Given that it was released for Nintendo’s SNES shortly after both the PlayStation and Nintendo 64 made their Japanese debuts, Harvest Moon shouldn’t be an instantly recognisable name. Other top-down, sprite-based games of that time (with the rather noticeable exception of Pokémon Red and Green) struggled to make themselves heard among the clamour of the new. Harvest Moon was different, and not just because of its unlikely success. It was and is unique for its playful, earnest synthesis of action-RPG and slow-burning simulation – and, most enduringly, its gentle good nature.
The game presents a comforting alternate reality in which cows smile, friendships are sealed with gifts of dairy produce, and hard work always has its rewards. It paints an idyllic picture of the simplicity and essential goodness of rural life, an idea that has proven especially appealing to the inhabitants of urban Japan. The concept for Harvest Moon blossomed from creator and, later, director Yasuhiro Wada’s first years working in the videogame industry in Tokyo – a city to out-sprawl all cities – where it first occurred to him to make life in the countryside into a game. “I was raised in the country town of Miyazaki in Kyushu,” he tells us, “and I think that it has influenced me greatly.”
Wada had always loved games as a boy, particularly the original Legend Of Zelda, whose open-world influence can be seen in Harvest Moon’s presentation. He had never worked on an original title before Harvest Moon, spending two years in advertising after university and his first years in the game industry in production. “After working as a production assistant on PC Engine games, I produced several,” he explains. “During that time, I really studied the whole structure of games and the gameplay at their core, working out the logic for myself.”
The original draft for Bokujou Monogatari – or Ranch Story – was complete in 1993, but it spent three years in development. Developer Pack-In Soft hardly had a glittering reputation at the time. “Before I started there it was known as a pretty crappy game developer,” laughs Wada. “But during the time I was there there it was properly reorganised, and while we didn’t have that many people, everyone was there for the same purpose, and the result was being able to work freely. It was a very good environment.”
Making a top-down, 16bit SNES title at a time when 3D gaming had just entered the mainstream market was at the very least extremely brave, but Wada felt that it had its own advantages. Unfazed by the almighty fuss that the 32bit and 64bit consoles were making in the Japanese media, he was confident that Harvest Moon could reach a wider audience on established hardware. “I believed that if we could make something new and interesting then it would still be a success,” he says. “When a new console is released, the attention of both the media and gamers is inevitably focused upon it, but the SNES was being distributed around the world, and a lot of people had one.”
Pack-In Soft endured several shake-ups during Harvest Moon’s development, including a restructuring and, most dramatically, the dissolution of Harvest Moon’s entire eight-person development team near the end of the development cycle, leaving Wada almost alone to ready the game for release. “During development, the team broke up. We were working with an external developer on production, and that developer went bankrupt,” he explains. Despite these difficulties, though, Wada refused to let the project fall apart. “It was always my intention to finish and release it… I ended up putting the finishing touches to the game as a director. In the latter half of the final year it was three people, including myself, who completed it,” he recalls. Wada worked most closely with just two other staff, Tomomi Yamatate as a main programmer and Setsuko Miyakoshi as a planner and designer, retaining a large measure of personal creative control – something more recent Harvest Moon games, created by much larger teams, no longer enjoy.
Aiming to create a game that conveyed the gentleness and wellbeing of a farming life was unusual in an industry that Wada felt was dominated primarily by violence. “When we started making it no one could imagine what it would look like when it was finished, and as there was no precedent we didn’t think it would be very popular,” he says. “It had to be a game with no fighting, a game like no other, and a tactile realtime action game. Those were our three starting principles, and remain our enduring ethos.”
The moment that Wada and the rest of the development team realised that the concept was working is the same moment that hooks most of Harvest Moon’s players: “[It was] the moment when, in the first playable version, we watered a seed and, after a day, a sprout came out. We felt that there was no other game that conveyed this kind of pleasure. The joy of growing things is the same across the world.”
Watching the farm evolve from a single sprout to its own agricultural economy is the simple reward at the heart of Harvest Moon. Patience is a dying virtue in videogames, but it is the chief trait that Harvest Moon both asks of and cultivates in the player, making them wait for plants to sprout, friendships to grow, animals to mature and funds to accumulate. Harvest Moon’s gameplay systems bear almost no resemblance to those of any other title released at the time – Wada was adamant that it should be “a game like no other” – but there are some clues to his childhood favourite. “I got a lot of hints about game design from The Legend of Zelda,” he acknowledges. “For example, In the version of Zelda released on the Famicom Disk System, you could set fire to any tree; in the same way, you can cultivate every piece of land in your ranch. I also think that the gameplay, when you’re pulling up grass or smashing stones, was influenced by it.”
There is perhaps a nostalgia for a less urbanised Japan of the past in Harvest Moon. Its green meadows, mountain expanses, farmland and crumbling old houses are not a million miles away from the wistful environmentalism of Hayao Miyazaki films. But Wada doesn’t see appreciation of nature necessarily as a longing for the past. “The difference isn’t between now and the past; it’s between rural and urban,” he says. “In other words, it’s not that the past was good, it’s that the countryside was… The ideology that the past was better is a belief that we should all stop going forward into the future, and I don’t like that very much. Saying that the country is ‘good’ is probably the natural feeling of those who live in cities, in the same way as those who live in the country are drawn to the city. I like them both.”
Though Wada never thought his first game would be published overseas, Harvest Moon came late to the US in 1997 and to Europe the following year, becoming one of the last ever SNES releases in PAL territories, and one of the rarest. Localisation problems, largely as a result of the sheer amount of text involved in all the dialogue and random incidental moments between the farmer and various townspeople, still plague the series today, often resulting in year-long gaps between Japanese and western versions. Although most of Harvest Moon’s Japanese flavour remained intact for its overseas release, it did not go entirely uncensored – all references to alcohol were replaced with the word ‘juice’ in North America.
Subsequent games in the series have built upon and expanded the social life and agricultural options of their virtual farmers, largely based on player reactions. Ever since the first Harvest Moon, the games have shipped with a customer questionnaire in the packaging asking for feedback – a tradition that Marvelous’ current development team reputedly still upholds in Japan. In the past 14 years, though, Wada feels that the core principles of the original game haven’t changed beyond recognition. “Out of our three starting principles, it’s still a game with no fighting, and one with a real tactile nature,” he muses.
“It’s no longer a game unlike any other because we’re living in a world with FarmVille in it!” It’s perhaps proof of the strength of Harvest Moon’s concept, though, that millions went onto play a farming game. That’s quite a legacy for a simple 2D RPG released at the very tail-end of a console’s lifespan.
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