Harvest Moon: Another Wonderful Life [GC]

The Harvest Moon series attracts a very specific type of gamer. Like SimCity and the Sims, Harvest Moon takes a bunch of everyday (or seemingly mundane) chores and whips them into a compelling game experience. In Harvest Moon, the objective is to raise a family and run a farm. Both objectives require you to perform a string of tasks, ranging from milking cows and feeding chickens to playing with your kids. Obviously, this kind of thing doesn't appeal to everyone.

The release of Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life, which shipped last year for the Nintendo GameCube, didn't change the formula. To those who loved the series, A Wonder Life remained quirky and undeniably charming. That's the way it has always been in the Harvest Moon universe. The recent release of Harvest Moon: Another Wonderful Life, which casts the protagonist as a young girl instead of a boy, follows the same formula. Only this time, there are even fewer changes.

If you've played A Wonder Life, then Another Wonderful Life simply doesn't hold much appeal. Technically, the two games are virtually identical, with little to no differences in gameplay, sound or visuals. Yes, you do play as a girl, but the effects on gameplay are minimal at best. Running the farm and raising a family still form the bulk of the game, with all the chores from A Wonderful Life remaining largely unchanged. Balancing finances, animals, plants and kids remains the key to success. As such, if you liked Harvest Moon and you haven't played the first GameCube title, then Another Wonderful Life serves up a mean dish of, well, farm life.

The game starts with your arrival in Forget-Me-Not-Valley. Your father has recently passed away and you want to trade city life for something a little more laid back. The first thing you do is tour your new farm. Your guide on the tour, a crabby farm hand by the name of Takakura, gives you the skinny on just about everything, from the local townsfolk to running the farm to purchasing animals from local merchants. After the not-so-brief introduction, Takakura leaves you alone to fend for yourself. Life in Another Wonderful Life splits between a number of chapters, each with its own set of requirements. The first chapter ends when you get married to a bloke from town, for example. Having said that, you can spend 100 hours on the first chapter if all you want to do is milk cows.

The biggest difference between games, apart from being a girl, is finding a husband. You can court three different guys, all of who behave differently and require a different approach. First, there's Rock, who represents the "cool" and slightly immature member of the bunch. Then there's Gustafa, the guitar-toting hippie and Marlin, a brooding man who's just misunderstood. Choosing which to seduce and marry is a matter of taste, since it won't matter all that much. Each guy will help you pop out a child equally well, but you'll need to cook the right foods and give the right gifts to score the guy you want.

Before getting hitched, it's best to learn how to farm. Like previous Harvest Moon games, you receive an initial batch of seeds and equipment, plus a single cow. Success in Harvest Moon depends largely on how well you manage your first cow, as well as your first batch of seeds. Since this is essentially the same game as A Wonderful Life, performing tasks around the farm feels just as fun as before. Planting seeds and watering plants is just as strangely addicting as before, as is taking care of and milking cows.

Of course, there's a lot more to do than raise chickens, milk cows and sow plants. You can also purchase sheep to sell their wool. Raising sheep brings its own set of complications, however. If you want the best wool, you need to bathe the sheep. Plus, you can't sell wool nearly as fast as you can sell milk, but sheep also require less of your attention. It's a decent trade-off. Furthermore, the more animals you have on the farm, the harder it becomes to feed them, wash them, take them outside when weather permits and also sticking them in the barn when it's rainy. Beyond this, you still need to cuddle them and talk to them to make sure they're happy. And as everyone knows, happy cows produce excellent milk.

Fishing and cooking represent major pastimes in the game as well. After purchasing a fishing rod from Van, a roaming merchant, you can set off fishing to make dishes or to sell on the market. Like most aspects of the game, fishing can be as simple or as complex as you want. You can fish only once in the game if you want, for example, or spend hours at a time searching for one specific class of fish. The same goes for cooking dishes. You can simply cook with whatever ingredients you have or you can spend whole days searching for that single, elusive ingredient.

Just as in real life, you'll find there isn't enough time in the day to do everything you want to do. In addition to raising livestock and tending to plants for cash, Forgot-Me-Not-Valley features a cast of oddball characters and locations to explore. You can hunt for treasure at Carter's Dig, buy drinks at Blue Bar and chat it up with the over 25 denizens spread across the valley.

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