Harvest Moon: Light of Hope Special Edition

It's cute! It's no Stardew Valley, but it's in that vein, and the crop mutations are a fun feature you don't see elsewhere. It's worth playing when I want a SDV-flavored farm sim but I don't want to have to pay attention to too many processes and details. It's simpler, and that's both a pro and a con depending on the day and mood I'm in. Worth having in my library, though, for sure!

love this game. very fun and interacttive

Honestly really lacks the magic of previous Harvest Moon games. I loved HM A Wonderful Life and HW DS, but this is an empty shell of a HM game. Gone is the cosy, lively feeling of the world. None of these characters feel fleshed out or real. All NPCs either love seashells or flowers basically. It's so surface level. No feeling of relationships between them or how they relate to the island in any way that motivates you to save it. For some reason they've also dispensed with the mechanic of letting the NPCs walk around. Instead they just fade in and out of existence at different places at different times. It's a nice change to have an overarching plot to a HM game rather than just marriage and kids, but it's so so short. Completed it by Fall Year 1. Like the only reason I have 46 hours in the game is because I'm playing whilst working from home so hours are being spent on the pause screen in between working. The story line again also feels very surface level. We're constantly told that...