My Experience with: Harvest Moon - Hero of Leaf Valley

I’ve been a fan of the Harvest Moon series for many years (and its awesome spin-off series Rune Factory), though I haven’t played any of the newer games like A New Beginning or The Tale of Two Towns.

Harvest Moon: Hero of Leaf Valley is the most recent game I’ve played, released back in 2010 in the US. I personally like it a lot.

It’s got some seriously addictive gameplay. I’ve stayed up way longer than I should on some nights just playing this game and telling myself, “I just gotta go mining one more time, and then I’ll be done…” 2 hours later, I’m still playing, watering my crops, taking care of my animals, doing miscellaneous jobs, again telling myself that I’ll go do this thing or that thing one more time and then I’ll put the game down. But I won't. I'll keep playing. It’s a terrible, vicious cycle. But it’s fun.

Being an expansion of Harvest Moon: Save the Homeland, Hero of Leaf Valley’s story is similar. A town is being threatened with renovation for a theme park, and so you have to raise 50,000G in 2 years if you want to stop it.

In actuality, there are many different paths that you can take to stop the development of the amusement park – you don’t have to just raise 50,000G. You can experience different plotlines depending on who you interact and become friends with, which encourages you to make friends with everybody if you want to experience everything. Or, if you wanted to play the game a second time, you could make friends with people you never did before, and have an wholly new experience than when you played the game the first time. This is pretty awesome.

The basic farming gameplay returns, where you raise and harvest your crops; some (potatoes, for example) you can only harvest once, and some crops stick around (tomatoes, breadfruit, rice) so you can harvest them multiple times. It’s definitely a time and energy consumer, but if you stick to it, you’ll definitely profit doing it. And isn’t that the focus of the Harvest Moon series? How putting in a lot of time, dedication, and hard-work into what you do pays off?   

There’s also animal-raising, like in past games. You can take care of a dog, a horse, chickens, and cows. Like caring for your crops, raising your animals is a lot of hard work, but it pays off in the long run. Nurturing your dog and horse is especially important, because they do two things for you, respectively: increase your stamina meter and allow for fast travel.

Besides the socializing, farming, and animal aspects of the game, you can also work at various places in the town. At first, there’ll be at least 5 jobs – taking care of horses and cows, cooking, taking care of chickens, cutting down trees for lumber, and mining. 2 of these jobs – cutting down trees and mining – will go away after you work them enough times, but then you’ll be able to get certain resources – lumber and ores. Overall, these part-time jobs are enjoyable, though it can feel like a chore at times. The mining activity – which involves solving puzzles – is probably the most entertaining of the bunch.

The music is nice and calming, and definitely has an appropriate nature-ish tone to it. It can repetitive, I’ll admit, but it’s decent, and so are the sounds.

In terms of graphics, the environments are nice, and the characters look appealing. This looks alright for a PSP game, though I personally preferred the cel-shaded art style of Save the Homeland.

All in all, this is a good game. It’s pretty delightful and addicting. I’d recommend this to anyone interested in farming games.