8 Best Harvest Moon Games That You Should Know Update 04/2024

Best Harvest Moon Games

The Harvest Moon game series, which is now called Story of Seasons, is one of the best-selling game series on the planet. Players have to farm, make friends, and take care of the property. The first game in the series came out in 1996, and since then, a lot of other games have come out.

If you are new to the series, you have a lot of options because there have been so many games on so many different platforms. It can be hard to decide which game to try, so we put together this list of the best games in the series and ranked them to find the best of the best!

Story Of Seasons: Pioneers Of Olive Town

Pioneers Of Olive Town

Story of Seasons: Pioneers of Olive Town, which came out for the Nintendo Switch in 2021, is the second Harvest Moon game for the consoleștii.știi. It has a lot of the same gameplay elements as the previous games. It also brings back the best friends system and adds character customization and different levels of difficulty.

The game has some major frame rate and technical problems, but it still stands out thanks to its fun and easy-to-understand gameplay loop, making it arguably the best Harvest Moon game on Switch.

Harvest Moon: The Tale of Two Towns

Harvest Moon: The Tale of Two Towns came out in 2011 for the Nintendo DS. It takes place hundreds of years before the rest of the games in the series. In the game, a cooking competition has turned the towns of Bluebell and Konohana into bitter rivals, and it’s up to the player to choose which one is their hometown.

Both towns have different things to offer. Bluebell is known for its farm animals, while Konohana is known for its crops. Like the other games in the series, players have to take care of their farm, get jobs from the towns, and get to know the non-player characters. It’s fun and easy to get hooked on, but it doesn’t add much to the series, so it’s at the bottom of this list.

Harvest Moon: A New Beginning

Harvest Moon A New Beginning

Harvest Moon: A New Beginning came out in 2012 for the Nintendo 3DS. It was the last game in the Harvest Moon series before it changed its name to Story of Seasons. In the story, there is a town called Echo Village that has been abandoned. The player must bring it back to life by farming and using other methods that are common to games in the series.

Getting new people to move to the town is important, but it will take a lot of hard work to do so. With the Construction Workshop and Town Renovation Plan, you can build new and interesting places for potential residents to live. This makes the game, at the very least, unique and interesting. A New Beginning is interesting and fun to play, but the long tutorials and slow start can make it take a while to get into.

Story of Seasons

After the series stopped using the familiar Harvest Moon name in 2015, Story of Seasons was the first game to have this name. The game takes place in Oak Tree Town, a small town that wants to find farmers. The player answers an ad for the job because he or she is tired of living in the big city.

If the player does this, they will move to Oak Tree Town, where four other farmers will show them how to farm their new land. The goal of the game is to open all seven shops so that Oak Tree Town can become a place where people from all over the world come to trade. Story of Seasons is a great addition to the series. The only real problem is that it can’t be played with people from other parts of the world.

Harvest Moon: Sunshine Islands

Harvest Moon Sunshine Islands

Harvest Moon: Sunshine Islands was a 2009 video game for the Nintendo DS. The game took players away from the usual farm in a small town and put them on an island farm. The player can choose their gender, and the game is better than Island of Happiness for the DS, which also had the Sunshine Islands.

The game adds more people to marry, gives the player the job of growing the island, and lets people get married to each other. Players must worry about caring for their farm while also trying to find sun stones to unlock the other islands in the game, including islands that helped players acquire new animals and crops

Harvest Moon: Magical Melody

Harvest Moon: Magical Melody came out in 2005 for the GameCube and in 2008 for the Wii. The main goals of the game are for the player to marry one of the beautiful people in the town and bring back to life the Harvest Goddess, who has turned to stone because the people in the town don’t respect her.

The game is a little different from others in that the player has to do chores and reach milestones in order to collect musical notes. This will eventually let the player make a magical melody, which will free the Harvest Goddess from her stone prison. The game brought something new and different to the series, making it a fun and creative addition.

Harvest Moon: Animal Parade

Harvest Moon Animal Parade

Harvest Moon: Animal Parade came out in 2009 for the Wii. The characters and parts of the game are the same as in Harvest Moon: Tree of Tranquility. As the name suggests, the player can ride any of the animals that are available.

On the island of Castanet, where the story takes place, the Harvest Goddess’s pond is missing its sacred tree. Because of this, the island’s animals are leaving, and it’s up to the player to bring the Harvest King back to the island to help bring back the Goddess’ Tree and the island’s animals to their former glory. This game feels new and exciting because it has circus animals in it. It’s a great addition to the series as a whole!

Harvest Moon “Natsume Era” Games (2014+)

If I want to do this right, I need to talk about the big problem.

Like many other Japanese games, Bokujo Monogatari was always localised and released in the West under a different name: “Harvest Moon.”

In recent years, the publisher Natsume, which had been localising the series since it started, lost the rights to the Bokujo Monogatari series but kept the Harvest Moon name for its own releases.

Since then, they’ve put out a number of games with this name that are all farming simulators.

Natsume’s in-house developers don’t seem to understand what makes the original games so addicting. Even though they had some good ideas, they got rid of everything that made Harvest Moon special up to that point.

As a child, I was taught to be quiet if I didn’t have anything good to say, so I won’t include games like Harvest Moon: Skytree Village and Harvest Moon: Light of Hope in the ranking. I’m hopeful for the future of their version of the franchise, but as a fan, it’s sad to see how things are going right now.