Harvest Moon 64; there’s a well-telegraphed checkup date every year, there’s a strong set of overlapping upgrade trees based on performance (upgrading tools, your house, your community), and they encourage optimizing plants and daily time in the exact way Stardew does.
When I speak of explicit goals, it’s really just the Community Center path and the way NPCs communicate their wants; they have similar desires in the 20-year-old game, but they obscure it in more natural conversation elements. I’m not entirely sure Stardew’s explicitly game-like elements make the game better.
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no the ds harvest moons were among the worst and jankiest, so it probably happened.
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Yep, it’s Harvest Moon: Grand Bazaar: https://fogu.com/hmforum/viewtopic.php?f=23&t=150589
It doesn’t matter, all your Stardews and Harvest Moons have been made obsolete now.
Okay it’s not quite the same, i just wanted to share a random game.
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