Harvest Moon: The Winds of Anthos is a Farm Life Sim released by Natsume, as part of its Harvest Moon Series.
Only a decade ago, the volcano was about to erupt and the Harvest Goddess sent out the Harvest Sprites to keep the towns safe and they transformed into giant wallstructures. She herself lent her powers to aid them and left behind a bottled message, before fading away.
Now the farmer living in the small town of Lenctenbury comes across a bottle on the beach and finds the Harvest Goddess' message inside of it, requesting help to reunite the towns by awakening the Harvest Sprites slumbering within the walls and have the Harvest Goddess regain her powers.
With some help from Doc Jr. and the townsfolk, the farmer manages to awaken Ver and plans to head out into the rest of the world and remove the walls keeping families and towns separate.
The game was released in September 2023 in America and October 2023 in Europe on the Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, Steam and Xbox One.
Harvest Moon: The Winds of Anthos provides examples of the following tropes
- Aggressive Play Incentive: The Harvest Moon weather is the best time in the game to gather seeds and befriend animals. Since it only happens roughly once a season and only at night, it incentivizes the player to stay up all night and deal with the consequences of sleep deprivation to make the most of the rare opportunity.
- And Your Reward Is Clothes: There are two outfits the player can create, three with the Villagers From Afar DLC, during late game.
- Completing the Zimagrad plotline allows the player to create the traditional clothes from the plotline to wear themself, while completing the Providence plotline allows a beach-themed outfit to be made. However, these clothes are not just aesthetic, as they protect the farmer from extreme cold and heat, respectively, which makes having a farm located in Zimagrad, the Desert, and the Volcano a little less strenuous.
- Completing the DLC post-game story, the player can create a Steampunk-inspired outfit that matches the appearance of Charlotte and Jacques. This outfit really is just an aesthetic change, having no added effect like the other clothes.
- And Your Reward Is Parenthood: You and your spouse can have a baby after marriage. Notably, you have to actually take care of your child in their infant stage, feeding them milk, or they'll keep you up all night crying!
- Ambiguous Gender: All the Harvest Sprites' designs are rather ambiguous-looking. In addition, the Harvest Goddess uses a gender-neutral "they" for all the Harvest Sprites, even when the Doc Pad gives them specific genders (for example, calling Ver "he" and Aestas "she").
- Anti-Frustration Features:
- The beginning introduction in Lenctenbury has the time only advance as necessary for events and no stamina gets lost, at all, giving the player time to adjust to the overall mechanics. Once they open the small pathway out of Lenctenbury and unlock the rest of the world, time advances normally and stamina drops with actions.
- You can pick up ground-based foragables and seeds while on your mount, making it easy for you to collect things without getting on and off your mount, and it will warp with you when you fast travel.
- Whenever a crop mutates, you'll harvest one of whatever crop you originally planted alongside the mutated crop—so, for example, if your Fodder Corn mutates into Glass Gem Corn, you'll harvest a Fodder Corn alongside the Glass Gem Corn. This ensures that, for example, if you're trying to plant crops for a quest, your crops mutating can't screw you out of harvesting the produce you need to complete it. This is in contrast to previous Natsume Harvest Moon titles, where you would only harvest the mutation (and thus collecting certain crops for quests was harder). It also has the bonus of making mutations more desirable for the simple fact that they let you harvest more crops than you would before.
- Animals who are tamed from the wild and then released back into it retain their friendship notes. This makes it easier to get the "tame all animals" achievement without losing out on keeping a pet a player might want—the player can complete the achievement, then immediately re-tame the animals they want as pets without doing extra work re-befriending them.
- Beef Gate: The volcano and the desert. You can explore both as soon as you get to Lilika Village, but their extreme heat will sap your health extremely quick. In order to really poke around, you'll want both extra hearts from getting Harvest Wisp Fruit, and/or cooling food items like Coconut Milk and Tomato Juice—the recipe for Coconut Milk doesn't become available until after completing the Lilika storyline, and Tomato Juice needs you to collect a lot of tomato seeds from the region, which means you'll need to have done a fair amount of story progression/farming to make the items you need to explore safely.
- Bigfoot, Sasquatch, and Yeti: The first DLC pack includes several different flavors of Sasquatch, including Bigfoot brown and Yeti white, you can keep as pets. They have mystical powers that improve the health of your crops, and they're also considered mounts.
- Boring, but Practical: Recipes that can be made with a single tree fruit, such as Coffee or Coconut Milk, are easy to produce in large quantities, and they double the effectiveness of those fruits in healing stamina. They may not heal a lot at once, but it's very easy to carry a lot of them. Coffee/Coconut Milk in particular also give you an hour of hot/cold resistence, making them efficient for exploring the mountains/desert as well.
- Broken Bridge: Several of them can be found across Anthos, requiring the player to fix them with materials they collect. This includes bridges that lead to the other towns, but require higher material that can't be gotten early, leading to a degree of Railroading.
- Cartography Sidequest: The map starts off black and needs to be filled in by interacting with the small Harvest Goddess statues that also serve as warp points, making them very useful for traversing the large map.
- Com Mons: Horses—there are eight different varieties (nine if you count the Zebra), each kind is found in multiple places all across the map, and they all have the same stats. For most of the game, they're the only kind of mount available, so they need to be very wildly available.
- Cooking Mechanics: You can cook food in the stove in your house. Each recipe takes a varying amount of time to prepare, though you don't need to actively participate—you just need to wait for it to be done. Also, many recipes will accept a wide variety of ingredients—for example, Green Salad needs both a "tender" leafy green and a "bitter" leafy green, but the "tender" one can be Lettuce or Cabbage or any of their variants, while the "bitter" one can be Spinach or Kale or Watercress or any of THEIR variants.
- Death Is a Slap on the Wrist: Running out of stamina and fainting simply ends the day prematurely. You don't even wake up later than you would normally. That said, it can still be an undesirable penalty in the mines: Each mine has a checkpoint every 10 floors that you can travel to once you've reached it, and the quality of the mine's ores and gems generally goes up every 10 floors. Descending those 10 floors isn't necessarily easy and is stamina-intensive, requiring lots of food, meaning that the player has to spend a lot of time building up the resources to try again.
- Difficult, but Awesome: Placing your farm in the Oasis or inside the Volcano is quite difficult, given that those areas naturally have bad weather that requires you to use weather protection just to work on your fields. Crops in those locations also require fertilizer to grow and can't just be left to their own devices. However, the crop mutations that grow in those locales fetch the highest prices of any crops in the game.
- Double-Edged Buff: Pitfalls in mines advance you very quickly through the floors: They don't require digging to use, they can drop you multiple floors at a time, and even if you don't hit a checkpoint floor precisely, they still "count" for you having hit the checkpoint, making it easier to get to desirable ores. However, they're VERY stamina-intensive and a surprise one can cut your mining of an ore-rich floor short. A farmer well-stocked with food can make good use of them to reach high-value ores faster, but they're extremely risky if you let your health drop below five hearts.
- Downloadable Content: The game received four packs of DLC to date, with more planned to be released.
- The first pack added various wild animals to encounter and tame, ranging from pandas to sasquashes to unicorns, the last which could be ridden and were mounts that can easily traverse any terrain.
- The second pack called Visitors From Afar added a post-game story that revolved around a small town built in the desert region, as well as adding two more marriageable candidates in Charlotte and Jacques.
- The third pack adds another upgrade for the tools in the form of the Harvest Goddess level, and a few new furniture items to decorate the house with.
- The fourth pack adds several new crops and recipes that use them, such as Soybeans and Tofu made from them, as well as several new kinds of fish to catch.
- Early Game Hell:
- Until you finish the Lectenbury quest, you don't have access to fast travel or a mount. That means that wherever you want to travel, you have to go there slowly, on foot, your stamina draining the whole time. Though there's no strong penalties for fainting in this game, it still means that doing things like foraging for fruit and seeds will take up a large amount of your time and stamina, and if you don't want to faint and end the day prematurely, you'll need to pack enough food, or turn around and head back to town quickly enough, that you don't keel over.
- The Lectenbury and Providence mines are some of the most difficult to advance in due to their lack of pitfalls, meaning the player has to manually advance each floor.
- Everyone Is Bi: Just like in One World, the player can marry either gendered marriage candidate.
- Exposed to the Elements: Subverted like in One World, where the player needs to ingest heat-resistant or cold-resistant food to tolerate the temperature in the desert or the icy mountains.
- Fantastic Fruits and Vegetables: Not all the crop mutations you can get are grounded in the real world. For example, Watermelons grown during winter can mutate into a Snowman Watermelon that literally looks like, well, a snowman, while Pumpkins can become living Jack-o-Lanterns that grow with faces built in.
- Fantasy Counterpart Culture: Each of the five villages has a name that evokes a different country or culture, with the names of the villagers in that village generally being tied to that particular country as well:
- Lectenbury: A picturesque, rural village with a tight-knit community, it's evocative of England.
- Lilika: A tropical, volcano-adjacent village full of coconut palms and with abudant fishing, it's based on Hawaii.
- Herbstberg: A cool, autumnal village high in the mountains with a rich musical history, it's inspired by Austria.
- Zimagrad: An isolated icy outpost where the villagers are tough as nails, it's similar to Russia.
- Providence: An independent, patchwork village populated heavily by immigrants from all the other villages, it's a lot like the USA.
- Verne (DLC): Taking lots of creative cues from the work of Frenchman Jules Verne, the aesthetic is very French, as are the residents' names.
- Fishing Minigame: You can fish in a wide variety of places across the world, with different fish found depending on the region you fish in. You can also make bait.
- Gotta Catch 'Em All: There are achievements for befriending all the non-DLC animal species, as well as finding all the Harvest Wisps.
- Heart Container: Harvest Wisp fruit, resembling golden acorns, are scattered all across the map. You can trade in three to the Harvest Goddess for an upgrade to your stamina, or any of your inventory sizes.
- Interface Screw: It's impossible to look at the map in the desert due to the sandstorm there interrupting your communication with the Doc Pad. (Thankfully, you can still use the Warp Statue list to escape.)
- Lava Is Boiling Kool-Aid: There are fish living in the lava in the volcano, which you can fish out. Some (such as the Lava Mosquitofish) are implicitly magic, but most are normal-looking fish that just happen to live in lava.
- Missing Secret: Downplayed. There are several difficult-to-reach areas on the map, most notably the tiny island in the Herbstberg province that requires you to build three bridges with increasingly difficult requirements to get to it, which, in the base game, do not seem to offer unique rewards. Many of them do hold the rare White Fox pet, but there are usually simpler places it can be reached. These locations are actually meant to hold the locations' matching Sasquatch creature, which is only available as DLC—so they can appear like Missing Secrets in the base game.
- Mystical Pregnancy: The Miracle Potion that gets animals pregnant is actually magic in this game, as it can induce pregnancy in a wide variety of species, and resembles a classical "potion" in a colorful glass bottle.
- Non-Human Non-Binary: The Harvest Sprites are referred to both with gendered pronouns and "they," and their visual designs skew towards being ambiguously gendered. Gendered pronouns seem to be preferred by the human members of the cast, but the Harvest Goddess usually uses "they." For example, Aestas is referred to as "she" in the DocPad's friend list, but when preparing the Pearl of the Full Moon to restore their power, the Harvest Goodess says "let's bring it to them."
- Not the Intended Use: Sidequests from the travelling merchants will allow you to pinpoint them on the map while they're running their shops, so simply not doing them gives the player a convenient way to always find them when they're not in their hometowns.
- Obvious Rule Patch: During the tutorial sequence, the Tool Shop in Lenctenbury will sell Turnips and Milk—when no other shop in the game, at any point, sells crops or animal products—so that the game can't become Unintentionally Unwinnable if you eat or sell the turnips/milk you need for the plot.
- Palette Swap: Each animal variety has several different subtypes available that use the same basic model, but with different colors and textures. For example, the "mustelid" model comes in both Ferret and Otter varieties, while the "big cat" model can be a tiger, a jaguar, or a bobcat.
- Points of Light Setting: The eruption ten years ago has completely cut off communication between the villages, leaving them isolated and remote. Even after breaking down the walls keeping them trapped, the expanse between the villagers is considered rugged and tough to travel, and only a handful of people (such as the player character and Vivi) are bold enough to take it on. Helping the villages reconnect (i.e., helping to remove the "Points of Light" nature of the setting) is a major part of the plot.
- Prolonged Prologue: The introduction takes less than an hour to awaken Ver and open a small pathway outside of Lenctenbury, allowing the player to leave and explore. But in order to 'properly' finish the introduction in Lenctenbury and gain access to various gameplay mechanics, like the very helpful warping mechanic, the player has to complete the beginning quests of improving the town to a two star rank, removing the entire wall around Lenctenbury. This can take another hour or more, depending on how fast the player can obtain the materials needed for the quests.
- Railroading: Zigzagged, as the player can walk almost anywhere on the world map once they open the small pathway in Lenctenbury's wall. But there are broken bridges that require materials to fix, and some of those materials can't be gotten until more of the story has been played, so very often the player needs to do part of the Herbstburg events to obtain the material to fix the bridge leading to Zimagrad.
- Schizo Tech: The Doc Pad resembles a tablet computer and seems to have an internet connection, and most houses seem to have electric lighting and refrigerators. However, animals provide the only transportation, the fact that the Doc Pad has a camera is treated as a surprising and uncommon thing, and the lack of cell phones or aviation means the Harvest Goddess's walls fully cut off the four villages for the past ten years.
- Sequel Escalation: The world in One World was somewhat large, but still easy to traverse and had pre-determined paths to arrive at destinations. The world in this game is much larger, a lot more open, and the player can walk almost any way to a place.
- Shout-Out:
- The sixth DLC village, which has a steampunk aesthetic, is named Verne Village.
- One NPC in Zimagrad, Dolph, will occasionally request metals and then say, upon receiving them, "This [Metal] looks delicious!" Considering that he can request actual food items and doesn't say this line upon receiving them (instead giving a generic "thank you for fetching this" response), this is almost certainly a reference to Stardew Valley and Abigail's infamous Eat Dirt, Cheap tendencies.
- One of the DLC fruits is a Killer Tomato.
- Title Drop: Once the Harvest Goddess has been restored to her full power, a new weather type gets introduced known as the Harvest Moon. It happens during every full moon from that point on, and makes regular Harvest Wisps drop four times as many seeds, and Rare Harvest Wisps and non-tame wild animals won't run away from you.
- Unicorns Are Sacred: The DLC Unicorn pet spawns at the Goddess's shrine, accessible only in the postgame, likely due to the association between unicorns and holiness.
- Vegetarian Carnivore: Several obligate carnivore species are available as pets, such as tigers and velociraptors, but if tamed they eat grass-based Animal Feed like every other animal.
- Warp Whistle: The Harvest Goddess statues found all over the world serve as warp-points, but they can only be activated once the player has completed the introductory section of getting Lenctenbury to two stars. There is also a warp always set to the home farm, wherever the player may currently have it set.
- Whateversaurus: The dinosaur creature available as a mount is called a "Velociraptor," but mostly looks like a generic stocky-looking theropod.
- Wonder Child: If you marry someone of the same gender as you, the Harvest Goodess is so happy you've found someone to spend your life with that she decides to visit you in a dream to magically gift you with a child.
