Harvest Moon 3D: The Lost Valley

Genre: Management Simulation / RPG

Players: 1

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Review:

Harvest Moon 3D: The Lost Valley, released on Nintendo 3DS in 2014, is a Management Simulation with RPG elements much as with the rest of the Harvest Moon franchise. However, this game marks a major departure from the rest of the series in numerous ways. Firstly, this is the first mainline Harvest Moon title not developed by marvelous after their split from publisher Natsume. Secondly, this game mixes the series’ usual Farming RPG gameplay with elements of Minecraft.

The first sign of this is in the game’s boxy 3D visuals, much in the same style as Minecraft, although here they’re joined by chibi-style 3D characters. There’s a lot of detail pop-in here, which seems odd given that there’s not all that much detail to begin with. While the visuals here may or may not appeal to you, the soundtrack is quite good, with some catchy, chill synthesized tunes playing in the background.

The big new addition to the Harvest Moon franchise here is the ability to raise or lower terrain as you see fit. While you cannot create caves or structures using the Minecraft-esque land deformation, you still have a wonderful amount of control to alter the environment to your liking, and if everything else in the game checked out, this could make for a wonderful expansion of the genre.

There are issues, however. Firstly, traversal and lining up to raise or lower the land is fiddly, with players prevented from dropping their character more than a small amount of elevation at any given time. This would seem to make it unlikely that you’ll want to make the terrain anything other than perfectly flat, because having variation in the height of the terrain just makes traversal more awkward.

Then there’s the other stuff that’s missing here. Namely, this Harvest Moon game has no actual town to visit, and no other significant area beyond the map that you’re farming in. What’s more, until you get to a certain point in the game’s story, that map will be pretty monotonous, featuring only one biome with one season – Winter.

Because of this, what could have been a glorious expansion of the scope of the Harvest Moon series instead becomes an interesting experiment that’s unfortunately far too limited to truly capitalize on the idea. Harvest Moon 3D: The Lost Valley still has some good ideas going for it, but those ideas needed more work, more content, and more refinement to truly make this the great game it should have been, instead of the moderately decent game we got.

tl;dr – Harvest Moon 3D: The Lost Valley is a “Farming RPG” that combines the series’ main elements with terrain-changing gameplay from Minecraft. It’s a great idea, but it’s far too limited here, with numerous issues as well as series mainstays that have been cut from the game. It’s still a game worth trying out, but it definitely feels like it’s not living up to its full potential.

Grade: C+

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