Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life

Your wonderful farming life starts now.

JP release: 12th September 2003
NA release: 16th March 2004
EU release: 26th March 2004
Developer: Marvelous Interactive
Publisher: Marvelous (JP), Natsume (NA), Ubisoft (EU)
NGC Magazine Score: 91%
Mods Used: Widescreen Code

While the days in Harvest Moon 64 went by far too quickly, you’ll have plenty of time in A Wonderful Life. Really, this GameCube Harvest Moon game seems to suffer from the opposite problems. While you struggled to see everything in the N64 game, for A Wonderful Life, you’ll have trouble finding stuff to do. And it’s a massive shame as this Harvest Moon has a unique idea.

You see, A Wonderful Life really does mean a life. You’ll start a family and watch it grow through multiple chapters until eventually you die of old age. The game is split into chapters. The first does have a specific goal: get married. There are three eligible girls in the town and you have to chat with them. Unfortunately, seeing their story events is a massive pain. Making them like you is easy as you just give them stuff, but you need to be in specific areas at the right time with other characters in the right place to trigger events to progress the relationship. Even with a guide, I simply couldn’t get some to work.

The developers seemed to be aware about the difficulty of being able to prepare, so at the end of the first year, the girl that likes you the most will propose to you. You can accept to continue or refuse and end the game. The game skips forward a few years and you have a toddler. From this point on, your wife is just another NPC who very, very rarely offers to help on your farm. You can influence your child to help out as well, and how you interact with them will affect the career path they eventually make.

It’s all nice, but the systems in place are just very shallow, and it’s pretty much one task of the day. The farming itself is also quite basic, with a few small fields (already prepared) for crops and a barn for animals to milk. You can buy a few upgrades, such as a milking station to help speed up your meagre farm duties. The biggest problem, however, is the town itself.

While it does change throughout the game – a couple of new people moving in, the child characters growing up – there’s really not all that much to do. The only events are cutscenes you trigger by being in a particular location on a particular day, there’s no big festival events for you to interact with, which means they the daily grind is all there is, when what the game really needed was fun stuff to look forward to. Even progressing the story takes far too long.

Fine

As you’ve probably gathered by now, we reckon Harvest Moon is the best thing since carrot seeds and baby cows. It requires an awful lot of effort before you feel like you’re really getting anywhere with it, but then the result is so much sweeter for the knowledge that it’s entirely your own swear and toil that made everything just so.
Martin Kitts, NGC Magazine #91

Remake or remaster?

The game did get a remake which has a new visual style, improvements from later versions of the game and some additional features under the name Story of Seasons: A Wonderful Life

Official Ways to get the game

Story of Seasons: A Wonderful Life is available on Switch, Xbox, PlayStation and PC.