For Everything There is a Season: In Praise of Farming Simulation Games

I was skeptical of Stardew Valley, in the same way that (I imagine) the Celts must have felt when some long-suffering missionary showed up and told them they could keep their evergreen tree and their solstice celebration, they just had to call it Christmas. At first glance, it looked like a Harvest Moon knockoff, and, as someone who grew up with Harvest Moon, I feel incredibly protective of the franchise, even though it might not deserve it anymore.

The appeal of some video game genres is easier to explain than others. Take first-person shooters, for example. Everyone, or almost everyone, can enjoy shooting virtual guns. There’s a very simple, almost bodily pleasure to mowing down faceless hordes of evil. In a world that, increasingly, requires us to squelch that natural and endlessly problematic desire to create in-groups and out-groups, a game that gives us homicidal alien invaders or Nazi zombies, monsters whose monstrousness is undeniable, is a welcome return to a more primordial perspective.

Other genres seem to defy explanation. How, for example, do I describe the appeal of the farming simulator, whose name, I fear, evokes Farmville, that cancerous social media phenomenon that still serves as the epitome of the worst kind of casual game, right up there with Candy Crush. Even the CEO of Natsume, the company who makes Harvest Moon, was unsure of his games market. In an interview with Polygon, Yasuhiro Maekawa said that other Japanese developers urged him not to bring such a “boring game” to America. “But I said to myself, America is a huge farming country, so there might be potential to grow. And at the same time, for some reason, my instinct told me it might be a good idea.”

For some games in this genre, like the very functionally-named Farming Simulator, farming might be the main focus. The FS-UK (Farm Simulator UK, of course) site polled users on their reasons for playing this game, which is literally exactly what it sounds like — a game that allows users to drive massive virtual farming machinery to produce crops. The most frequent answers were “I’m a farmer, but it’s fun to play with friends on my days off” (33.7%) and “I’m not a farmer, but it’s fun to pretend” (35.6%).

I am not a farmer, and I don’t really enjoy pretending to be, which is probably why I do not feel drawn to Farming Simulator 2015. As a kid, I spent my formative years playing Harvest Moon 64 in the basement, as far from the outdoors as humanly possible, so, for me, it’s clear there’s something else at stake. Harvest Moon, while it falls under the same category of “farming simulator” as Farming Simulator, is also a role playing game with great narrative depth and near-endless replay value. The original Harvest Moon for SNES, along with its many descendants (when you add up the series and its spinoffs, it comes to about 30 games), follows a relatively predictable pattern: you are charged with revitalizing a run-down farm and building relationships with the people in a nearby village. Though certain games will add their own twist to the way your farm works, they all give you the option to grow crops and raise animals through years comprised of four seasons. You befriend the villagers by talking with them, participating in festivals with them, learning their likes and dislikes, and giving them gifts; most gifts are things that you harvest or make yourself. You can choose someone to marry, have a child, and, in most cases, continue playing indefinitely. Some games have an end point, which is usually a cut-scene applauding you for your success, and one game, Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life, actually lets you (or, in another light, makes you) die of old age, but in most cases, you can keep playing forever.

If you’ve never played a game like this, what may strike you first is how different it is from most popular titles. When I first got my Nintendo 64, I spent dozens of hours wandering through Super Mario 64 and Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. Both titles were revolutionary in the way they allowed the player unprecedented freedom through their worlds, but they still followed a linear pattern — there’s one main conflict and a single villain at the source of it. Your purpose is obvious from the very first scene; you exist to restore balance to the world. Most importantly, you have no choice but to succeed — and you have only one kind of success. There isn’t an ending to Ocarina of Time in which Ganondorf defeats Link and seals him in the Dark Realm for all eternity, or one in which Link helps Zelda discover her inner badass and empowers her to use the Master Sword to save herself. At every step, the game world waits for you to find the correct sequence that will allow you to progress towards its inexorable conclusion. This is a common feature (or limitation) of many games; it’s possible to partially explain it by looking at the cost of content creation in a game. Each additional story line costs money and space, and if you’re working on a budget (or on a system that’s already strained by your game’s memory requirements, as Ocarina strained the N64), then it’s reasonable to prefer one excellent storyline over several weak ones.

Harvest Moon is obviously quite different from games like these, as I learned when I first picked it up and realized that, while Ocarina of Time allows me to wander around, chat with villagers, and get distracted by fun mini-games, Harvest Moon encourages it. The world of the Harvest Moon games is much smaller than Ocarina of Time or Super Mario 64, and because there’s less ground to cover, it feels much more fully realized. No matter how far you roam, you always begin and end your day at your home on the farm, and though it slowly changes as you build additions (a kitchen, a nicer bedroom for you and your spouse, a child’s room, etc.), it creates a sense of continuity, of really living a life.

Despite the simplicity of its premise, Harvest Moon has a far greater number of paths to success than a more immediately impressive — but again, more linear — game. If your goal is to become a fruit and vegetable mogul, you can focus on growing the highest-quality crops, a process that can take many (in-game) years and depends on different types of soil, fertilizer, and crafting the best seeds. You can hybridize your own new species (in A Wonderful Life, my favorite is the watermelon-strawberry hybrid, the delicious-sounding “berryber”) or use your crops to create artisanal products like jam that sell for higher prices than their unprocessed ingredients. If you want to focus on building relationships, you’ll find that all the Harvest Moon games, to varying degrees, reward your friendships with the villagers through surprisingly sweet and funny cut scenes, gifts from the villagers, and useful information like recipes your character can use. What’s most important to understanding the Harvest Moon games is that you can’t do it all — at least not at once. The most obvious example of this feature is marriage, since in each game there are usually five marriage candidates (in some later games, when you can choose between playing as male or female, there are ten candidates, five men and five women), and who you choose to date influences the behavior of other characters in the town, the insight you gain into your partner and their family through cut scenes and dialogue, and your child’s personality. At their best, the games are small but fiercely intricate, requiring multiple playthroughs to understand each villager’s motivations, desires, and narrative arcs.

Harvest Moon has a very different appeal from the more popular game franchises of today (Call of Duty, The Elder Scrolls, etc.), and it has occupied its own niche for almost twenty years, both in the consumer market and in my heart. I suppose that most video games exist to offer a higher-stakes world for their players, a world in which they are the hero, and the fates of nations depend on their actions. But I’ve frequently found myself, ever since I was a kid, wishing that my life was a little smaller and simpler, a little more consistent, and that’s what Harvest Moon offers me. Offered me.

I reluctantly stopped buying Harvest Moon games in 2011, after putting twenty busywork-filled hours into the unimaginative Tale of Two Towns for the Nintendo DS. One of the dangerous opportunities that arises when a franchise becomes a franchise is complacency. Fans make it clear that they’ll buy anything that bears the game’s name, so instead of using this faith to take risks and work harder to expand and deepen their customer base, companies sometimes begin to get lazy, or worse, reductive. By my reckoning, Harvest Moon’s heyday was a relatively short stretch of its long lifespan, from 1998’s Harvest Moon 64 to 2003’s Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life on Gamecube. Some of the games outside this five year window are worth playing, but most of the later games feel…wrong. All the Harvest Moon games are formulaic, but these feel soulless, like eating fast food versions of comfort food.

In 2014, I heard the death knell of Harvest Moon. The two companies who collaborated on the series, Natsume and Marvelous, split up to pursue their own visions of the games. Yasuhiro Wada, the designer who created the original concept for the games, had already left Marvelous in 2010, so I don’t think the schism prevented the companies from saving the series, but it’s been strange and disheartening to see the latest vapid installments from each company. As PC Gamer said in their review of Natsume’s Harvest Moon: Seeds of Memories, which, for some unfathomable, money-grubbing reason, is available on iOS and Android (I can’t think of a platform less friendly to slow-paced, contemplative gaming), “This is not the Harvest Moon game you hope it’s going to be. This is not the Harvest Moon game you want. This is a Harvest Moon game that will likely make you sad.”

Enter Stardew Valley, a game made by one person, ConcernedApe (Eric Barone), who has spent the last five years creating what is essentially a radical reboot of the Harvest Moon series. I had my doubts about Stardew Valley when I first read the developer’s blog. This looks like a shitty Harvest Moon, I thought, conveniently forgetting that almost every official Harvest Moon game since the last Concorde flight has been shitty. I determinedly ignored the game until a friend reminded me of its release, confessing he’d just spent all night playing it. In a surge of hope and nostalgia, I paid the price of admission ($14.99) and downloaded the game.

Twelve hours in, I don’t have a single real complaint about the game. It combines, as far as I can see, the best parts of the Harvest Moon games; it even incorporates some elements from Rune Factory, a more combat/fantasy-oriented spinoff of Harvest Moon (yes, it exists). The game has also made some thought-provoking deviations from the formula, on the level of plot as well as game mechanics. Stardew Valley does actually have a “villain” of sorts: the manager of JojaMart, a grocery store owned by the heartless conglomerate Joja Corporation. The corporation shadows the entire game — in an early scene showing how the player ended up leaving their old life behind to come to Stardew Valley, we see the main character (who can be male or female, straight or gay, any color from ghost white to dark brown to grass green) at her job in a Joja Corporation call center, near tears. The character reaches into a drawer at her desk and opens the sealed letter her grandfather gave her many years ago. It reads: “If you’re reading this, you must be in dire need of a change. The same thing happened to me, long ago. I’d lost sight of what mattered most in life… real connections with other people and nature. So I dropped everything and moved to the place I truly belong.” He gives her the deed to his old farm, and the game begins.

It isn’t hard to draw a parallel between Joja Corporation and the companies who made, and then ruined, Harvest Moon. Early on in the game, the player is offered a membership in the local JojaMart; if she becomes a member, the community center, which offered the player the chance to earn town refurbishments and expansions by collecting and depositing various items like fish, high-quality crops, and precious gems, disappears. It’s replaced by a Joja Warehouse, and the JojaMart begins offering the town expansions — for very high prices. The difference between the two paths is clear; one encourages exploration and experimentation, the other requires a focus on making money.

I still have a hard time believing that one person, with years of love and hard work, did what a giant development company could not — created something that gets me excited about the genre again. ConcernedApe has made the ideal farming simulator — a clean, complex game that lets me fall in love with the little world I’m helping to grow. I’m already looking forward to my next replay of Stardew Valley, but no matter how many times I restart, I know I’ll never choose to support JojaMart. I’ve already played that game.