In the Harvest Moon series, players have been raising crops and tending to adorable livestock for years. In this iteration of Harvest Moon, you receive a farm located in Leaf Valley from your recently deceased grandfather. Before you can collect his things and return home, you're confronted by three Harvest sprites and the Harvest Goddess who all urge you to stay and help them. It turns out that a capitalist group named FunLand is threatening to level the town and construct an amusement park in its place.
Even though your character has zero farming knowledge and has literally just arrived in the area, you're tasked with raising $50,000 in two years or else the community is doomed. Fortunately, coughing up the cash is only one way to save your newly inherited home; there are 16 possible pathways to put the kibosh on FunLand's park. If you successfully complete related storylines, you can help turn the town into a tourist attraction or a nature reserve.
Regardless of how you rescue the land, you'll need to work odd jobs, plant crops and raise animals in order to make money and maintain a cushy lifestyle. Fishing, mining for ores, chopping down trees for lumber, cooking noms and tending to livestock are the basic ways to make some dough in Leaf Valley.
Now, I'm aware these activities sound extremely mundane, but there's an addictive element to the Harvest Moon series that's hard to pinpoint. All of the mini-games are fairly mindless with the exception of cooking for Martha -- she requires you to figure out recipes through trial and error and then remember them the next time you come around -- but it's satisfying to find a rare metal or giant Tuna or acquire a lot of lumber from a tree.
Working is only half the battle, though. In order to get anywhere in this town, you need to make nice with your neighbors. Give them gifts from your farm and they'll be friendlier toward you. Building positive relationships with people also opens up the aforementioned side storylines to help save the town. My major annoyance with these side quests is that once they're initiated you can't manually progress them. For example, Chester the town priest instructs you to return to the church another day to help him solve a mystery. I returned over and over and over, just waiting for something to happen, but nothing did. Eventually, the second cutscene played, but it's a bit frustrating to have little control over how the story moves along.
Like other Harvest Moon games, you'll be able to marry one of the many townswomen after the FunLand threat has been eliminated. A majority of the girls are easy to woo, but two in particular present more of a challenge than the rest. Alice, the CEO of FunLand and the Harvest Goddess are two brides designed for veterans of the franchise.
Although the game is a lot of fun, it does have its fair share of problems. If you hate loading screens, beware -- this Harvest Moon is plagued by them. Expect to run for a couple of seconds, enter a loading screen, run some more, see another loading screen -- rinse and repeat. It would've been nice to have fewer interruptions to keep you engaged. Additionally, the title suffers from a tempermental selection system -- meaning that if you're trying to brush your horse you sometimes have to circle it for a while until the option pops up. Visually, the game offers a cutesy, vibrant world that any person would enjoy spending time in, but there are noticeable blue seams throughout the game, which can be distracting.
Ultimately, The Hero of Leaf Valley contains very similar elements to its predecessors, so if you've played all the previous games and are starting to grow tired of them, you won't find much new to keep your interest. If you're new to the series or still love Harvest Moon, you'll enjoy exploring Leaf Valley and building relationships with the townsfolk.
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