I fucking love harvest moon. I have beaten Harvest Moon Back to Nature once per year for the past 13 years. I can't actually put into words the reason for my deep love of harvest moon. I don't know why I like it, but damn do I. It's an utterly fantastic game in my eyes. And no it's nothing like farmville.

I haven't played one, but I'm curious - which would you recommend to start (I have a 3ds, so I can play that or ds games)

For me, Harvest Moon has the same effect as Mario Kart; the first one I played was the best and in this case it would be the SNES version. I just can't get into any other versions of it at all. But I fucking LOVE Harvest Moon on the SNES.

@miyuki: I actually would not suggest any of the ds ones, but any of the rune factory games are fine.

If you have a psp or a ps3 you can download the one harvest moon game for 6 dollars and that's the best one.

@dekkadekkadekka: I agree the snes was fantastic.

They're pretty fun. I remember wasting tons of hours on the first Gamecube one.

I like Harvest Moon and the concept of Harvest Moon. However its really hard to go back to a normal harvest moon game after playing Rune Factory 3.

Bought the recent one on 3DS subtitled "A New Beginning" which is so fucking slow to start. Played the shit out of Grand Bazaar on DS though.

I did buy Harvest Moon: Hero of Leaf Valley for my Vita, but I really haven't spent enough time with it to be sure if I like it or not. I was always super intrigued by the Game Boy (color?) game, but never got it.

Played a shitload of the gba one. Those games are all right. Someone should make an indy PC game on the same concept

It has "Moon" in the title. Therefore, I'm surprised that I haven't played it, yet.

I'd recommend buying the GBA version off eShop. It's the cheapest, in case the series doesn't fit your tastes. It's the closest to the SNES original (which I've enjoyed the most) but with some nice tweaks/improvements to its systems. It's also straight up farming and animal raising. Later games just add on to this core gameplay loop.

It's a game about chores, but there's a lot of satisfaction in seeing your farm come together for comparatively little work, and no manual labour.

@video_game_king: and you call yourself a videogame king.

I played the first one on SNES. I don't remember finishing it. Can you finish it? I haven't really been interested since.

64 is the greatest game of all time

I have no opinion about Harvest Moon! D:

I find Harvest Moon conceptually fascinating, but I've never really been able to get into the games. Not really sure why.

Have I got news for you!

Harvest moon is pretty rad but, especially compared to rune factory, the series has kinda stagnated. The obsession with handheld doesn't help. If they take lessons learned from RF (and I know they've started to) and then apply it to a big Wii-U game I'd be back onboard.

EDIT: Oh, as a side note for any interested in their first harvest-moonish game, Rune Factory 3 for the DS was easily the best title in either series in a long while. There's a bad habit in HM to take one step forward, one step back, improving and adding something cool each game while somehow managing to desperately fuck up something old at the same time. I can't speak for the recent 3ds game, but I know RF3 avoids this pretty handily and is just all-around good.

I really, really liked that GBA version and played the crap out of it. None of the other versions I've tried since then have felt quite right, so I sadly haven't been able to get back into it.

Well, that could be fun. We'll see if they can capture what made Harvest Moon so special.

I thought that SNES, HM64, and BtN were all really fun games. After that I kind of fell off of the series. I played the first PS2 game and didn't play past the first season just because I wasn't a fan of the changes they made. Then I got A Wonderful Life for Gamecube without really knowing what it was and just off of liking the old games, and hated how drastically they changed the structure of the game.

Maybe going back and trying it now I might like it more, but going from the basically timeless progression of SNES, 64, and BtN to the rapid and dramatic progression of time in AWL wasn't very fun. Mainly I didn't like how short seasons were, it felt like you didn't have time to really accomplish anything and I felt very rushed.

At some point I got Friends of Mineral Town which was basically a remake of BtN and that was pretty alright because that was always my favorite of the three that I liked. That it went from an isometric perspective in BtN to a top down perspective in FoMT was actually a really nice change, though it was a shame that some of the more fun holidays were taken out. The endless mine was kind of poorly implemented I thought as well. Though that you could just give the Harvest Sprites flour to make them love you and do farm work for you was great because then you could use your entire field and never miss watering or harvesting anything.

Then I got HM:DS and 2 different games in a row I triggered some bug that basically gave me infinite money which really killed any desire to farm. I also figured out how to game the harvest sprite casino so I had unlimited resources. Blegh.

I most recently bought Animal Parade or Paradise or whatever used, again without really knowing anything about it just going off nostalgia for the old games, and holy shit the frame rate. Never even played past the first day.

Harvest Moon is a series that I'll always have a fond memory of, but it's something that I just can't go back to anymore.

I played the crap out of the SNES one. Didn't that come out after the N64 already hit shelves? I think that was the only reason I kept my SNES plugged in. Good times.

Haven't tried any since then, unfortunately.

I've played a wide variety of Harvest Moon games but I really liked the SNES/N64 HM games. I'm not even sure why I liked them so much but they just seem to hit my sweet spot for a farming simulator. Friends of mineral town on the GBA was the only other one that managed to keep my interest like the SNES game.

My response was gonna be "I fucking love harvest moon" but you already said that

I wanted to love Harvest Moon but I couldn't quite wholeheartedly. Note that I've only played A Wonderful Life on the GameCube. I could not stand watering every individual square of my crops. Could not stand it. I gave up on that and invested fully in dairy for the rest of the game. I enjoyed so much about that game but that one repetitive task was surprisingly frustrating for me. Unless there's some kind of irrigation upgrade in other games I don't know if I could stick with it. I've been hesitant to try another HM game (or a Rune Factory game) since then. Which HM/RF games are everyone's favorites?