Harvest Moon Magical Melody - first impressions

Hello, everyone!

I've decided to work on expressing my thoughts and my opinions more by writing on the game Harvest Moon: Magical Melody as part of the Bokujou Monogatari Club monthly event.

Harvest Moon: Magic Melody was released in 2005 for the GameCube and is one of the many, many games in the Bokujou Monogatari / Harvest Moon / Story of Seasons series of game.

In this game, the Harvest Goddess turned herself to stone in despair of humanity's lack of heart, and one of your objectives is to find enough music notes to bring her back to life. You can obtain music notes by doing things in the game, a little like achievements nowadays.

Another of your objective is to earn a lot of money and outdo your farming rival. You can get married too! Even to your rival, which switches gender depending on whether you choose to play as a boy or a girl. This isn't the first Harvest Moon game in which you can play as a girl, but we're still far from being able to date anyone we want. (I think we actually have Stardew Valley, which released in 2016, to thank for same-gender relationships in farming games.)

There are three reasons why I'm suddenly interested in playing this game and sharing about it:

• Despite being interested in farming games so much that I want to make my own, I have actually played very little of the Story of Seasons series. I have a very strong intellectual curiosity towards those games that shaped the genre I like so much! Specifically, this game has several mechanics around buying lands, competing with a rival and unlocking NPCs & shops through various "secret" ways that I'm interested in experiencing through myself.
• As I mentioned, this play-along is organized by the Bokujou Monogatari Book Club (Bokumono Club for short) which is a fan community centered on the Story of Seasons games and the archival / preservation of older materials concerning the series. There is something charming and a little touching about their work, especially since I am pretty sure it's the work of one (1) very motivated person. I hope I can be supporting their effort in that way.
• As I've mentioned as well, I really struggle with expressing myself publicly. Even on my very blog. I never post because I start thinking of something to write, then I go "ah... but nobody cares..." and don't even start typing. I want to change this! It will be easier if I have the rest of the Bokumono Club to interact with (three or four whole people!!!) and, well. Maybe I will be surprised to discover some of you are Bokumono fans too!

I was actually hoping to play more, like one in-game year through the month, so around one in-game season per week, but I have barely managed three weeks by now, and I am OK with it.

My first impressions were pretty much, "overwhelmed"! There is a LOT to do in this game, and it doesn't hold your hand through any sort of tutorial as modern games do. I don't mind that much, or rather, I've been playing enough farming games and this one follows enough conventions of the genre that I was fine, but I still felt very "wuh. what meow?" at the start.

Now that I am a bit more steady on my virtual feet, I'm really enjoying it. The game has mechanics I haven't seen in any of the contemporary games of the genre, and so it's very interesting to wonder why and why not? Although I must assume that most modern games are based on Stardew Valley, which itself took inspiration from a specific iteration of Harvest Moon before becoming its own thing.

(If you're interested in the subject, to celebrate the ten year anniversary of the game, the developer recently put out a video showcasing some older builds of the game. I highly encourage you to watch it.)

The first such mechanic that comes to mind is the land system. In Magical Melody, you get to choose your starter farm, and then you can acquire more land as you go. Your starter farm matters because it decides who your closest neighbours are going to be, how much space is available to you right at the start of the game, and the quality of the soil you are growing your crops on.

The space matters because you need it for crops and ranching (chickens need a coop, other animals need a barn, etc) but you will also want to upgrade your house at least twice if you want to get married. The quality of soil (low, normal and high quality) influences how fast your crops grow, for how much they sell, and how happy they make the people you gift them to.

Pretty much the whole game map is purchasable, which is so funny to me:

The blue areas are the starter farms you can choose one of, the yellow areas are where people either already live or will set up, and the green areas are all the places you can buy.

You might notice little hearts on the map next to the address-- that's the number of hearts (friendship level) you need to be at with the mayor in order to be able to purchase the land. I just. Yes. You need to butter up to the mayor in order to buy off the village. You can't make that up.

But the mechanic is interesting because it brings in another element of strategy and planning (OK, so I will start in that plot, then move my house to another plot and keep the first one for crops, etc). I like it. I'm not sure what I would do with all that land given that my stamina barely allows me to water all my crops without eating raw honey or berries as if my life depended on it, but. I like the idea.

The game also tells you that NPCs will snatch the lands in front of your nose if you're too slow to get to them, but according to the guides that's purely flavor text and not something that happens in the game at all. That's fortunate, because otherwise I would probably not be as interested ._.

Another mechanic that I find interesting is the unlockable system, where, depending on what you ship and how much of it, this or that people will come and join your community. For example, I shipped one (1) clay and immediately the grandpa-est of grandpa's moved in:

My issue with the system is that if you don't ship the same sort of things regularly, those people leave! And I couldn't find any information of how much of what I need to ship with what regularity to get them to stay, which! is! bothering me! and makes me feel a little pressured to adapt my playstyle, even though there are ways/guides to bring people back. I wonder if that's why we don't find that feature anywhere else, because it corrals players into a specific playstyle? And a lot of the fun of these games is playing how you want to, or you can do "runs" like "this time I'm gonna focus extra on mining/ranching/fishing/etc and marry this NPC who loves gifts from that mechanic".

Talking about gifts and playstyles, something else I have noticed is that, while I'm usually a very happy hoarder in those games... I can't do that in Magical Melody. At all. There is simply VERY little storage space. My inventory has ten slots (with another five I can unlock later on), I have access to a small fridge, a small tools & seeds chest, and a small set of shelves, and nothing stacks. Well, my seed bags stack, but my crops don't. So I can't stock up on this or that. All my gifts have to be seasonal, and I have been selling so much of my production. That would feel very unusual and wrong, but it's actually not that bad in the context of the game. I'm a bit annoyed at having to choose what food (stamina item) to keep, but it makes up for having lots of money in the game early on.

In that way, I find Magical Melody to be much easier than I feared. The only other older Bokumono game I played is the original Harvest Moon on the SNES and that one is just brutal. You have to time everything and follow a guide to the letter if you don't want to end up with, well, a bad ending in this one. It's a very, very different experience.

Magical Melody feels easier so far. As I mentioned, a lot of the modern conventions are already there. I "naturally" focused for crops that re-grow and didn't hesitate to restart a few in-game days, which really helped me make money and progress smoothly. And there is, as far as I can tell, zero incentives to do things faster or before this or that deadline. I can really go at my own pace. There is friendship decay, but according to people online it's a rather slow one, and so far I manage to talk to almost everyone every day on account of my stamina running low as soon as I am done watering my crops. (One of the things I want to start looking into is cooking so that I have more stamina and can really start hitting the mines.)

Oh, and I really appreciate being able to save whenever. I could technically use my emulator for that but I really appreciate that it's in the game. Well, I can't save wherever, I have to go back home to my diary, but that's already nice. Some modern games don't have that!

... Mmh, what else?

I wish bringing notes to the Goddess would better tie in with the overall gameplay and be what unlocks things. Although with that many notes and that many different ways to obtain them, it sounds really difficult to balance out what comes when from a game design perspective. It also feels like, well, if you want to gather all the notes (or at least the 50 notes you need to wake up the Goddess), you kind of have to do every single thing the game has to offer, and do a lot of it too. When I was researching the game, I came across a video titled "doing everything in Magical Melody is GRUELING!" and I fear they might be right. Oh well. We will see where we're at at the end of March, and whether I want to keep playing then. I just might, to be honest! The game is incredibly charming, for all that it lacks the modern convenience and amenities.

When I was doing my research, I also came across a guide on crops that said something along the lines of, "if you're a veteran HMer who never forgets to water your crops..." and like, is this something people struggled with back then?? I always water my crops no matter what. I often forget to put the animals back in the barn until it's the last minute, but I never forget the crops. Anyway, this is also a reminder that this is a game for children, so that's why it might feel easier; especially coming from modern titles which are more geared towards the "cozy gaming" adult crowd.

OK, I think those are my thoughts for meow. Thank you for reading! If anyone has any question, input, feedback, etc, please let me know! Thank you!