Within minutes of booting up Harvest Moon: Another Wonderful Life I could tell my girlfriend was getting ready to take a nap, curling up in my lap and responding in sleepy monosyllables to my chatter about cows and bachelors. I wasn't surprised; Eliza, who I had just seen ecstatically play six hours of Destiny, prefers games with a little more action, a little more ass-kicking, than Harvest Moon has to offer. About fifteen minutes in, though, she sat up with a perplexed look on her face and starting asking me questions about what was happening and helping me play.
"Don't you need to put your cows in?" she asked at one point, gesturing at the flurries of blurry snow starting to fall gently across her TV screen. I was surprised that Another Wonderful Life had managed to keep Liz's attention long enough for her to learn that weather was a threat to my livestock, but I should've expected as much. It had held my attention off and on for the past eight years, after all. That's the magic of Harvest Moon.
Harvest Moon, now known as Story of Seasons, is a farming sim franchise born 20 years ago on the Super Nintendo that has since inspired too many sequels to count, spin-off RPG series Rune Factory, and love-letter farming sims like Stardew Valley and World's Dawn. It's the genre's golden child, and for good reason: each iteration has found a way to make country chores fun, and then integrates elements of dating and raising children into them. Another Wonderful Life is no exception, packed with fun, quirky charm and laid-back yet rewarding gameplay.
This GameCube title from the early 2000s features a variety of characters to befriend and wacky scenarios to walk into that are sure to entertain players. Some of my favorite scenes involve Daryl, the local mad scientist whose main interests seem to be cloning the player's cows and capturing the white forest beast, Mukumuku, neither of which he ever becomes any good at. Nik, Nak, and Flak, the three tiny harvest sprites that pop in from time to time to help players advance (though you can visit their cheerful woodland home at any time if you're brave enough to eat the strange red mushrooms in the woods), are also delightful additions to the game. The cast of Another Wonderful Life is quite a motley crew, all with their own likes, dislikes, and effects on the career path the player's child will ultimately decide to take.
The world this cast populates, Forget-Me-Not Valley, is surprisingly beautiful for residing in a GameCube game, and thankfully, after tending to their farm each day players have time to explore, allowing them to fish, visit the dig site up by the waterfall, collect flowers and other wild plants, chat with residents, or just admire the scenery. Most of the lovely outdoor areas of the game lack music, but are instead filled with the sound of the wind in the trees and the occasional bird call. Where it does come in, though, Nakajima Dai's soundtrack, though not as memorable as some OSTs, feels right; songs like "Breeze Song" suit the lighthearted rural tone of the game as a whole, while songs like "Theme for Encounter" and "Exciting Love" fit the playful and flirtatious scenes they appear in respectively.
There's plenty to giggle at mixed into this world, too, if you're willing to look around a little. Checking the TV at a late hour, for instance, will treat you to short infomercials for a variety of absurd (and wildly expensive) products. The game is luckily not realistic enough to let a player plunge into debt during the course of one late-night TV session, but it's certainly realistic enough not to limit your creative obscenity when it comes to naming things.
Other systems in the game are more fine-tuned than the name system. Beyond an easy-to-use inventory system, satisfactory camera angles, and an area so neatly set up it's impossible to get lost, Another Wonderful Life's reward and punishment system is pretty clever. By treating their livestock and crops right, players ensure that they will receive good products that will fetch enough money to sustain the farm. Conversely, irresponsible players run the risk of losing money when their crops fail and their animals die. There are plenty of ways to earn money in the valley if something goes wrong and a player needs to pay for medicine, cow insemination, or even a replacement animal, but it's slow going. The game allows players to hand-pick what they'd like to raise, so any loss is a personal blow, even if it's not hard to recover from. It's this personal level of responsibility combined with the ability to fix your mistakes that makes raising crops and animals rewarding but not yet frustrating. Another Wonderful Life does a good job of ushering you in the direction of the most satisfying path for a player to take.
Is it good enough a path to replay? I can't say for sure. Another Wonderful Life has so much content that every play-through lets a player discover even more records, pets, fish, plants, mini-games, crops, recipes, tools, cut scenes, friendships -- even new outcomes to their marriage or their child's career. There's a significant lack of explanation when it comes to wooing bachelors and guiding your child through life, which are major elements of the game, and the sheer mass of unexplained content in Another Wonderful Life could lead either to fun or to frustration. It's a wildcard.
There are plenty of shortcomings in Another Wonderful Life that any player would stumble on when encountered, but I'm willing to ease up on my condemnation of them (at least a little) because they will not affect every player. It depends on how players prefer to play the game. Those focusing on growing crops don't have to worry about the unfairly limited barn space, and someone in it for the child-rearing won't be too upset that, for some reason, their fishing rod is unusable in the ocean. A player not particularly interested in raising cows isn't likely to splurge on the milking room and stop playing as soon as they realize they paid 60,000G just to have a room to push cows into.
Speaking of disappointing purchases, Another Wonderful Life actually drastically improved upon one money-wasting problem in its slightly older sibling, A Wonderful Life, that became notorious on Harvest Moon forums. The severity of the warning displayed on the IGN Goat FAQ specific to A Wonderful Life (and the guide to freeing up barn space through "drastic measures" that follows after) should be explanation enough of the goat's infamy and why allowing it to be sold after becoming useless in Another Wonderful Life was perhaps the best change made between games.
Other changes, however, were not so great. Another Wonderful Life is almost the same game as A Wonderful Life, with a lot of good fixes, but there is one very glaring issue: marriage to a man is mandatory to continue the game. The expectation that a woman must marry a man is misogynistic, rooted in the idea that a woman is incomplete without a man, and her role in life is to bear his children. The same expectations do not apply to men, so while A Wonderful Life (the "boy version") also requires different-gender marriage, it doesn't force centuries of misogyny into the picture (though it does bring up heteronormative ideals into play). I didn't notice when I was a child, and likely would not notice as an adult if I were heterosexual, but now when I play through the first year of the game I get more than a little distressed knowing that, if I refuse to marry a man, I will be forced to quit, supposedly because I'm not cut out for the farming life. It's something I would be able to shrug off, since I'm stuck playing straight characters most of the time, if Another Wonderful Life did not push the standard on me with such urgency. This is a title that I encourage you to take breaks from if you're sensitive to internalized misogyny and homophobia, as it may just dredge up those feelings as it did in me.
My biggest complaint about Another Wonderful Life that applies to any player, regardless of demographic, is that picking it up after a while is disorienting. I've been playing both games since I was a kid, and I'll always hold the opinion that getting back into Another Wonderful Life after you haven't played in a few months is much more stressful that cracking open Animal Crossing after leaving it to sit. Another Wonderful Life drops you right back into the life you were cultivating with no idea what that life was; you don't know who you were trying to marry, what you were trying to get your child interested in, or which of your cows was the one that needed to be impregnated next. Deciding to visit your farm again can be a mess, no matter how fun the game is when you're playing it.
That's the thing -- it really is fun. Harvest Moon: Another Wonderful Life is certainly flawed in many areas, but in many cases its flaws can be easily avoided. It won't fulfill your needs if you're looking for action, and I wouldn't say it's worth scouring local game stores for even if you aren't looking for thrills, but if you find it, it's worth picking up. You and your inner farmer might just flourish in Forget-Me-Not Valley.