From Harvest Moon to Stardew Valley: Two Great Cozy Games

I’ve been playing quite a bit of Harvest Moon and Stardew Valley recently. I wrote a review for Harvest Moon on the SNES, and about my experiences with Stardew Valley. Revisiting these two games has made me think about how far the Farming/Life simulation games have come.

 I’m not sure if Harvest Moon was the first game in this genre, but it is the first one I can remember. You can see many features in the game that influenced future games. It established a handful of what we’ve come to expect from the genre.

Stardew Valley is one of my favorite indie games and one of the first games I bought for the Nintendo Switch. It gave me something to do while I was rehabbing a broken ankle, and it is one of the few games I streamed on Twitch when I was still interested in doing that.

I’ll briefly go over both games and how the genre has changed over the years, and look at how some of the things from Harvest Moon were carried over to Stardew Valley. I’ll do my best to cover everything, but I’ll probably miss something.

Thoughts on Harvest Moon for the SNES

This game came out in 1997. It was a late release for the Super Nintendo, and it shows. It is a beautiful looking game, and it has some great stuff in it.

Back in 1997, it was a very unique game that wasn’t found on the home console. It isn’t a very big game, and there aren’t too many NPCs in it. Those NPCs don’t have very big dialogue trees, so it is rather repetitive.

That creates quite a bit of a problem because you have to talk with them to build relationships with four of them. That’s because you can marry one of four women in the game. Harvest Moon didn’t track your relationship with other characters.

This is a small game as far as having places to go. Here are the locations in the game:

• Your Farm/Ranch
• Crossroads
• Forest
• Mountain Top
• Cave
• Town

That’s it. There are no dungeons, weapons, or enemies in the game. This leads to the one thing that I really didn’t like about this game.

In two seasons, you can’t grow crops. They aren’t even available at the store for you to buy. It makes the Fall and Winter months very boring, especially after you’re married in the game. I got a similar feeling after I’d upgraded my house.

Once you’ve upgraded your house completely, there is little to no point in collecting wood. You can still do it, and if you want to make a fence, you’ll need it, but you don’t have to. All your buildings are already built, so you don’t need additional wood.

While I enjoy the first Harvest Moon, it is hard not to compare it with the modern indie games inspired by it. There are a lot of them, and more are being made.

The Simple Joy of Stardew Valley

 Stardew Valley improves on Harvest Moon in every way. It was made decades after the game that inspired it. The development of the game was very different from Harvest Moon.

Stardew Valley was made by one developer, and Harvest Moon was made by a team. There were several technical limitations for Harvest Moon that Stardew Valley didn’t have to deal with. This resulted in a much better game.

You have more people to talk with, more places to visit, and more you can do. It also helps that this game can be updated and improved. That wasn’t possible with an SNES cartridge.

There is something relaxing about Stardew Valley. It is one of the games I can get lost in for a few hours and forget about all the garbage I have to do in real life. Playing this game makes me happy.

In all the versions of this game, I’ve found it to be very relaxing, and there is always something for a player to do. There is little downtime, even in the winter season. It always seems like there was something to do.

I can always come back to this game, and I have a great time whenever I do. This is one of the games I thoroughly enjoy playing. I’m not sure if I’ll ever review the game or if I’ll simply blog about my experiences with it.

What I Noticed While Playing

While playing Harvest Moon, I noticed a few things that inspired Stardew Valley, aside from the whole farming/ranching thing. In both games, you’ll find a few festivals that are the same, similar, adorable graphics, and a strange dating system where buying gifts makes people fall in love with you.

Cows and chickens show up in both games, which shouldn’t be surprising. In both games, the animals look adorable. I had forgotten what the animals looked like in Harvest Moon, and after looking at them, I saw that they are very close to those in Stardew Valley. They look like little plush toys.

I had forgotten all about the festivals in Harvest Moon. A few of them occur during the year, and they’re very similar to those found in Stardew Valley. Their differences have to do with when they take place and where. In Harvest Moon, they all take place in town, because there isn’t another location. In Stardew Valley, they take place all over the place because the map is bigger, and the developer makes use of all the locations.

The dating system in both games is strange, to say the least. You give gifts to people to make them like you. This works as a game mechanic, and I don’t mind it at all, but it feels odd when I analyze it. Mostly because that isn’t how things work in real life, but this isn’t real life, it’s a video game.

I’m sure I’ll find more similarities as I play the other games in the Harvest Moon series. When I look at Stardew Valley, I see more parts of Harvest Moon and Rune Factory in it. It is a lot of fun to go back and look at these older games and find the bits and pieces that were polished up and put into modern games.

Reviews for both games  

I wanted to look at the reviews of these games when they were released. I did this for Harvest Moon and found that few people covered it. This will be the first time I’ve ever looked at the reviews for Stardew Valley.

Nintendo Power’s 1997 review was really the only one I found from the year the game was released. I’m sure there are others, but I couldn’t find them. The score was a 3.6/5, which I think is fair.

The other reviews were mostly 8s and 9s. There was a strange review in HonestGames that had some good criticism of the game, but it was most likely done just to be different. Someone always wants to give a game a terrible score just to be different.

The games media loved Stardew Valley when it was released in 2016. I couldn’t find a bad review for it from that year. One reviewer gave it a 73/100, but I can’t quite figure out what they didn’t like about the game. It’s a little odd. (KillScreen 73/100, Destructoid 9.5/10, Giant Bomb 5/5).

The games media landscape changed significantly in the 20 years between these two game releases. In 2016, hundreds, if not thousands, of people were reviewing video games, and the farming simulation genre had been around for a long time. People knew what they were getting in a game that took inspiration from Harvest Moon.  

Wrap Up

It has been fun going back to look at the first Harvest Moon and seeing how far the genre has evolved over the decades. This was just a surface level look at the two games. I’ll look at other games in the genre, and eventually put together a more comprehensive write up on it.

Playing the SNES game brought up many of the same feelings I had in 1997 and 1998 when I played Harvest Moon for the first time. I liked it, but got tired of it as I ran out of things to do in the game. When I reviewed the game, I had the same feeling.

There isn’t much of a reason to go back and play Harvest Moon on the SNES. I haven’t played the N64 and PS1 releases, so maybe there is something to those games. I’ll check them out at some point.

I still play Stardew Valley from time to time. It is a wonderful game, and I’m looking forward to seeing how it changes over the years. I’m not too sure what updates the developer has left to make, but I’m sure I’ll enjoy them.

If you enjoyed this post, you might like my blogs on My Time in Stardew Valley.