Gaming UX: what’s wrong with new Harvest Moon

Just recently I covered some ideas for the first Harvest Moon game to make it more engaging and interesting as a farming simulator. I was talking about plot and tool enhancements.

What I want to cover today is Harvest Moon: Lights of Hope, probably one of the worst games in the series ever developed.

It’s difficult to say what was the main goal of the developers. Whether they wanted to follow the best Harvest Moon traditions or wanted to implement something new — given that they have been experimenting with fantasy settings already.

The game looks like it was intentionally simplified digitally, but I don’t think that true fans would expect something extraordinary this time.

Despite the graphics, which I consider to be the last aspect, there are a few fundamentally wrong things that make the game rather unplayable.

Tutorial

I understand that the game would probably want to target the new audience. Those who never played Harvest Moon in their lives. However, the tutorial is rather dumbed down, extremely simplified and even offensive for most experienced players. And you cannot even skip it!

The tutorial is embedded in the storyline at the very beginning of the game, and in 5 minutes starts being really annoying.

I would say that having a tutorial is necessary, especially if the game had complex game mechanics. The ones that are difficult to figure out.

In this case, the basic concept of planting seeds and watering them has been in the game for a while. And for an experienced player this tutorial seems like attending an elementary school class on calculus all over again.

The world

It’s boring. Although it has a map that you can unlock step by step (following the story), it’s not interesting at all.

Each chapter or a part of the island brings more similar locations and duplicated sprites with no visible alteration.

I would even suggest that the locations are generated randomly, by a computer. Judging on this I can understand the following — there was an idea to introduce several characters in the timeline that would fit a storyline. It’s a nice intention, however, locations lack personalities.

Parts of the island look alike, areas are the same, and, honestly, characters are so chatty that you are hoping to escape them as soon as possible.

Repetitive Gameplay

I know that Harvest Moon is not the game where you’d expect a diversity of actions — given that farming is very repetitive.

To avoid falling into a boring, pointless and imbalanced game. It would be nice to have a certain level of tool diversity, as well as difficulty elevation the way you need to grow crops, as I pointed out before.

Unfortunately, in Harvest Moon: Lights of Hope farming itself is not only beneficial, but also useless. For example, instead of farming we can do mining. But it’s not interesting. You just do the same mining, over and over again, but the locations just become bigger. No need to say about farming features — they have the same game mechanics as the first game released in 1996.

Storytelling

It’s awful to admit but storytelling is tragically impaired in this game. And it’s not what you would expect — a lack of story, nice characters or interesting twists.

Just the opposite. You are so much bombarded with a story and endless cut scenes where you just talk and talk without actually playing. But knowing how the world also lacks diversity and is cut on gameplay, it’s really difficult to say what’s worse.

The first 30 minutes of the game is just a endless conversation with rather boring characters and unfolding events that don’t bother you one bit.

Overall Impressions

It’s important to highlight that the game was released on PC, and when you look at the gameplay and graphics in general, the overall picture is rather disappointing.

It feels like an underdeveloped, raw mobile game prototype, which needs work in terms of storytelling, tools, and even gameplay!

I’m sure that the intentions of game developers were the best ones. They wanted to revive the series and attract more players. Who are used to mobile applications rather than complicated games.

However, this approach is flawed. In this case, it would be smart to just introduce the game to newcomers, and release a separate Harvest Moon game on mobile, for example.

This way, the graphics, the interface, and even tutorials wouldn't be that offensive for advanced, more mature players, who are used to a different kind of Harvest Moon games.

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Have thoughts, ideas, opinions on games and game ux? Feel free to tag me on Twitter @OksanaIvanovaPM, and I’ll be glad to discuss it with you.