Harvest Moon: Magical Melody

Harvest Moon: Magical Melody

Videogames give us the chance to pretend we’re Premier League footballers, sky divers, ancient warrior heroes, race car drivers and SAS paratroopers. Sum up what they’re about and you’d likely speak of vibrant, exciting, fast-paced, twitch reaction-based challenges, of danger, wonder, peril and awe.

What you probably wouldn’t think of is the pastoral vocation of tilling the land, sowing seeds, tending to crops and feeding lambs. Who in their right mind would want to undertake the backbreaking fantasy of becoming a virtual farmer for the day?

Well, as it happens, you might just want to. Harvest Moon is a Japanese-grown series that offers gamers the chance to do just that: take on the role of farmer in a hyper-specialised simulation role-playing game. While it might sound like a recipe for retail disaster, the series is in fact very popular in Japan and, as it’s now up to its twenty-fourth iteration (!) it’s won a growing number of western fans in recent years.

Magical Melody is a port of one of the most critically-acclaimed games in the series, originally released for the Gamecube in 2005, but which has only just found its way to Europe on the Wii. In it you play as a farmer running a working farm with your assorted tasks being to grow produce, ranch livestock, look after pets and other animals, gather materials, attend festivals, woo girls, get married, spawn children and generally live the ostensibly idyllic life of a country bumpkin.

While in synopsis the game sounds a little slight in fact this is a deep experience with hours and hours of compelling gameplay for those open-minded enough to give it a chance. Chasing after girls, building a smoothly functioning industrial operation with multiple animals and crop types, before furnishing your house and mining the local area for diamonds is an experience reminiscent of Animal Crossing, and this is a game that offers lots of for gamers seeking to build a new virtual life for themselves in the countryside.

New people will move into the town your farm services and, in time, the farming aspect of the game comes to feel just like that: a job, with the game’s myriad other activities providing extra-curricular opportunity. A rival farmer provides an element of competition and the game throws constant challenges and quests at you from start to finish, ensuring a pace that never lets up.

The conversion, despite being two years in the making, isn’t quite perfect. The option to play as a lady farmer (and hence woo boys etc) has been inexplicably removed but, other than this oversight, everything from the original remains intact. The result is a captivating, curiously compelling experience that offers a different pace of life and challenge to gamers bored of the football pitches, tarmac tracks and war-torn streets of most other games.

4 out of 5