; and, finally, Harvestella – a brand new franchise from Square Enix and seemingly the biggest budget game of the lot. Harvestella had actually been unveiled in an earlier Mini-Direct, when it shared the limelight with Doraemon Story Of Seasons: Friends Of The Great Kingdom, so that is an awful lot of farming games all arriving at once. But while Harvest Moon (which had to change its name to Story Of Seasons for legal reasons) is the progenitor of the genre it's indie game Stardew Valley which is responsible for the current wave of popularity. Stardew Valley is a great game but it's very low tech and doesn't look much different from the original Harvest Moon games. Harvestella, though, is an attempt to marry the concept with a more modern style Japanese role-player, with a complex story involving time travel and the existence of a deadly new one-day season called Quietus. Harvestella starts off like many a Japanese role-playing game, with your main character (who can be male, female, or non-binary) waking up with amnesia and no clue as to where they are, only for an angelic looking figure to tell them that they're destined to save the world. You subsequently find yourself in exactly the sort of fairy tale village that farming games are always set in, although everyone's upset about Quietus and what they refer to as Omens – one of who crash lands in a spaceship/meteor just as you arrive and turns out to be a human girl from the future. All this happens within the first half h){kind=link}
Square Enix takes the Stardew Valley style farming sim and combines it with an action role-player where only gardening can save the world.
The last Nintendo Direct featured not one, not two, not three, but four separate farming games. There was Story Of Seasons: A Wonderful Life, which is a remake of the similarly subtitled Harvest Moon game from 2003; four-player indie title Fae Farm; Harvest Moon spin-off Rune Factory 3 Special and a tease of a new game (so technically that’s five farming sims); and, finally, Harvestella – a brand new franchise from Square Enix and seemingly the biggest budget game of the lot.
Harvestella had actually been unveiled in an earlier Mini-Direct, when it shared the limelight with Doraemon Story Of Seasons: Friends Of The Great Kingdom, so that is an awful lot of farming games all arriving at once. But while Harvest Moon (which had to change its name to Story Of Seasons for legal reasons) is the progenitor of the genre it’s indie game Stardew Valley which is responsible for the current wave of popularity.
Stardew Valley is a great game but it’s very low tech and doesn’t look much different from the original Harvest Moon games. Harvestella, though, is an attempt to marry the concept with a more modern style Japanese role-player, with a complex story involving time travel and the existence of a deadly new one-day season called Quietus.
Harvestella starts off like many a Japanese role-playing game, with your main character (who can be male, female, or non-binary) waking up with amnesia and no clue as to where they are, only for an angelic looking figure to tell them that they’re destined to save the world. You subsequently find yourself in exactly the sort of fairy tale village that farming games are always set in, although everyone’s upset about Quietus and what they refer to as Omens – one of who crash lands in a spaceship/meteor just as you arrive and turns out to be a human girl from the future.