• Hey Guest. Check out your NeoGAF Wrapped 2025 results here!

Best Harvest Moon game?

The only problem A New Beginning has is the extremely extremely slow beginning. However, once it does ramp us it's easily one of the best if not THE best HM I've played. It's super accessible. There's a lot of customization and things you can do at a given time. Lots of goals to work towards making things not very routine. The game also gives you a lot of samples such as free animals, farming, and such so you are enticed to try out different aspects of the HM life. It's a wonderful game that has excellent game design. Save the intro.

The slow start is my main complaint about ANB. But for someone who has never played Harvest Moon, it might not be an issue. If anything, the hand-holding is probably a good thing for newbies.
 
The slow start is my main complaint about ANB. But for someone who has never played Harvest Moon, it might not be an issue. If anything, the hand-holding is probably a good thing for newbies.

I think even for newbies it might be a tad slow. However, it is an excellent guide for introducing you to the series and what you can do in the game. It's also charming.
 
You'll likely find most people will answer with the first one they played in this series case. I personally liked the n64 one :p
 
A New Beginning isn't released in Europe yet haha. I'll be playing New Leaf for as long as possible and hopefully Harvest Moon will be out when I'm done.
Get Rune Factory 3 then to pass the time. Game is phenomenal and better than any Harvest Moon I've played.
 
Played Back to Nature the most. Played a bit of both BTN and HM64 but ultimately went with BTN.

It had a nice mix of farming + town events + citizen events. You could also do quite a bit in a day.

Pretty much every HM after it seemed to have some major flaw for me, lack of events or direction in the PS2 one, Magical Melody and a few others had too little stamina and you could not do much in a day without cooking/eating. This was annoying early on at least.

I put some good hours into A New Beginning, it seems better, but still feel lack of events and citizen interactions. The city building stuff is neat though.

Since BTN, probably like Rune Factory 3 the most, even if it's not directly HM.
 
I have to say that for me the best Harvest Moon Experience was Rune Factory Frontier (until the goddamned runeys ruined everything).

The only problem A New Beginning has is the extremely extremely slow beginning. However, once it does ramp us it's easily one of the best if not THE best HM I've played. It's super accessible. There's a lot of customization and things you can do at a given time. Lots of goals to work towards making things not very routine. The game also gives you a lot of samples such as free animals, farming, and such so you are enticed to try out different aspects of the HM life. It's a wonderful game that has excellent game design. Save the intro.

I just got A New Beginning and I'm really loving it so far. But yeah the intro is molasses but so far it's on track to be better than Back to Nature which is really saying something.
 
Friends of Mineral Town.

Just the best overall experience. Lots of content, cute graphics, portable.

PS/N64 version are a close second/third.

First reply nails it. Friends of Mineral Town perfected the HM formula by making some tweaks and changes to the already great N64/PS1 game. It still holds up really well to this day.

After that the series has just been in a constant nosedive with Animal Parade and the Rune Factory entries being the few exceptions. Rather than building on what made the early entries great, the new ones all just rely on shoehorning in some irritating, half-baked, poorly implemented gimmick along with artificially restricting access to everything until you collect X number of sprites or notes or whatever.
 
Need to try ANB but my favorite would be 64.

Wonderful Life would've been my choice if we only counted the first two years. After that, it becomes insanely boring to play.
 
never played snes one, but i fell in love with the series with the N64 one....and then i fell out of love with the series with the PS2 one.
 
Tried Friends of Mineral Town a couple of weeks ago and didn't really feel it. I didn't like that you had all your tools right from the start and just upgraded them like in a RPG.
Hence there really weren't that many reasons to explore the town and whatnot.

The very first one felt really good in that regard - sadly there's hardly anything you can do in winters, which makes them ridiculously boring.
 
Magical Melody was a basically a greatest hits of the series up to that point. One of the coolest features was the ability to purchase various lots across town and spread out your property. And depending on where the land was located that affected the crops. It also had 10 love interests per character gender. The rival concept was really cool too. I haven't played any HM since, but I think it was the best in the series at the time.
 
Top Bottom