Harvest Moon 3D: The Lost Valley review: Fractured farming tales
3DS
After taking root in the 16-bit era and spanning multiple console generations, the Harvest Moon series now finds itself in a precarious spot. The North American publishing rights for the Marvelous-developed Harvest Moon games have changed hands, leaving Xseed to publish the next 3DS sequel as Story of Seasons. Freed of its ties to the series itself but retaining the Harvest Moon trademark, Natsume took the opportunity to shift the franchise in a new direction with the internally developed Harvest Moon 3D: The Lost Valley.
Featuring terraforming mechanics inspired by the indie hit Minecraft, The Lost Valley shakes up long-standing series traditions in a bid to explore new farming-focused gameplay ideas and forge its own identity. While its attempts at innovation are successful to a limited extent, longtime Harvest Moon fans will be disappointed with the barebones end result.
The Lost Valley plops players in the middle of an abandoned swath of land cursed to suffer an eternal winter. The Harvest Goddess is slumbering, and only your agricultural skills can wake her up, melt the snow, and restore the seasons. Fortunately, crops in The Lost Valley will grow even in wintry weather, giving you plenty of options in your quest.
Compared to 2012's Harvest Moon 3D: A New Beginning, The Lost Valley wastes little time in equipping the player with everything they need to kickstart a farming empire. You can start planting and harvesting crops within minutes – a welcome improvement over A New Beginning's hours-long prologue.
Farming itself is easier than it's ever been in the series. After choosing a plot, your actions follow a context-sensitive sequence of events. Point your character toward a fertile square of land and you can till the soil, plant a seed, water it, and fertilize it with four consecutive button presses. The process is entirely painless, and eliminates the constant inventory juggling that bogged down earlier Harvest Moon games.
Lengthy and unskippable animations mitigate any time you'd save, however. Your farmer pauses to marvel at every single plant you harvest, and watering crops square-by-square is equally time-consuming. You can enlist the help of harvest sprites to partially complete your chores, but planting and watering a full field of crops is often a day-long ordeal (several minutes of real-world time), since you can no longer upgrade your default tools to speed up the process.
In fact, many features that previously defined the Harvest Moon series are either scaled back or missing entirely in The Lost Valley. In many Harvest Moon games, for instance, players can wander expansive villages and interact with townsfolk after finishing up their daily chores. This was especially appealing in A New Beginning, which innovated with its customizable town layout and a cast of dozens of likable villagers.
In The Lost Valley, there is no town. Villagers show up on your front lawn on specific days of the week, then promptly disappear at sundown. The Lost Valley also ditches character preferences and gift-giving. You need to speak to visitors and fulfill requests for specific crops in order to progress through the story, but otherwise you have little sway over friendships. You can't even give gifts to your romantic partners – not like it matters much, since The Lost Valley has few suitors to choose from (three male, three female), and they're all equally generic and unappealing.
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The Lost Valley's Minecraft-inspired elements are another disappointment. Terraforming basically amounts to raising and lowering land on your farm in the hopes of producing height-specific crop mutations, and the biggest challenges you'll face involve constructing soil-based staircases to reach higher ground. It's as exciting as it sounds, which is to say not very exciting at all.
If you're hoping for Minecraft levels of customization, you're also out of luck. You'll need to play through several seasons before you can access basic structures like bridges and fences, and you have few options when it comes to character clothing and hairstyles once you finally unlock them.
You'll otherwise spend much of your time staring at a barren wasteland covered in snow, since restoring the seasons is a slow, arduous process. Worse, you likely won't see the results of your labor until the second in-game year. During my playthrough, I managed to complete the Harvest Goddess' requests and restore Spring on the very last day of the season. The next day – the first day of Summer – all of Spring's greenery disappeared, and the snow returned in full force. It felt like my previous five hours of work were wasted.
It doesn't get any better afterward. Summer's restoration quests make you wait weeks for characters to show up so that you can talk to them in a very specific sequence, and Fall requires you to tunnel through a mountain over a period of several in-game days before it sends you on a series of tedious fetch quests. In between, you're stuck shoveling snow until The Lost Valley finally opens up, and even then, it's still nowhere near as satisfying as earlier games in the series thanks to its many missing or scaled-back features.
Harvest Moon: The Lost Valley has some good ideas, and the improved farming mechanics are appreciated, but its awful pacing sabotages any fun you might otherwise be able to squeeze out of it. Even when it's not taken in the context of previous Harvest Moon games, The Lost Valley feels half-baked, and its attempts at variety don't add much to the experience.
If you're looking for a similar game to fill this year's Harvest Moon-shaped void, Level 5's recent Fantasy Life fits the bill nicely, offering ample depth to match its grind-happy gameplay. In comparison, The Lost Valley offers a pitiful amount of content, and what's available takes ages to unlock. Here's hoping that Story of Seasons makes up for The Lost Valley's disappointing harvest.
This review is based on an eShop download of Harvest Moon: The Lost Valley, provided by Natsume. Images: Natsume.
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