Harvest Moon: Magical Melody

collect all the musical notes to rescue the Harvest Goddess. Your farm life begins now.

JP release: 3rd May 2005
NA release: 28th March 2006
JP release: N/A
Developer: Marvelous Interactive
Publisher: Marvelous Interactive
NGC Magazine Score: 91%
Mods Used: Widescreen Code

After experimenting a bit with A Wonderful Life, Marvelous decided to return to the roots of the franchise a little bit more. This includes a top down view and a much bigger focus on farming again, but very little focus on growing up and the town changing around you, with your child also growing up. However, that doesn’t mean that things don’t change over time in Magical Melody.

When you start, the town will be quite empty, with you picking one of three locations. As time moves on and you start selling stuff from your farm, more people will move in, opening up new shops, libraries, cafes and the like. It lets you slowly get used to things in your first year or two of the game, creating new things to discover over time. Unfortunately, once you do meet someone new, there’s not much to it after that. Dialogue is the same most days and there’s usually only two small unique conversations per person for getting them to like you.

There are. Thankfully, plenty more festivals than the previous game, with a few minigames for some. You’ll likely miss a few in the first year as you’ll need to donate resources to make them happen, and, outside of the first festival, the game doesn’t tell you this. Once you know, it’s simple, but it’s annoying to miss out due to stuff like that. You’ll also need to complete a minigame to earn a blue feather so you can choose to marry. Although marriage is just something they pretty much need to have – your partner will carry on with their regular routine, they’ll just be standing by your bed in the morning then teleport to their job when you leave the house (nobody walks around).

One big difference between this and Harvest Moon 64 is that the farming takes place on the same map as the rest of the village. Not only that, but you can buy land – a lot of it. There are plenty of fields around, and you can even buy land on the mountain at the top of the village. You can have multiple houses (although if you want to change where your main house is, you’ll need to get that relocated, you can’t swap with another built house – this affects going to sleep from the menu and where your post appears) and other farming buildings. There’s not a lot of options, but it does give you a bit of freedom and you can use plants to make the village look nice.

While the game does get repetitive quickly, it also gives you objectives – 100 or so – to encourage you to try out all the different mechanics and to become friends with everyone. There’s definitely plenty to like here, but like with Harvest Moon 64, a lot of it is just done better by Stardew Valley. In the Japan, Magical Melody had two versions, with the updated version fixing bugs, doing some rebalancing and adding a small amount of extra stuff (like a game over scene for marrying your rival). The North American version is based on the updated version.

Fun

But persistence is one thing that Magical Melody does reward – moth materially and spiritually. For this is a town and a world that is yours to shape, yours to play with, as your own pace for your own ends.
Alex Cooke

Remake or remaster?

A Story of Seasons remake like other Harvest Moon games would be good.

Official Ways to get the game

There’s no official way to buy Harvest Moon: Magical Melody.