Ever since the great Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life I’ve been waiting for a new Harvest Moon game that’ll blow peoples minds away. The concept is easy to play with; the overall idea of the game is enough to sell it and honestly I think that the people that loved the early Harvest Moon games would love to return to the franchise. Harvest Moon for the SNES is my favorite game of all time and here’s a game that could be even better, if it ever gets made, of course.
I think that it is necessary for the developer to create an engine that runs the economy of the game. Key to a great Harvest Moon game would totally be an awesome economy system where you, as the player, had opportunities to create your own story and world. Many of the games that have been released to date had some of these functions but in a very, very cheap way.
What if they did it this way? You choose your property, anywhere in the game world. Choosing the property is the first of many choices through out the whole game that drastically changes your story. By choosing a property near the water you have a great opportunity to get your money in the fish industry. Build a factory and export your stuff to earn your money. By exporting outside your village, you do both yourself and the town a favor by getting the village’s economy up. Of course, you could also build your career in animal care, vegetables, fruits and all the other stuff that Harvest Moon comes with usually.
I also think that a redesign of some of the things in the game would be necessary. By buying property you need to complete couple of stages before you can use the property for something. Stage one: security. It’s easy, build a fence around your property, by doing this you crops will not be destroyed by wild animals and your animals will not run away. Stage two: clear the ground. This one is a classic, you need to cut down trees, hammer the shit out of stones and of course get it all free from bushes and stuff. And then of course stage three: fertilize/prepare. If you want to plant crops, then you’ll need to fertilize the ground. If you want to build stuff then you’ll need to prepare the ground. If not, your crops get messed up and the buildings will fall apart.
The whole economy system needs an overlord of course. A major for this would be a perfect man. The major own the bank, and the bank basically owns you. By buying property you could easily choose to share your earnings with the bank. So, lets say that you have a great harvest and you’d decided that the bank would have 25 % of the money that you get out of the Harvest. In this way, the economy would develop because you have suddenly a lot of stuff to export. But, if you have a crapy season, then the bank stands for 25 % for the money that is necessary for you to have to carry on. So if you are playing it bad, then you’ll drag the whole economy to the ground.
All this, combined with all the great Harvest Moon stuff would make this a fantastic game. Of course… The game engine is important though; it’s almost necessary for the developers to create a whole new style for the game. A combination between Lionheads Fable II engine and the Euphoria engine would be awesome.
All this is a dream and I don’t think that it will happen for a very long time. All this on Xbox 360 and/or PlayStation 3.
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