Harvest Moon: Friends of Mineral Town Review (Game Boy Advance, 2003)

When the Game Boy Advance was first announced I was giddy. I knew all of my favorite franchises would appear on the thing, but what I was looking forward to most was a new Harvest Moon. This simple farming sim series captured my imagination when I was a kid. Up to this point the portable Harvest Moon games were severely lacking. They felt like cheap cash ins. This was their big chance to give us the experience we loved on consoles, but in portable form factor. It took a few years but Marvelous Entertainment (courtesy of publisher Natsume) finally delivered. Harvest Moon: Friends of Mineral Town was amazing. Today we’re going to take a look back on this title and see how it holds up. Is this farming bliss or a bitter harvest? Let’s jump right in.

The first thing that should be said about Harvest Moon: Friends of Mineral Town is that it’s not a completely original game. Rather, this is a remake of the PS1 game. I loved Back to Nature so hey I’ll take it. The Game Boy Advance isn’t as powerful as the console so some concessions had to be made. Most notable is that the graphics are entirely sprite based. Gone is the awkward isometric perspective from Back to Nature. I’ll take that as a win. Friends of Mineral Town instead uses a semi-overhead point of view more like the SNES game. In my opinion the gameplay is far more suited to this. Now you don’t have to worry as much about using your tool on the wrong thing, or clipping into objects. Due to the limited storage space on cartridges some content had to be cut though.

In Harvest Moon: Friends of Mineral Town you play as a young man named Jack (though you get to name him). As a child he met an old rancher while on vacation, and had the time of his life. Here he explored the farm, played with the animals, and made friends with a young girl. Jack and the old man became friends and exchanged letters throughout the years. Now our hero has grown. The letters have stopped and he goes to check on things. That’s where Friends of Mineral Town begins. The old man has passed away and left the farm to Jack. It’s your job to restore the homestead to its former glory through growing crops, raising animals, and getting married/having kids. It’s pretty cheesy at times. This is HM after all so it’s to be expected.

The neat thing about Friends of Mineral Town (and the other Harvest Moon games by extension) is the fact that you can play them how you want. For the most part. The game has a loose goal of making the best farm possible within a three year time span. That’s in-game time to you and me. A year consists of four seasons which each have thirty days. The sun rises and sets within a few real world minutes. You are restricted to what you can do by an invisible stamina meter. This depletes as you use your tools. These consist of a watering can, hammer, scythe, axe, hoe, fishing pole and more. If you want to focus on farming you have to clear the land, till the soil, plant seeds, and water them each day. You have several different options for crops and they all mature at different rates.

Part of the strategy is in choosing what to plant. You see, each fruit and vegetable is worth different amounts of money when sold. Additionally some need only be planted once and only die with the changing of the seasons. Part of the fun is planning out your growing plots to maximize profits. Sometimes you’ll want to plant cheaper produce because it will give you money quicker, and other times playing the waiting game pays off better. There’s a huge selection of crops to choose from and they vary in each season. You can even grow flowers, but these work better as gifts than product. There’s also the option to focus instead on animals. You have several options, and these vary in the same way crops do but produce year round. They also need to be fed instead of watered. Bummer, I know.

Of course you can play Harvest Moon: Friends of Mineral Town without planting a single crop or raising any animals. It’s going to be a tough road ahead, but the game offers other options for income. You can go fishing and sell your catch. This is a simple mini-game based on a single timed button press, but it’s mildly entertaining. You can also make Jack into more of a forager and simply gather and sell nature’s bounty found in the nearby woods. Mining in the caves is also a big activity in the game but it’s not nearly as profitable as the others. This serves an entirely different purpose which I’ll get to in a minute. Harvest Moon’s charm is that it’s basically a sandbox, and you can play it how you see fit.

There are few games where progress feels so rewarding as in Harvest Moon: Friends of Mineral Town. As you upgrade your tools the chores become easier. You start with a watering can that can only wet one tile at a time. After upgrading it using ore (which you get only from mining) it can wet a larger area with little effort. The other tools can be updated at the blacksmith in the same way. Their upgrades are also noticeable such as being able to cut tree stumps faster or smash larger rocks. The game even has power berries which increase your character’s stamina. If you put in the work the difference between the first year and second can feel like night and day in terms of effort. This really works to cut down on the repetition and keep you playing longer. Better yet it gives you short term goals.

Besides chores there’s also a social element built in. You interact on a day to day basis with various NPCs living in Mineral Town. Speaking with them consistently as well as giving them gifts raises your friendship level and unlocks events. What’s neat is that everyone likes to be gifted different items. You have to kind of get to know these NPCs in order to befriend them. Every character has a specific schedule that they follow. You’ll need to figure out where they are at specific times of the day to find them. The game also has five different bachelorettes which you woo in the same manner. When you reach a specific relationship level with them you can opt to get married and even have children. Of course to get to this point you have to upgrade your house (using money and materials). I love that this is all optional.

While Harvest Moon: Friends of Mineral Town is a great game there are a few drawbacks. Namely the festivals. On specific days of each season the characters gather for various celebrations. This is a big part of Harvest Moon. While this game is a remake of the PS1 release unfortunately a few of the festivals were cut. The best ones are unfortunately absent. I’m talking about the tomato festival. This had you competing in a throwing contest against NPCs and was a nice diversion. It’s nowhere to be found here. Others have been toned down and have less interaction than before. I didn’t like the festivals here as much as I have in the other sequels. Despite this I still consider Friends of Mineral Town one of the best Harvest Moon games of all time.

A big drawback to being a remake is the fact that the cast is recycled. There are almost no new characters here. It’s all the same faces we saw in Back to Nature. This wouldn’t be so bad but that cast was already recycled from Harvest Moon 64. This was basically the third sequel in a row that featured the same characters. By this point it was getting a little old. A few new citizens of Mineral Town would have gone a long way to making this game stand out more. What’s more is that a lot of the heart events (story sequences with individual characters) are also recycled. If you are just coming off of Back to Nature you’ll get a serious sense of deja vu with this one. While I can appreciate Friends of Mineral Town as a remake it needs something a little more.

In terms of graphics this one is a little rough by Harvest Moon standards. It re-uses the same pre-rendered clay look to the characters. This is a little ugly in my opinion. The sprite based tiles are also highly repetitive. The environments just plain don’t look very good. There’s also a weird green haze over the screen to indicate the early morning. Something like blue or orange would have made a little more sense in my opinion. On a high note I do like the character portraits. These are pretty much the same as in the PS1 game but at a lower resolution. Regardless they look quite nice on the GBA screen. The soundtrack is the same as in Back to Nature, but instead of redbook audio we have bleeps and blips. The music sounds really good and I like it.