It's going to be at E3....
Admittedly I should have noted many casual fans (or the sort of odd middle ground that pays no attention to the news but still gets most games) would get caught up in this, though they probably would never go "wait what the hell?" if someone doesn't point it out to them, though I guess the game could suck an unusually high amount. They'd probably just buy the game blissfully ignorant while the people trying to research into the series and where to come in get thrown off and wonder which recent Harvest Moon games are real ones.
The artstyle is pretty atrocious to begin with. Coupled with the twin facts of horrible and very often load times as well as 15fps WITH occasional slowdowns for a very basic looking game... it just hurts.
For what it's worth, my mother really liked them... but they are just very weak entries in the series. Nothing they did was better than any other game in the series before or after.
I'd imagine they'd just pull a Castlevania LoI and call it Harvest Moon in Japan. They'd own the name internationally full stop.
Which actually does make me wonder if maybe Toybox is developing this game. That's another wrinkle in this because to change my prior analogy it'd be like if Sony got to keep the FF name outside of Japan... and THEY were the ones that got the Mistwalker RPGs, and released them as Final Fantasy titles. Or hell Nintendo could've just gotten it and used it on Last Story, whichever.
I imagine the key difference is that Atlus could plausibly make a good knockoff so long as they kept it in house and didn't go a European dev or something similar to how they licensed a bunch of those for US release after Demon's Souls's success, where at best they get something that's very Eurojank but is a good game (Divinity II Dragon Knight Saga as I recall), at worst outright trash (Cursed Crusade.) Of course they could just contract out From I guess for full hilarity.
I giggled at 'stimulator'
RF4 did very well for them and Neverland seemed to go down through their own bad management, I'm sure we'll see the series again sooner than later.
Yeah, would've been interesting if they did get the original creator on board because then we have a more real divide than "yeah well we still have the trademark!"
Frantic Farming was a delightful puzzle game, although the mobile version has some control problems. The DS version has a nice challenge puzzle feature and interesting storymode.