![]() ![]() The romantic portions of the game are surprisingly well realized, and you'll find yourself really stressing over which girl to pursue. Which one you end up winning as your bride will impact the personality of your child, as well as various aspects of your farm. Each has a very unique personality, and each will respond differently to your advances. Social interaction with the other residents in Forget-Me-Not Valley, the area where A Wonderful Life takes place, is vital to the experience, as you'll need to court one of the three available girls in the area to keep things going. ![]() Or, you can just spend an afternoon hanging out in the local bar, having drinks and chatting with the locals. You can focus your energy on fishing, animal husbandry, archeology, cooking, or even cross-breeding your crops, and each of these activities is like a unique subgame in and of itself. There's the aforementioned groove you'll get into, and you can always expect Van, the traveling salesman, to show up on specific days, but if you grow tired of just milking your cows, collecting eggs from your chickens, and watering and harvesting your crops, the game offers plenty of other activities. There are aspects of the game that take on a certain clockwork quality. Once you get familiar with the particulars of caring for livestock, cultivating crops, and getting paid for your efforts, you'll get into a groove where it's dangerously easy to just let hours slip away as you take care of your day-to-day chores. The game basically lets you play out the life of a farmer, which, admittedly, sounds like a dull, tiresome undertaking, but there's a satisfyingly meditative pacing to it. And milk, and eggs, and wool, and fish, and, ultimately, children. Your character doesn't really have personal stats to build, but rather, the fruits of your labor are quite literally fruit. ![]() Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life is an RPG, but not in the save-the-world-from-an-absolute-evil way. It's all pretty ancillary to a lot of the actual game, but it's eccentric touches like this that really define the feel of the game. As an odd combination of second- and third-person perspectives-which you could safely call anything from fourth- to sixth-person-the technique is more interesting than just about anything the narrator actually says. Though you'll actually be playing the game as a young boy, the narrator is an older man who is helping you maintain the farm, and he's actually telling the story to the memory of your father, who left you this farm in the first place. In a peculiar game like Harvest Moon, the fact that the underlying narrative is one of the most peculiar parts is saying a lot. Now Playing: Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life Video Review By clicking 'enter', you agree to GameSpot's ![]()
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