Peak Gaming: Harvest Moon (SNES, 1996)

I rented many video sgames as a child in the early 2000s. Most of my most beloved experiences on my N64 were had on rentals. When renting, I’d have the opportunity to try titles sight unseen without needing to commit to one, stuck with it until the next time my single-digit-aged self would be given a new one. Eventually, curiosity lead me to a game for which I was woefully unprepared to play, Harvest Moon 64.

This article isn’t about HM64, so I’ll be brief. That game introduced me to gameplay that was non-violent, something I hadn’t even considered before. The music and graphics, with their strong Japanese influence, were evocative of a location which felt real and realized despite never having been. Though the game wasn’t violent, its gameplay still required lots of skill from the player. There’s lots of work, and very little time to do it, so players are encouraged to optimize their play. Later entries in the Story of Seasons¹ series mostly ditched this in favour of less aggressive timers as well as allowing players to become superpowered demigods of farming.

What I wanted to talk about, however, is the predecessor to Harvest Moon 64, simply titled Harvest Moon.

Mechanically, it is a simpler game. The graphics are 2D and there are fewer buttons on the controller (and thus fewer actions). The most significant mechanical consequence is that unlike other titles in the farming genre, Harvest Moon completely lacks an inventory system. Anything you harvest or gather must be either sold, given away, or disposed of before taking any other action. Even though this is the first entry in its series, the choice to forgo any kind of inventory is one that is a significant departure from most RPGs, the genre which formed the basis for Harvest Moon.

Because players won’t keep anything that they gather for long, the game could forgo needing to add a signficant amount of depth to its systems. There’s a fishing minigame, and the only thing that can be obtained from it is a single fish item. At some point, the designers of the game decided that the minigame did not need a couple dozen species of fish to be obtainable, because that’s not what the game was about. The result is a simple mechanic that feels very focused, and the knowability of the mechanic also allows players to take a very informed approach to it; “I’ve finished my chores for the day, so I’ll go to the backwoods to gather. Do I try my luck with fishing to maybe ship something worth 300G, or do I just gather mushrooms for 150G?”

Every part of Harvest Moon is designed in this way. There are only four vegetables that players can grow at any time, two in the spring season and two in the summer season. What differentiates each season’s crops is the speed at which they grow. So, for each season where planting and harvesting can occur, there are only two options for what to grow. Players' choices amount only to which amount of each to handle, yet it’s a choice of profound consequence. The longer waits always produce a greater per–day profit, but the shorter turnaround for fast–growing plants means one can reinvest their earnings sooner. The game could have easily chosen to present the player with more options in this regard; A greater variety of vegetables would make the calculus a bit more interesting, but Harvest Moon opts instead to boil the option down to its simplest form. All farming games compel me to pick all varieties on offer, but only Harvest Moon really makes me think hard about how I’ll count what I grow.

The result that most should expect out of such a spartan approach to game content is a shallow and ultimately unsatisfying gaming experience, yet that’s not what Harvest Moon grants its players. What the game lacks in depth, it gains in comprehensibility. A new player can quite quickly grasp the mechanics of the game. Experimentation is encouraged because a player will soon learn all there is to know, and once all of a game’s mechanics are understood can the most interesting part of a game truly begin.

Through a game design methodology that results in very simple, shallow game systems, Harvest Moon can expose a juicy core that can push even skilled players to their limits: The core of this game is to ask the player to give themselves work, and warn them not to bite off more than they can chew. Everything in the game exists to entice players into action while punishing overwork. Players are thus organically pushed towards walking on the razor’s edge between “could do more” and “can’t handle everything”. If you plant too many crops, you may not have the time or energy to tend to each of them. If you buy animals, you need to spend time and energy planting and cutting grass to feed them, which cuts into the precious time and energy you have for crops. Too much time spent working also means less time to socialize with the game’s characters, which is a mechanic that actually contributes to the player’s final score at the end of the game. The brilliance of Harvest Moon in this regard is that it never imposes work onto the player. The player is the one who chooses which crops to plant, and when. The player is the one who chooses which animals to buy and breed, and when to do it. For players who lack skills in quick execution, they can grow a more modest amount of crops — they’ll still profit, so the game won’t discourage this. For players who are more ambitious, they can plant more. Each player plays at their limit. While there are fixed goals for the end of the game, the player is always the one who chooses how to pursue those goals (or even whether to pursue them).

The simplicity of Harvest Moon goes further than simply make strategic choices easier for players to understand. Consider the ability to raise animals, a staple in the farming genre (if specifically because of the mechanic’s presence in this title). In a move which feels unusual for the genre today, the player starts the game with their ranch infrastructure at full capacity. The barn and chicken coop do not need to be expanded to accommodate more animals, yet the game still has a mechanic to place a cap on how many animals can be purchased. The town’s animal dealer will refuse to sell an animal if the player’s farm does not have enough grass planted onsite. A secondary “soft cap” also exists in the player’s own capacity to grow enough food; A player who cannot adequately feed their animals will be unable to properly gather milk or eggs yet, as mentioned before, this work also robs capacity from other parts of the game. Planting grass is not a simple one-and-done affair. Players need to continually harvest hay to be able to feed their animals, which takes precious time and energy for tending to crops. It’s a balancing act that is much more interesting than simply filling up a barn and watching the money roll in.

Where most games present the player with the same content again and again as a means to pad out the runtime until the story ends, Harvest Moon consists entirely of repetition. Because players are tasked with expanding their farm, and thus their responsibilities, the result is a gameplay loop where players don’t feel like their time is being wasted, but instead one which tasks them to perform consistently. A simple fumble or simple forgetfulness will throw players off balance, which then means a player must adjust on the fly. Because the player is their own level designer, however, they’ll always be able to figure out a solution.

Because of the caliber of game design on display in Harvest Moon, I find myself frequently returning to this title and not its sequel to which I have a much stronger emotional connection.

Harvest Moon is currently available to play on Nintendo Switch Online. Harvest Moon 64 is currently available on Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion Pak. Similar games include Story of Seasons: Friends of Mineral Town, Story of Seasons: A Wonderful Life, and Stardew Valley, all three of which are available on Windows PCs and all major consoles.