Harvest Moon 3D: The Lost Valley Review

I’ve been a fan of Harvest Moon since the very beginning. In 1997, a strange Super NES “farming RPG” was brought to America thanks to the localization work of Natsume, and having no idea what I’d be getting into, I immersed myself into the quirky, unusual, yet charming and addictive life of a younger lad trying his best to make his late grandfather’s farm the best it could be. There was no world to save, no evil to slay, no princess in need of rescuing—and I really loved that. Harvest Moon was a game that rewarded players who brought life to the world, not took it away.

In the 17 years since, there have been 23 mainline Harvest Moon games released in North America, excluding spin-offs like Rune Factory or non-farming projects such as Puzzle de Harvest Moon. In that time, the franchise has grown into a beast that couldn’t have been imagined in the days of its first chapter, working in deep social aspects, complex endgame objectives, and even the notion of “saving” someone or something through your skills at crop growing. While I’ve loved some chapters dearly along the way, I can’t help but feel at times that developer Marvelous is on a bit of autopilot at this point—throwing out new iterations simply because that’s what they need to do, and not because they really know what direction they want to take the empire they’ve built.

So, when it was announced earlier this year that Bokujou Monogatari—the Japanese series known as Harvest Moon in the West—would now be published by XSEED Games under the title Story of Seasons, leaving Natsume to develop their own line of farming titles to continue on the Harvest Moon name, I got a little excited. I really wasn’t sure that Natsume would be up to the task of taking on that responsibility (given their modest development efforts in recent years), but sometimes such a big shakeup is exactly what a series needs.

Well, I was right: They weren’t up to the task, at least if their first efforts—Harvest Moon 3D: The Lost Valley—are any indication. And yet, there’s also a level of promise here, which shows that, given time, they may be able to pull all of this off.

At the game’s unveiling, and in the following months, Natsume proudly proclaimed The Lost Valley to be the “first fully three-dimensional” Harvest Moon game. (A claim made about its game engine, not its support for the 3DS’ built-in features, as only the title screen is viewable in autostereoscopic 3D.) It might seem crazy to think of ideas like being able to freely turn the camera in any direction, or the world having actual height in addition to width and length, to be major gameplay features to announce in this day and age. And yet, this is the first time a Harvest Moon release has moved away from pre-set cameras angles and 2D landscapes, and it’s a jump that feels both welcome and long overdue. Even if the game’s environments are built out of blocks of dirt, rock, water, or other materials, this still feels like a world that’s far more realized and alive at times.

This change also brings the ability for players to place or remove those blocks of material, making a huge leap forward in the series’ recent trend of letting players customize their farms to better suit their personal preferences. My multi-leveled plan for crop growing made little sense logically, but it was my nonsensical design brought to life. This is Harvest Moon for the Minecraft generation, a step I not only think was a wise one, but also one that’s the best for the future of the series—and for Natsume’s attempt to stand apart from XSEED’s first Story of Seasons release.

The Lost Valley has little of the polish or potential that Mojang’s survival-builder has, however. During my discussions with members of the development staff at E3, I was told that the team had almost no familiarity with Minecraft. Well, I’ve got a piece of advice: Get familiar as quickly as you can. Transforming the land here is cumbersome, frustrating, and time-consuming, due to the low height of the world’s basic building blocks (meaning more must be used to create topographical features), the limits placed on how far up or down you can place or remove tiles, and the fact that you can neither dig straight into the side of a hill, nor can blocks be connected to other blocks if there’s nothing directly below them.

Still, this is a game about farming, and Natsume has tried to make improvements to the core of that central goal. Gameplay is heavily based on contextual design, so your next logical action can happen without needing to switch commands or pull out specific tools. For example, standing in front of a newly tilled patch of soil and hitting the A Button will always do the one thing that you’d naturally want to do: plant seeds. As soon as those seeds are sown, the A Button’s function changes to watering them. If a patch of soil has been watered, then you obviously wouldn’t want to do so again, and thus your next action would be spreading fertilizer.

It’s a simple idea that really goes a long way—and while you’ll occasionally run into times when the process being so smooth can actually be a detriment (I fertilized many a crop when I was trying to water a neighboring square of soil), it’s a sign of Natsume taking player feedback to heart when designing The Lost Valley. Other little signs of fresh thinking are scattered throughout various parts of the game, such as animals gaining traits that can boost the production or quality of their produce or crop and flower mutations that occur depending on the elevation they’re planted at—and what they’ve been planted next to.

Unfortunately, the fact that this is Natsume’s first attempt at developing a complete Harvest Moon chapter is painfully clear, as every hour you spend with The Lost Valley reveals more ways in which it seems as if the developer tried to introduce too much too soon. Tool upgrades are completely missing here—meaning that you’ll have to do everything one square at a time, a process that’s bogged down due to how long many of the game’s animations take. Harvest Sprites are available to assist you in some of your work, but they’re pretty useless until you’ve built up your relationships with them—and, even then, they aren’t around on weekends and won’t work multiple in-game days in a row. Cooking is an activity you’ll regularly take part in, but you can’t directly access any of the produce that’s stored in your refrigerator while doing so (even when it sits directly next to your kitchen unit). All of it has to be in your backpack in order to be usable—a real inconvenience, given how often you’ll hit the limit of what you can carry due to the array of seeds, minerals, tools, harvested crops, and other items you’ll be lugging around.

Surprisingly, there’s absolutely no village or town to speak of—something even the original Harvest Moon featured—meaning that most of your interactions with the game’s various NPCs will happen as they creepily mill around in front of your home on seemingly random days. With as big as the valley itself is, and with the focus on player customization, why not let me build out the land and place shops in various locations? That should be an easy idea to implement, given how The Lost Valley was designed—and it would help alleviate how lonely and empty the world feels. Sure, you can use all of that space to go crazy making a totally customized valley, but good luck doing that while also keeping up any decently sized farm (given the slowness of crop care and ground transformation, mixed in with days that pass way too quickly). Oh, and while we’re all off arguing about the lack of options for gay marriage in Nintendo’s Tomodachi Life, here, you can’t even pick the race of your farmer like you could in the last entry of the series, Harvest Moon: A New Beginning—an absolutely unforgivable omission in the year 2014, especially given Natsume’s direct connection to the Western market.

There’s plenty of other little problems that I could list if I wanted to, but really, what I’d most like to hit on as my final complaint is the point where I think Natsume made the biggest mistake. The premise of The Lost Valley is that your character comes across a valley trapped in eternal winter, with you goal being to bring the seasons back—and, with them, a return of life. In order to accomplish this, you’re given three rounds of mundane tasks to complete for the Harvest Goddess (or her associates), each of which unlocks one of the lost seasons. It’s quite likely that you won’t return each season until it’s already passed (or very close to passing), meaning that, for many, the entire first year of the game will be nothing but winter.

Now, let me reiterate that point: For the entire first year of a game based around farming, most players will experience no seasons but winter. And yet, the game expects you to farm, and farm you shall. You’ll dig out the snow to grow vegetables and flowers, none of which have any business growing, as snowdrifts dot the landscape around them. Who in the world thought this was a good idea? Why would you want players to spend the first 15-plus hours of their farming game perpetually stuck in one season—the season that makes the least sense for farming? This is a plot point that should’ve lasted for 15 minutes, not 15 hours. Had the player lifted the curse right at the beginning, it would’ve explained why the valley was barren and desolate, and why the player would be tasked with bringing it back to life through growing crops, planting flowers and trees, and shaping the land. Instead, it’s one of the longest “no, really, trust us, the game gets better once you get past the intro” intros I’ve ever seen in gaming.

Really, the entirety of The Lost Valley’s storyline should’ve been scrapped. The dev team at Natsume spread themselves thin, and the result is a game that ranges from good to mediocre in everything it does as it tries to be too much too soon. Instead of attempting so much, I wish the team would’ve concentrated on what matters most: the farming. Get all the basics right first, and make sure they’re fun. Growing crops, taking care of animals, managing your farm, cooking, fishing—polish and perfect all of those core elements, and let me take the time to really enjoy what I’m doing with each. I want to take pride in the crops that I’m raising and animals I’m keeping, not see them as time-sinks or distractions that stand in the way of getting other things done. Once you’ve got all of that down, then bring in elements such as NPC stories, quests, and other distractions. Or don’t, really. I haven’t liked how story-heavy the series was getting over the years, so I’d love to see future chapters stay away from going down that path again. (I know, though, that enough other fans disagree with me that I’ll probably never win that fight.)

I complain about so much of Harvest Moon 3D: The Lost Valley because I genuinely care about the franchise and where it’ll go in the future. Deep down, Natsume created something here that can—and hopefully will—improve with time. It’s not a bad foundation, just one that needs to be stronger before too much more is built on top of it. Take what’s here, iterate on it, make it better, more robust, flesh out its contents and concepts—don’t just throw this all away and start fresh for the next game. Do that, Natsume, and you can have something special a game or two down the line. Until then, The Lost Valley can only be what it can be: an awkward, fumbling first step, one desperately trying to find its footing.

D Poor

While Natsume seems to have some legitimately good ideas for where they want to take their spin on the Harvest Moon series, too much of what’s been put into The Lost Valley feels awkward, underdeveloped, or unnecessary. While series fans will be able to find fun in some of what it offers up, you can’t help but wish that the development team had focused on the quality of the features they implemented, not the quantity.

Harvest Moon: The Lost Valley was reviewed using review code, physical copies, or hardware provided by Natsume. Scores are graded on a scale of E (Bad) to S (Special) in homage to Japanese video game grading scales, with the understanding that an S still does not denote a "perfect" score. Scores may have been adjusted from the original source to better fit my personal scale.