Game review: Harvest Moon – Tree of Tranquility

Harvest Moon: Tree of Tranquility, the latest release in the Harvest Moon series. This first HM game for the Wii utilizes a larger and more complex world than previous games, with many new additions to the farming, crop harvesting, animal raising, cooking, foraging, and just plain “peaceful living,” which is the main appeal of the Harvest Moon series. There are many great new additions in TofT that previous games do not have, but there are also things that are lacking in this HM game as well…

*Note: Besides this game, the only other Harvest Moon game that I’ve played is the one on GameCube, A Wonderful Life. So much of my review will be about how TofT stands against the GC game. Also, as of now I am still in the early stages of the game (almost reached marriage and almost at my second rainbow) but I still think I have played enough of it in order to write a good review.*

Plot/Story

Just like past Harvest Moon games, the plot and storyline of Tree of Tranquility remains basically the same, with a few new features. It’s still a farming simulation game in which you build your own farm on a peaceful island town, raise animals and crops on the farm, and use the profit you gain from them to buy items that help and enhance your everyday life. In addition to farming, you can forage, fish, cut down trees for lumber and stones for bricks, work part-time jobs, go to festivals, cook, mine, and interact with the other townspeople. By fostering friendships with the townspeople on the island, you can receive helpful gifts from them, and one of them could possibly become your future spouse! You can also foster friendships with the animals on the island; treating your farm animals affectionately will cause them to produce better quality goods, and if you’re kind to stray animals, you could even adopt them as a pet. As the days and seasons go by throughout the game, you’ll eventually want to marry and have child, but still continue to develop your farm and live a peaceful life.

In addition to simply caring for your farm and your own daily life, TofT brings back the side-story quest of reviving the Harvest Goddess, which was absent in A Wonderful Life. You need to restore the five rainbows of the island in order for the Harvest Goddess who protects the island to reawaken. Scattered throughout the island are five areas where you can find the five Harvest Sprites, who will tell you what items you need in order to restore each rainbow. Once a rainbow is restored, it will connect to a new area that you can explore.

Graphics, music, and controls

Being on the Wii has improved the graphics of TofT when compared to past HM games. The scenery of the game is absolutely beautiful, especially in the spring time when you can even see butterflies hover around flowers, birds pecking on the ground, and leaves falling off trees. The world of TofT is much larger too, with way more places to go and explore than past games. The designs of the people and animals has changed a little but they still retain that cute, innocent, chibi-ish look that is standard of all HM games ^_^ The simple, cheerful music fits the peaceful mood of the game well, and I like how the background music automatically quiets down when night falls. The Wii controls sometimes give you two options for a certain action. For example, when fishing you can either hold down the A button to charge up your fishing line, or you can pull the Wii remote back to charge it, then fling it forward to cast your line. Because of this, the game does not necessitate the technology of the Wii remote as much as other games, but it does take advantage of just about all the buttons on the remote and nunchuck. The graphics, music, and controls of TofT are pretty standard for a game of its kind. So in order to examine TofT further, I would now like to compare it to the other HM game I’ve played, A Wonderful Life…

Gameplay quality vs A Wonderful Life

Farming and animals: Getting your farm started is a lot more difficult in TofT than it was in AWL. In AWL you’re given your barn and coop as well as a few animals early on, but you get nothing for free in TofT. You get your house and a relatively small amount of money before you’re left on your own. I found the first few seasons of the game to be quite a struggle, with the only way to make money being from foraging, fishing, and part-time work before I could afford to buy cooking utensils and a barn or coop with at least one animal. Some players might like this challenge, which makes their eventual success in farm life all the more worthwhile, while others might find it frustrating, especially for new players. And obviously, TofT lets you play as a boy or a girl, while AWL only lets you play as a boy (but this was soon remedied with the next GC releases, Another Wonderful Life and Magical Melody). Another new feature of TofT is that later in the game you can own more than one plot of land with more than one house.

When it comes to the farm animals themselves, some good points in TofT is that there are even more farm animals you can get. TofT adds silk worms (which I believe were in a few past HM games but not in the GC games), who produce silk that you can make into yarn and use to make clothing items, and even ostriches, who lay eggs and can also be used for riding. In addition to cows, horses now come in different colors too (but unfortunately in TofT, their colors are chosen at random when you buy them), which also means that unlike AWL, you can get more than one horse, since animals can now die of old age in TofT. I also think it’s great how in TofT you can upgrade your barn and coop so you can have a lot more animals than you could in previous games.

However, there are a few bad points about the farm animals in TofT when compared to AWL. I feel that the interaction with the animals was handled better in AWL. In AWL, you could physically pick up the small animals like the chickens and carry them around. You could also push the larger animals around, in and out of the barn and over to the water so you could give them a bath. I also thought the animals’ reaction to your character’s affection was a lot more adorable in AWL (I loved how the cows would lick your face ^^). But in TofT, you can no longer carry animals or even push them around. It’s not even required that you give the large animals a bath, which I thought was fun. Their reactions to your affection are not as cute either. I also find it a bit annoying that you have to have your Saddle and Milker with you to ride your horse and milk your cows and goats, whereas in AWL you could ride your horse without a Saddle, and you could milk your cows and goats with your bare hands.

But one of the major animal issues I have with TofT is how the chickens and cows produce their eggs and milk. In AWL, it was a lot more like real life; you had to have at least one rooster in order to get the hens to produce fertilized eggs that could then be incubated and would hatch into chicks. Likewise, you had to have at least one male cow in order to get the female cows pregnant. The female cows would then only produce milk a certain amount of times after each pregnancy. You would also need to give some milk to their newborn calf. Unfortunately TofT does away with all this; when you first buy cows, they’re young and take a season to grow up. They then continue to give milk whether you make them pregnant using a Miracle Potion or not. The hens also produce fertilized eggs indefinitely without any need for a rooster. I feel that doing away with bulls and roosters in TofT took a lot of the realism out of the game. But hopefully this aspect will be brought back in the next HM game, and will also carry on to the goats, horses, and other animals too.

While I was a bit disappointed with how the farm animals are handled in TofT when compared to AWL, TofT’s new feature of adopting stray animals is a definite plus! =) In AWL, you could only have one dog and cat who would be given to you. They would then hang out outside your house and not do too much. But in TofT, there are many different kinds of animals roaming around the island, from dogs and cats to rabbits, boars, turtles, etc., and just about all of them are adoptable. In order to adopt an animal, you have to raise its affection to a certain level by talking to it everyday and giving it specific food items that it likes. When it starts to like you a lot, it will give you a present in return, and then when it really likes you, you will have the option of adopting it. Once it’s adopted, it will hang out inside your house and you can pet it and take it for walks into town where people will comment on it. So yeah, pet adoption is a great new feature in TofT =)

Relationships and family life: Interaction with the townspeople in TofT is pretty much the same as AWL. You can talk to them and give them gifts to increase their friendships, and sometimes stumble upon some of their little side-stories and cut scenes. And of course, a few of them are eligible to be your spouse once your raise their affection to the highest level. A new way to raise a specific person’s affection in TofT is to work part-time at the place where that person works. Also, the number of townspeople in TofT is higher, with new people moving in more often. Marriage is pretty similar to AWL, but your relationship with your eventual child is a bit different. In AWL, you could influence your child’s future career by gifts you would give him and which people in town you befriend. In TofT however, you do not influence your child’s career, but rather, after he/she grows up and you complete a few events, you have the option of starting a new game as your child (he/she will inherit most of your items and money and just about everything in the game will be the same). I don’t think TofT’s child rearing or AWL’s is better or worse – it’s simply a preference of whether you want to play out your old game or start anew as your child.

Fishing, mining, and other actions: Just about all of the everyday activities you can do in HM games have expanded in TofT. Most of them utilize the technology of the Wii remote, but you also have the option of using old-fashion button pressing too. All the tools you use can be upgraded and your skill level can increase with each, allowing you to use them more effectively. New tools include the Axe and Hammer, which you use to cut down trees and smash stones. You now need to use a certain amount of stone and lumber at the carpenter’s whenever you build a new building or upgrade an old one. Mining has also improved. In AWL, you could only go to the small fossil dig sight and maybe dig up a few things. In TofT there are two mines. The mines have several floors with many different items to be found, as well as booby traps! You can also get the ores, ambers, etc., that you dig up appraised and even use them to upgrade your tools. Fishing is pretty much the same except that there’s many more kinds of fish in TofT. And with more kinds of fish and more kinds of crops comes a ton of more cooking recipes and utensils! Part-time work is a new feature of TofT. Originally thought to be mini-games, all you do is ask for part-time work at a particular place, then a cut scene of you working there plays, and then you receive money depending on how long you worked. Very helpful at the beginning of the game, but I’ve found that later on it’s more profitable to cook and do other farm work rather than work part-time. The return of silk worms has also brought clothing you can buy using certain amounts of silk and/or wool. Festivals in TofT have also improved. Though most of them are still just cut scenes or temporary markets, some are a bit more interactive, for example, the cooking contest at Brownie Ranch. Weather in TofT is pretty similar to AWL except when it comes to snow. In AWL, snow would only fall lightly and would not threaten the health of your animals. Snow is damaging in TofT however, and snowstorms and typhoons can occur. In AWL, weather could change during a single day, but in TofT, the weather remains constant throughout the day. Some may prefer the unpredictability of the weather in AWL, while others may prefer the predictable weather in TofT.

Conclusion and general thoughts on Harvest Moon

Being such a complex game, there are a ton of features and details in TofT that I probably didn’t touch on. But I think I’ve covered the basic points in this review to give you a good idea of how it fares, at least compared to AWL. Once again, since I haven’t played many other HM games and I haven’t yet gotten too far in TofT, if there are any errors in this review, please let me know ^^ For those of you who are not familiar with Harvest Moon games, Tree of Tranquility, or just about any HM game, are definitely worth playing if you like complex simulation games that are relaxing and slow-paced rather than action/suspense oriented and fast-paced. HM games are some of the most long and drawn-out games, so if you like your games to get going quickly with lots of different things happening all the time, then HM might be too slow for you. The very repetitious farming and other activities that you do daily in HM games might also become boring for players who prefer to have a variety of challenges. For me, the peaceful, simple, and relatively trouble-free world of Harvest Moon, where everyone is kind and lives in harmony with animals and nature, is a perfect way to escape the confusion and strife of our modern world in reality. It allows me to live a tranquil, near-Utopian life that I might like to live in reality had I been given the chance…and I’m sure a lot of other HM fans feel the same way ^^,,, So yeah, HM games are great if you like cute, pretty, complex, and detailed simulation games where you can find tranquility in the slow-pacing and repetitious daily activities. Although Tree of Tranquility might be difficult for first-time HM players, and although it’s lacking in some aspects when compared to other HM games, it has plenty of new features and new developments of old features to satisfy any faithful HM fan ^_^