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Harvest Moon: Friends of Mineral Town Review - GBA

The Harvest Moon series is very much a love/hate scenario. Either you're a 15 year-old girl and absolutely love the cute little cows and chickens, or an addicted gamer that can't get away from your farm, or somebody that thinks the whole idea of raising a farm is moronic, and not your idea of fun. Whichever it may be, the Harvest Moon series has proven to be one of Nintendo's successes, and it will be around for many years to come. Harvest Moon: Friends of Mineral Town (from now on, HM: FOMT) has compiled every feature you love from the old SNES, GB and PS1 games, put it all in the one game, and then added some more. There's so many different ways that you can play out your life as a farmer, and with dozens of different endings available, so you'll be up all night raising your crops and animals.

Gameplay

For those unfamiliar with the Harvest Moon way of life, usually somebody has deserted a farm - whether it be your parents, your grandpa, whatever. Basically, it's up to you to run the farm however you choose, have fun, have kids, and hopefully make a bit of money in the mean time. HM: FOMT is no different to its predecessors in this respect. It has every feature that a gamer could dream of (except perhaps chopping people's heads off with the master sword), and is a big progression from the previous Harvest Moon titles that we've seen on the Game Boy.

There's only really one type of gameplay mode, and that's your basic career/storyline. Your life on the farm will eventually expire, as you do have one enemy and that is the element of the 4th dimension - time. Don't worry though, because you have a LOT of time to do everything you want. Grow crops, love your horse, milk cows, build extensions on your house, and maybe even find a girl to marry. At the end of the game, your life is basically summed up and depending on how happy you are you'll get a different ending. There are lots of different endings, meaning you'll be playing this game over and over again if you're a hardcore fan of getting every last drop out of your game.

There are however sad parts to the game. If you run out of cash, you won't be able to feed your animals and they may die. If you don't pay enough attention to your horse, it might decide to leave. Once you've been running your farm for a while however, you'll see that it's very hard to not be making any money. Unless you're doing absolutely nothing on your farm, you'll have some sort of daily income! There are also ways of getting money for not doing any harvesting. Take a journey to the forest below your farm, (continued next page)