To paraphrase a bunch of anti-Nazi singing nuns: How do you solve a problem like reviewing a game that’s almost 25 years old? The nuns never came up with an answer, but we have to, because this is a fashion show, not a convent, and that’s the focus of this review after all. Harvest Moon 64 was released in 1999 — the 20th century! — and it certainly plays that way, with awkward camera angles, bad localization, a lack of things to do, and music that will drive you crazy with its incessant 32-bar loops.
But no one comes to Nintendo Switch Online emulation of N64 games expecting something that could have been made yesterday. There are plenty of people who will be happy to devour this game from the NSO Expansion Pack service, their eyes blissfully misty with the pink specs of nostalgia, and to that we say — good for you! We’ve been that person enough times to feel the pleasure of feeling warm 90s flavored flakes coursing through your blood. But for those of you reading this who may be more used to a more modern interpretation of the farm simulation — this review is for you.
Harvest Moon 64 is from a simpler time, much closer to the origins of Harvest Moon in 1996 than today’s farming simulators. The series began as creator Yasuhiro Wada’s dreams of a rural, pleasantly pastoral side of Japan that has now largely disappeared, replaced by machines, skyscrapers, and consumerism (a theme that also appears in games like Stardew Valley). There’s not much to do in rural Japan, and especially no combine harvesters and automatic sprinklers to help you plant, grow, and harvest your crops — everything is painstakingly done by hand, from feeding your cows to watering your fields.
Is it tiring? Oh yeah. Your life will become a little easier when your tools automatically upgrade after a certain number of uses, which you can cheat a bit by spamming them by using them inside buildings, where time is paused, but it’s still a pain to have to feed all your livestock or sell your crops one by one, and your miserably small inventory of eight places doesn’t help you either.
And let’s not forget the crudeness of early farming simulations, where you’ll often find yourself accidentally dropping crops on the ground, or planting seeds a millimeter away from where you wanted them and losing half of them, or — as we were — having your horse bravely jump between you and the ground, resulting in you hitting him with a hoe. And now he is angry with us. MATE. YOU DID THIS TO YOURSELF.
Harvest Moon 64 is unpleasant, infuriating and unforgiving… buuuuut if you’re playing on Switch, liberal use of NSO’s save game state feature smooths out many of those wrinkles. In fact, bailing out can even come in handy if you want to win big in horse racing. Tip hint.
Speaking of horse racing, there are a few festivals you can participate in that break up the pleasant boredom about once every two weeks. There are also other events, such as the opening of the mine during the winter only, or a bridge being built in late fall, allowing access to a new and very boring mountain. But the general feeling of helplessness is kind of the point, right? If you’ve ever lived in a small town that went crazy when a McDonald’s opened right next to a roundabout, you’ll know the feeling.
You will of course be expected to get married. Giving gifts and talking to your intended will slowly build their affection for you, and after a while you can pop the question with the series’ equivalent of an engagement ring: the Blue Feather. Or — since this is a wacky game with lots of bugs — you can do what we did and spam ‘A’ to show tsundere Karen your dog 255 times in one day to get her to max hearts. Romance is dead, but our turbo button is alive and well, thank goodness.
Unfortunately, marriage is not all it is cracked up to be. In fact, seconds after proposing to Karen, she asked us our names and introduced herself. Later that same day, we met her at the beach, where she yelled at us because… we didn’t propose. A girl. Now that we’re married, she lurks around our house talking about laundry. Every day. We even walked in once to find her in bed, only to walk into the kitchen to find out more Karen, who threw us a birthday party. If you can teleport, Karen, why don’t you help with the farm chores once in a while?
Those little puzzles in the code will keep popping up, and as we mentioned before, the localization isn’t great either. There are a lot of typos, and some things don’t make sense — like when we checked one of our cows to find out her birthday is ‘jis020-13’, a date format we don’t know, or when Popuri responds by showing her our dog with “An arm, huh?” There’s even a tipfeler on the home screen, where Natsume’s name is spelled ‘Natume’, which seems like a pretty bad oversight. We don’t expect this game’s bugs to be fixed a quarter of a century later — especially considering that the developer, Victor Interactive, no longer exists — but it really makes us appreciate the diligence of modern developers and their thorough patching.
In general, harping on how corny and empty Harvest Moon 64 is feels like you’re getting mad at an aging actor for not being cute anymore. While it’s hard to forgive its scrappiness, the lack of things to do is so obvious because we’ve had 25 years of development in the farming game genre. If you want to play something that is better, then you can literally follow the evolution Back to natureFriends of Mineral Town and the new Friends of Mineral Town remake — all the characters are there, but the world is bigger, the mechanics are more forgiving, and the characters are more refined.
But if you want to experience history, dive into the waters of nostalgia and learn to appreciate how good we have it these days (and already have the Nintendo Switch Online Expansion Pack)… then try Harvest Moon 64.
Conclusion
Harvest Moon 64 can’t hope to stand up to modern farming simulations, but sometimes it’s nice to get a reminder of how far we’ve come. If you have an ounce of nostalgia for this one, you’ll have a lot of fun, especially with the added bonus of an easy save, and should add a few points to the score below. For anyone else, the nervousness and boredom might be too much to bear. Just be sure to play it with a guide, because this game talks to you NOTHING’.
