Harvest Moon: More Friends of Mineral Town

"Whoah, my farmer has boobs! Finally!"

Harvest Moon: More Friends of Mineral Town is a fun filled adventure of farming and friendship in a small country town. Now you might be saying "Wait a second...that name sounds familiar." You're right, it does. This game is basically an exact copy of Harvest Moon: Friends of Mineral Town, only from a girl's point of view and a few other changes. If only they had fixed up the Engrish, typos and other grammatical errors.

Story
You play a pretty young girl with a golden mane. Just your average city gal suffering through the boring 9-5 job, living in an apartment and basically stuck in a rut. Just when it all seems too dull you run into an ad for land out in the country and your own, beautiful farm! After day dreaming about this great opportunity to be a farmer you call up and quickly accept the offer. Sadly, once you arrive at your newly purchased utopia the mayor comes to greet you and basically tells you that you've been had. Instead of a lush, clean farm you just bought a plot of dirty land with old buildings on it. Fear not though! With a little elbow grease and love, it'll be the best farm in Mineral Town. As you try to bring your farm back from the dead, you'll also meet your friendly neighbors and the few men who you have the chance to court and marry one day. Let the country hijinks begin!

Gameplay
Pretty simple gameplay. You till the soil, plant seeds, take care of your animals, forage around the forest and beach while building relationships with everyone in town. The controls are also pretty simple once you get the hang of it. Where's the challenge? Keeping your pets fed, and happy while still interacting with your neighbors. You do, however, have Harvest Sprites to help you with farm work which makes life a lot easier. Money management and figuring out what everyone in town likes, cooking and upgrading your farm take up the majority of your time for the first two years. Downsides? Once you get married the game loses its juice. Neither your husband or child help you at all with farm work and your child really doesn't grow up. Barely anyone comes to visit you nor do they seem to notice if you don't speak to them for a while.

Graphics
Nothing different from Harvest Moon: Friends of Mineral Town. Same 2D sprites, same graphics, same background, same everything. Is this bad? Not at all. The simple, cute graphics make this game (and the boy version) very lovable and fun. I see nothing wrong with them. If you like cute, 2D anime-ish sprites then you'll like the graphics.

Sound
Once again, same stuff from Harvest Moon: Friends of Mineral Town. Personally, I'm not much into background music but I will say that this game has pretty nice music. Plus, once you connect to Harvest Moon: Another Wonderful Life you can get records to change the background music. A very nice plus to the game if you're not fond of a certain seasonal BGM or just want to change up every now and then.

Replay Factor
You can only marry one guy, shame huh? So you might want to replay to marry another one. However, the game only has two save slots and there are eight guys. So unless you want to delete old files you only get two chances to play. Is the replay factor high? It's so-so, as I said, once you get married and have your child things pretty much slow down. So, I personally wouldn't jump to replay this game right away but maybe a few months later, sure.

Scoring
Gameplay - 9
Story – 8
Graphics – 9
Sound – 8
Replay Factor – 4
Overall – 8

Closing Thoughts
So is this game worth buying or is it just a rental? Most likely people who would be interested in this game already have played Friends of Mineral Town are hardcore Harvest Moon fans anyway so will buy it no matter what. If you're not a hardcore Harvest Moon fan however, and already own Friends of Mineral Town there is much change in this game to warrant rushing out to buy it, maybe rent it or wait until it lowers in price. If you don't own Friends of Mineral Town already and are looking for a good Harvest Moon game then this one is great if you want to play as a girl and chase after men. If not, then pick up Friends of Mineral Town to play as a boy and chase after woman. Hopefully future Harvest Moon games will have the choice to be male or female built into the game in the beginning so that we can all save a little money.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 08/11/05