Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #673 in Computer & Video Games
• Brand: Nintendo
• Released on: 2007-04-13
• Rating: Universal, particularly children
• Platform: Nintendo DS
• Subtitled in: German
• Number of items: 1

Amazon.co.uk Review
While gentler games like Nintendogs and Animal Crossing: Wild World have become the best selling games on the DS, the Harvest Moon series has been ploughing very much the same field for nearly a decade now. As always the game starts with you inheriting a farm and most of the game revolves maintaining and growing your crops of vegetables and herds of animals. You have to work pretty hard at it too, planting crops, watering them and then harvesting them. Animals have to be watered and feed too, eggs collected from chickens, cows milked and sheep shorn.

Once you’ve tired yourself out with your daily chores though there’s a whole village to explore around you, as you collect wood to make new buildings or harvest fruit and other rare items to sell at the shop and expand your business. Your main goal in town though is to find yourself a sweetheart and woo her enough so that she’ll agree to marry you. As fun as all this is though it’s exactly how the Harvest Moon games have worked since the original SNES game and this version takes almost no advantage of the DS.

The touch screen is used merely as an inventory and as a means to pet your animals - other than that it’s almost entirely superfluous. Even worse, the graphics seem identical to a GBA game and not even a particularly good one at that, with some very poor animation. There are a few new features, such as a mini-casino run by the harvest sprites, but it’s not nearly enough to tempt you if you have one of the more recent GBA versions. If you haven’t though, it’s a reasonable, if unambitious, introduction to the series.
HARRISON DENT

Manufacturer's Description:
Your farm in Forget-Me-Not-Valley is waiting for you - tend to the flocks, cultivate your own seed variants into the best produce available, explore different locations, hunt for hidden treasure or even fish in the river. Use the unique touch-screen on the Nintendo DS to raise and interact with the animals by petting and caring for them. In return the happy animals will reward you with higher quality milk, eggs and wool. The bottom screen on the DS displays the menu interfaces and status screens which can be easily navigated through using the Nintendo DS Stylus, whereas the second screen allows you to view a section of the town or farm in real time which is handy if you need to keep track on any mischievous animals that may have run away from the farm.

Planting seeds, harvesting crops in the right season and looking after your cows, chickens and sheep will help you in running a successful farm which in turn will help to release the Harvest Goddess and Harvest Sprites from the world that the Witch Princess has transported them to. Freeing and unlocking the Sprites is certainly a benefit to you as they will then help you with your daily farming tasks, and in return, leave you with more time to sit back and relax.

However if all that just sounds like too much hard work and all you want to do is enjoy the calm, relaxing and social aspect of living in Forget-Me-Not-Valley by building up relationships with up to 25 villagers through chatting to them and giving them presents, then Harvest Moon DS is still the game for you.

Customer Reviews

harvest moon is funky
at 1st when i saw my couson playing it when we whent on our sumer holiday to france i thougt it was rubbishe but when he let me have a go i would not stop asking him if i could play it 2 dayes later i got the game i wold not stop playing the game.you can even get married and have a baybey

i give this game a star rating a million it's so cool.

Harvest Moon... gettin' bigger n better!
People who have been rubbishing this latest Harvest Moon game are just plain lazy... they whinge and whine that it just isnt the same... it aint supposed to be! There is more to do especially when interacting with your livestock, instead of just picking em up n putting em down you get to stroke them and even brush them using the touch panel glove. I do agree that you dont get to use the stylus as much but the minigames and challenges you have to overcome are so much better, you have to work harder in this game than the previous games but thats half the fun!

I would reccomend Harvest Moon DS to ALL fans of RPG'S and Harvest Moon, it's a game that will take you days, weeks, months possibly even YEARS to complete and thats the point! You can pick it up and put it down whenever you want... your farm will still be there... and so will your chosen wife to be! ;)

The Harvest Moon magic just isn't there...
As a huge fan of the Harvest Moon series, I was really excited about the first edition of the series on the DS. However, I was very disappointed in this game. Although the series has never been known for amazing graphics, Harvest Moon DS uses the exact same graphics as Friends of Mineral Town of the Gameboy Advance, making it seem dated and plain lazy. There are NO shops in the village, you have to buy things via telephone, another sign of laziness by the developers. The characters seem lifeless and the village in general lacks any kind of charm. The soul of the Harvest Moon series wasn't in this game for me, neither was the magic that touched me in the past and kept me coming back. Trust me, Friends of Mineral Town is a MUCH better game than this disappointingly lazy effort. The Harvest Moon series and its fans deserve better.