Harvest Moon GB

"Bad port of a good game"

Harvest Moon came out for the SNES and was quite a good game. So Natsume decided to port it to Game Boy. Too bad they did it so poorly.

Graphics 8/10
The graphics are quite good and look like a B&W version of the SNES graphics. But they don't look like much of the SNES graphics (that I'll get into later.) But the SNES graphics that they do look like are pretty good.

Sound 6/10
I can't even remember any of the music, which should tell you how good it is. Not very catchy. The sound effects are pretty good and realistic for the Game Boy, however. And the music isn't really horrible, just unmemorable. So it was OK.

Control 4/10
The control in this game is bad. Harvest Moon just doesn't feel right playing it on the Game Boy. The N64 only had 4 buttons too, but it didn't feel unnatural like the control setup on here. Not very intuitive, and not very useful.

Gameplay 1/10
Okay, now here's where the game turns out to be really bad. The only things that you do in this game are grow crops and raise cows chickens. There's no Mountain in this game, and the town comes up as a menu where you can entire and buy things. You can't explore anywhere, except for the super-hyper-foxtrot-omega-papaya-incredibly-astoundingly boring worthless farm you have to take care of. Since your grandad who was bad at it just kicked the bucket, bought the farm, dropped dead as a doornail. There's obviously no way to get married since you can't go to the town. There's no way to take on odd jobs like in HM 64. And the festivals simply amount to talking to a few people and going, ''Gee, that was FUN!'' Speaking of..

Fun 1/10
I can't have fun at a game with bad gameplay. Unless it's exceptional at graphics and sound, and this isn't. So it wasn't much fun.

Replay 1/10 Who wants to go through boredom again? Not me. Boring games with no variation aren't worth it. Come on Natsume, you can do a lot better than this. I know you can Natsume, I have played this on the SNEs and N64

Story ?/?
Not much of a story.

Overall, if you can buy this for 2$ or rent it and you haven't played it before, go ahead. It'll help you learn the Harvest Moon basics. But don't expect much. Look for HM SNES or HM 64 instead.

Reviewer's Score: 2/10, Originally Posted: 07/29/01, Updated 07/29/01