Harvest Moon 3D: A New Beginning

Welcome to Harvest Moon 3D: A New Beginning, where the ease of farming life is right in the palm of your hand. But what makes Harvest Moon endearing just so happens to be what I found to be the most tedious. What is meant to be a relaxing farming life sim, has somehow evolved into a slow and, dare I say, boring game.

In A New Beginning is that you’ve inherited a farm in a town called Echo. There’s only three residents, not including yourself, when you begin the game. Dunhill, the kind of town elder, Hanna the shopkeeper, and Emma who deals with shipping out your goods.

The idea is that by restoring the farm, it will encourage more people to live in Echo, allowing the town to flourish. Each day you are given a twelve hour window between 06:00-18:00 to take care of your farm, do your shopping, and forage for items you can ship off and sell. You could keep working past 18:00 but this then has a knock on effect with your character’s stamina and mood. The twelve hour day lasts roughly fifteen minutes in real time so you could get through quite a bit in an hour or two’s sitting.

The only painful, and at times very discouraging, part when you begin a new game is how slow it is to get going. The tutorial phase lasts roughly five days. You somehow figure out how to get around, collecting bugs and flowers, so you can ship off the items and get some money in your pockets. It remains like this until day nine when Neil, the extremely moody git pet seller comes to town, shortly followed by Iroha the blacksmith.

There are different areas within the forest that you can explore that are at first blocked off by boulders and trees. In order to access these places Harvest sprites Aaron and Alice explain that you need to hit several melody stumps which are hidden in the forest. To play the correct melody, you will need to find the different music sheets which are scattered around the town. To get to the point of being told there are additional areas you can explore, I’ve had to play through 19 game days. This equals to just under five hours worth of tedious gameplay.

I may be the proud owner of Bob the pregnant cow, who has been in the labour pen for five days, but I actually have lost interest in continuing playing it. The game is following the format of other Harvest Moon games, so I know that I could do the whole courting an eligible bachelor and get married – as Neil is one of my options I shudder at the thought – and I could meet the harvest goddess and take part in some random town festival and what not. I know this game could be good and I know I should stick at it to reap the rewards of such a painful start. But for me, A New Beginning is way too much of a slow burner. As a fan of the Harvest Moon series, I felt disappointed and frustrated with how this turned out.


Posted

in

,

by

Tags:

Comments

Leave a Reply