So, I've enjoyed Harvest Moon for a long time. I started at the SNES version and naturally worked upward from there.

Currently I'm playing the 3DS version "A New Beginning," but more on that later.

If you've never heard of Harvest Moon, it's basically about running a farm. Planting crops, tending animals, selling products, and even getting married and having a kid. You usually upgrade your tools for more efficient farming, and make friends with villagers by giving them gifts.

The first mistake most people might have is thinking it's a simulator. It's not at all. There are plenty of proper farming simulators out there, but there are no other franchises that have the style and personality of a Harvest Moon title. You could reasonably compare it to Animal Crossing without being extremely off-base. However, I've never enjoyed an Animal Crossing game in the same way I enjoy Harvest Moon. There's really no game like it.

So where does one start? What's the apex of the Harvest Moon series? I think a lot of people will agree that there are 3 major Harvest Moon titles that really defined the genre. While your favorite may be different from one of these, they tend to represent the series in the truest manner, for better or worse.

These titles are:
Friends of Mineral Town (Gameboy Advance)
Harvest Moon 64 (Nintendo 64)
Back to Nature (Playstation 1)

They have all of the major trappings such as extensive mining, interesting characters, and interactive festival events. The lesser titles of the Harvest Moon series tend to skirt on some of these basic things, and their sales numbers often proved that players want certain things out of a Harvest Moon game.

My personal favorite is Back to Nature, but I find all three of those to be fun, true versions.

I'm not going to go through each game in the series and say which ones I like and which I don't, but I will make some general statements.

The titles on the Wii, for example, seem to be very poor examples of what the series should be (Specifically Tree of Tranquility and Animal Parade). Everything is slow, clunky, and the frame rates are terrible. The character designs are also uninspired. Everybody looks like a Mii, and that is not what a Harvest Moon character should look like. After playing hours of Animal Parade and quitting several times out of frustration, I finally decided it's an extremely poor installment. I didn't make it far into Tree of Tranquility, which seemed to have a lot of the same problems.

The later titles on the DS (mainly Tale of Two Towns and Grand Bazaar) are also large departures from what a lot of people loved about the Harvest Moon series. Not many people cite them as their favorites. The earlier titles on the DS had some good points, however. Island Of Happiness, Sunshine Islands and Harvest Moon DS are all very competent versions, and I enjoyed each of them.

Many people like Magical Melody for the Gamecube and Wii. A lot of the trappings were there, but I found the controls to be extremely unforgiving.

I won't go into any more detail about the games other than the newest version I've been playing lately, which is Harvest Moon: A New Beginning.

When I first start it, I notice two things.
1) These are really good character designs. Maybe the best ever.
2) There's no one here and nothing to do!

The first month, you're thrown into a tutorial mode that, if you weren't told about it from an outside source, you would think this was all the game was. You have a few plots in which to plant (with no indication you ever be able to plant more than a few crops at a time). Also, there are literally only 3 people in town! And zero bachelors/bachelorettes to woo. There seems to be no mine either. For a month, you're left wondering if this is all there is.

Thankfully once you're at around the 25th, things start opening up, almost to a point where you think you're drowning. More people come to town, and you can build things to bring more people in. Once you build things, other places open up, and it's a sort of cascade of new content all coming at you at once. I wondered if I would have been overwhelmed if it started with everything already opened up, but I can't be sure now.

At this point, I can say it lives up to the reputation of being a good harvest moon title, and I've been considering things that could make it better, and how it's improved over past iterations.

One thing it does right is the ruck sack. For some reason, I've always felt that you should be able to upgrade your ruck sack instead of it just starting maxed out. My only regret is I've already maxed it out, so I don't get to do that anymore.

Other things I think it does right:
- You can move anything and everything. Every farming plot on your land, every building on your farm (including your house), every building/house in town, every road, everything. You can move all of it and arrange it to how you want. If there's one character in particular you really want to build a friendship with, you can put their house right next to your road into town, and you will pass them every day, making it easier than it's ever been.
- Trees/stones don't take a lot of time to chop/break. Even if you have 99 branches in your ruck sack, you can simply place them on the ground, and with one whack, turn them into 99 pieces of lumber. Full-sized trees only take two whacks with an axe (if your axe is the right level for the tree), cutting down on some of the tedium.
- The crafting system. You can make a heck of a lot of stuff. You make all of your own buildings and equipment, as well as decorations for a variety of reasons.

It could do better in these areas:
- There is a long unskippable cutscene almost every day between 10AM-10:15AM and 6PM-6:15PM if you happen to be outside. This is completely unnecessary. You will find yourself hiding indoors during these times.
- People only working 3-4 days a week. This is unacceptable. There's nothing more frustrating than having to wait until a day someone opens, and even then they're not open until 10AM.
- Not knowing how to access something. I wanted to some mining, for example. However, the mine doesn't become available until you build completely unrelated buildings in town.
- You can only mine a small amount each day. Mining is my favorite part of Harvest Moon, and it feels like they're always trying to remove or minimize it as much as possible.
- This is kind of a positive and negative, but there is a huge amount of different creatures. At some point, I think it would be okay to just have a dragonfly instead of 4 different species of dragonfly. Same goes with fish.
- You're told right away that giving people gifts is a good way to get things in return. So far, I've been giving people a lot of stuff they like, but I've only ever gotten anything from the blacksmith.
- Giving someone something they don't like makes them like you less.

A lot of these downsides go into a theory I have that a lot of these mechanics are designed to keep you playing as long as possible. They're getting better at hiding this, but I don't understand why they need you to play a single-player game for 200 hours. I think anyone would be happy with just 30 hours of really good gameplay, and it would do a lot better with what I imagine is a market that is growing older and has less time to play games.

All that said, it's a good game. It's probably the best Harvest Moon in a long time, and I recommend it.

Now, before I said there was no franchise that was like Harvest Moon. However, that was a lie. There is a franchise that is very much like Harvest Moon. In fact, it's so much like it that it would be positively litigious... if it weren't made by the same company.

That franchise, of course, is Rune Factory: A Fantasy Harvest Moon.

For a long time, I thought "Right. It's probably nothing like Harvest Moon. They're just trying to push their new RPG - trying to expand the market." But in reality, that is exactly what it is. Take your favorite Harvest Moon game, now put in weapons, monsters and dungeons. That's Rune Factory.

The series started on the DS, which I think is smart. Handhelds are still the perfect way to play Harvest Moon/Rune Factory, in my opinion.

The first Rune Factory was pretty decent. It played and felt a lot like an RPG version of Friends of Mineral Town, and was all around pretty solid.

Unfortunately Rune Factory 2 was practically broken by design. The voice acting was terrible, and you are tutorialized until you're married! It's your son who plays the real game. This sounds like it can work in theory, but it simply doesn't. Just skip this one.

Now you're up to the third installment on the DS, Rune Factory 3. This is, in my opinion, the best Rune Factory of all time. It's fast, the controls feel great, the fishing's great, the characters are all really interesting, and it's the only game I've ever played where the English voice acting is better than the Japanese. My only complaint is you can pretty much beat the whole game in one game year, and the days go by pretty quick. It's way too fun to be over so soon.

On the Wii titles, we first have Rune Factory Frontier. This game came before Rune Factory 3, and possibly as a result, didn't have the quick excitement of Rune Factory 3. It's still a great version of Rune Factory I've enjoyed more than once. It also has the first fat bachelorette. That's kind of charming really, but the artist they used didn't really know how to draw fat girls, I think.

Tides of Destiny was... confusing. I don't think people should play it looking for a proper Harvest Moon RPG experience. It almost swept under the rug the importance of farming in favor of the relationship and fighting mechanics. I managed to max out all relationships and get married with a kid and all that, but at no point did I really feel like I cared. It kept me going, but it wasn't the Rune Factory I was looking for.

On the horizon is Rune Factory 4. I'll definitely be buying it, regardless of reviews, because I need to see for myself what it is, no matter what. It's my sincere wish that it holds securely to what Rune Factory 3 did, but with a bit more content.

So, that was probably pretty rambling, but I hope I gave you some idea of the series if you weren't familiar with it. If you liked some of the ones I didn't, that's okay. I'm definitely not here to tell you your tastes are bad. There's value in only liking the black sheep of a series.

Keep on harvestin' those moons.