The series was called Harvest Moon from 1996 to 2013 before rebranding to its new name, and it had many titles from the first Harvest Moon for SNES to More Friends of Mineral Town for the GameBoy Advance. These titles introduced many gamers to their first farming simulator in which they take care of farm animals, grow crops, befriend the local villagers, and eventually get married and have a kid. However, one title stood above the rest and still does in terms of farming simulator stories, and that is the one where the main character dies in the end: Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life.
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Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life And It’s Ending
Outside of A Wonderful Life and its female-protagonist remake, Another Wonderful Life, farming games have tended to skirt around the concept of human death, aging, and the march of time. This is interesting, considering many farming games include and have their mechanics built around the passing of seasons, and years upon years going by. However, in Stardew Valley and other Harvest Moon games, the characters never age and do not go through much change. The village does not change through the years, but through the actions of the player, and those changes tend to be environmental instead of personal.
A Wonderful Life was not part of this repetitive cycle, and is actually divided into six chapters. Every chapter has a length of one to three years, and the villagers progressively age while some even die off. Throughout the chapters, Harvest Moon players gets married, has a baby, and the baby grows slowly ages into a teenager and then an adult. In the last chapter, the protagonist has a peaceful death and the game ends. However, fans could still play in the Heaven content, where all is the same but the characters are all at their youngest.
What Made A Wonderful Life The Best
Time affected every villager in Forget-Me-Not-Valley, and not just physically. The player got to see kids grow up, such as Lumina, who ages from a 14-year-old to a 22-year-old throughout the game. A lot of loving details went into how characters changed, and Lumina’s piano playing was a big example. In her youngest years, the player can hear her practicing piano and she constantly stops and starts again as she recovers from mistakes. As an adult, her piano playing becomes graceful with no stops.
On top of seeing kids grow, the player also saw villagers die off. Nina is an old woman who dies after the very first chapter, and her grave can be visited by the player and is constantly visited by her still-living husband. If players befriend her husband, they unlock a mini-game in cleaning her gravestone and her ghost appears to thank the player. With her death being plain to see in the beginning chapters of the game, A Wonderful Life makes it clear that every year should not be taken for granted and that players should enjoy their fellow villagers to the fullest.
These details are what made Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life a precious title in comparison to all others. Simulators often try to give the audience all that they want for as long as they want, and have no plans to pull the plug. A Wonderful Life was ahead of its time, challenging this repetitive simulator formula. Unfortunately, it was a one-time wonder, with all future titles adopting the timeless repetitive years.
A Wonderful Life is a simulator that brought some honesty to its players, showing that death is a part of life. This is especially significant in farming when crops and animals die all the time and the seasons are an echo of life, death, and rebirth over and over again. It is also an example of death making the journey more precious, as players can appreciate a single year, knowing that another year like it will not come.
Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life and Another Wonderful Life are available to play for GameCube and PS2.
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