I was hesitant to revisit Harvest Moon 64 after playing and reviewing the original Harvest Moon last year. Harvest Moon had been a mostly new experience for me, but I spent dozens of hours playing Harvest Moon 64 as a kid. Thankfully, Harvest Moon 64 has aged much better than its predecessor, and I have ended my replay with both a reignited love for the game and the realization that my childhood self had only scratched the surface of what the game has to offer.
Harvest Moon 64 shares a similar setup with the original game and many others in the genre. The game begins as you attend your grandfather’s funeral. Afterward, you decide to move into your grandfather’s farm where you spent your vacations as a child. The farm is in disrepair, and you have just over two years to clean it up, start a family, and prove to your father that you have what it takes to operate the farm and live on your own.
When you begin your first day on the farm, you have only a sickle, a hoe, a hammer, an axe, and a cute dog. As the seasons progress, you clean up the farm, plant crops, purchase animals, remodel your house, and spend time getting to know the local townsfolk — especially the ladies.
Moving past the basics, Harvest Moon 64 boasts several notable improvements over the original. The most obvious is the upgraded graphics. The graphics are 3D with a mostly fixed camera and 2D elements. The whole game is colorful and cute. The character designs are distinct and memorable, and each one also has a diverse set of character portraits to show different emotions during dialogue. Every animal will have you saying “aww” the moment you first encounter them.
The camera uses a fixed isometric angle inside buildings and exploring anywhere outside of your farm. While you are on the farm, you have the freedom to rotate the camera around at fixed points that let you see in between and behind the various buildings on your farm. The fixed isometric camera is generally fine while exploring and speaking to townsfolk, but it can make the actual farm work a bit error-prone. I was glad to have the option to rotate the camera to a more traditional top-down angle while completing my daily farm work.
The interface is another major improvement that more closely resembles modern entries in the farming sim genre. Your backpack (inventory) can hold eight different tools (which includes seeds) and eight items (mostly crops, milk, flowers, etc.) at a time, and you begin the game with storage for many more tools and seeds in your house. Upgrades are available that add more storage in your house for food and other items. I never felt like I did not have enough space.
The only problem with the inventory management is the inability to quickly swap between tools or to cycle through items. Equipping a tool or holding food in your hand always requires opening the menu and waiting a few seconds for it to close. It’s a minor inconvenience, but you will notice it. Swapping items is a quality-of-life feature standard in later farming sims that could have been implemented in Harvest Moon 64 if the Nintendo 64 did not have such an unorthodox controller layout that kept the d-pad out of reach.
I’ll sum up the remaining improvements by saying the game has enough content to always keep you busy. I was determined to complete as much as possible before the credits rolled and relied on guides to make sure I did not miss anything exciting or important, but I still learned new tricks and activated unexpected events until my very last day. Without following guides, Harvest Moon 64 has enough material to keep you interested for at least a few playthroughs.
As you play through nine seasons, you can hunt down ten “Power Nuts” that increase the amount of stamina you have each day. Some of these are easy to find accidentally, but others require winning mini-game competitions during the town festivals. Still others require becoming friends with specific characters. I collected all ten and received the last one just half a season before the game ended.
Taking the time to speak to and learn about the different characters is rewarding in multiple ways. Learning what each character likes increases their affection toward you and changes their dialogue. Giving the right gifts to the right characters could reward you with recipes (which unfortunately are just for show; there is no cooking) proving that you are truly friends. Your close friends may stop by the farm while you’re working to have a chat, bring you a gift, or ask you to go out for a drink to celebrate an event. It’s not a sophisticated system by today’s standards, but it keeps every day interesting. I never knew who might be at the door when I first walked out each morning. It could be a local child excited about the new cow I just bought, a local bachelor might be inviting me to his wedding, or some tourists may have stopped by to make out in my field of flowers.
Becoming friends with the townsfolk is confounded by the lack of tracking for your friendship levels and the mixed bag of dialogue. The game is full of obvious spelling and grammar errors, but they tend to be more funny than bad. At times, the dialogue becomes very repetitive, and some characters seem to have very little to say. Other times, you may do a double-take and ask yourself, “Did they really just say that?” This also is humorous more often than not, but it’s still weird to hear a child say, unprompted, that he can’t depend on God because God is too busy or for your wife to greet you in the morning with a biology lesson about how your unborn child is taking nutrients from her body. When you get past the errors and silliness, Harvest Moon 64 has some interesting world building, characters with depth, and a chance to learn clues from some characters that help you earn the affection of others.
Ten characters are more fully realized than the others. Five of them are the bachelorettes available to marry, and the other five are your rivals — the other local bachelors who will marry the bachelorettes if you don’t.
Speaking to and giving gifts to each of the women increases their affection with you, and these are the only characters with a visible affection icon (a colored heart). Increasing your affection with them enables new dialogue and cutscenes. Each bachelorette also has a special story event, and you aren’t likely to see more than one. The bachelorettes also have some events with each other or with their families. In typical farming sim fashion, you can marry one of the local ladies and start a family after you increase their affection enough and build a house big enough.
If you choose to become friends with the other bachelors, then you will learn a lot more about each of them, activate more hidden cutscenes, and attend four additional weddings.
I came to Harvest Moon 64 for the farming, but I was most surprised by the story. It’s not a unique or very special story, but there was much more to it than I realized, and it kept the game interesting between all my daily chores.
The core farming and animal-raising features all work as expected. I truly enjoyed building a stable full of cows, sheep, and chickens and filling my fields with grass and vegetables. The most expensive upgrade to your farm is a greenhouse that allows crops to grow year-round, and I really appreciate its inclusion. Growing crops is typically my favorite part of farming sims and the ability to ignore the different seasons and grow whatever I wanted kept it interesting for me.
Watering crops and feeding animals daily can always become tedious, and I definitely became lazier with it near the end of the game when I no longer needed extra money. Instead, I spent more of each relatively short day visiting with the townsfolk. My play style evolved as time passed. Early on, I focused on growing crops to earn money, then transitioned to raising animals before finally focusing my efforts on making friends. It was a satisfying way to experience most of what Harvest Moon 64 offers.
I’m still slightly shocked at my experience. I had hoped that Harvest Moon 64 would be “good enough.” I didn’t want to be disappointed. But I’m stepping away excited to replay the game again before too long; I’m definitely not waiting another twenty years to replay it again. I can confidently say that Harvest Moon 64 is when the series came alive and truly laid the foundations for the farming sims we enjoy today. This is a classic that deserves your admiration and your time.
