Accidental Aesop: A common thing in dating sims, but... the best way to befriend somebody or have them fall in love with you is to shower them with gifts. Sometimes justified, in that what the person likes correlates to foods or materials useful for their highly specialized jobs. Still doesn't explain why Rick and Popuri, who own a chicken ranch, are most easily wooed with eggs.
The fandom is torn on what time period their audience-alienating era spans but it's generally thought to have began around Magical Melody and DS. The characters are seen as shallower, several disliked mechanics were tried out, and the series as a whole got Lighter and Softer. It got worse when Marvelous said they were focusing on handhelds instead of consoles; they released six DS games but only two, near-identical Wii games (not including the WiiWare game My Little Shop). Yasuhiro Wada has shown dislike to the way the games have gone; he especially dislikes how much focus romance is given within the series, and has since left the series to create other games. However, the Wii games were acclaimed (though they still weren't perfect) and the 3DS game A New Beginning is seen as an improvement over the past handheld installments.
A large part of the fandom has been alienated again by the Switch era. Only one all new game was made out of the five that released, Pioneers of Olive Town; two games, Friends of Mineral Town and A Wonderful Life, are remakes of older games, while the other two are crossovers with the Doraemon series. Furthermore, Pioneers of Olive Town was not well received due to a lot of changes that appeared to be influenced by other games, especially Stardew Valley and Animal Crossing. Two of the largest complaints were the over-reliance on item-processing machines and having townsfolk that, while pleasant, lacked the depth of personality that older games gave to characters. There was also a considerable lack of interactive festivals, including removing any harvest festivals (and thus making the player's farm seem almost disconnected from the town next to it; there's little incentive to improve your animals and crops when no one's going to judge them anyways).
Catharsis Factor: Hate a certain character? Give him or her an item they dislike. Even better if you hate a certain rival in the game. You have the power to shape their life into a life of misery and loneliness.
In a meta sense, in all of the Harvest Moon games (notably the later ones where random events are limited or removed entirely), making friends with any of the villagers who aren't the bachelor/bachelorettes or rivals are meaningless.
Certain crops yield more gold and are more productive than other crops that are available in the same season (e.g. in Harvest Moon: Back to Nature, potatoes yield more gold and take only 2 days longer than turnips to grow).
Tell a casual western Harvest Moon fan that the video games were created by Victor/Marvelous. You'll be surprised by how many of them say "No, it's made by Natsume". This has caused some troubles after the split between Harvest Moon and Story of Seasons occurred.
"Jack" is ubiquitous in the fandom but has never been officially used. The character usually called "Jack" is canonically called "Pete". "Jack" is a Fan Nickname that stems from the SNES game featuring a beanstalk. Same with his Distaff Counterpart "Jill", whose actual name is Claire.
Despite popular belief, Marvelous didn't create Story of Seasons. The series was originally owned by Pack-In Video (and developed by Amccus), which merged with Victor Entertainment. Marvelous later bought Victor Entertainment.
Complacent Gaming Syndrome: There are crops that yield a higher profit than the others each season, as well as "money tricks". Complacent gamers have no qualms about exploiting said money tricks and planting nothing but the most profitable crops so they can ace the game faster, even if it means the game will get more boring later on.
Dueling Works: With Harvest Moon by Natsume since the split; the games from each side tend to come out within a year of each other, with the first post-split Harvest Moon game, The Lost Valley, coming out before the 2014 Story of Seasons. They don't duel in Japan because the Natsume Harvest Moon games aren't exported there.
Skye in Cute (the Distaff Counterpart) was created primarily so that there'd be a "special" marriage candidate for the girl versions, and he's extremely hard to find and talk to. Oh, he's also a bad boyBishōnenGentleman Thief. No surprise, then, that he's become one of the most popular boys in the series.
Other games have them as well, but with the exception of Skye, most are NPCs you can't marry. Examples include Flora (Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life—she was a candidate in DS), Pastor Carter (More Friends of Mineral Town), Alisa (Harvest Moon: Island of Happiness), Marian (Grand Bazaar) and Eileen (Tale of Two Towns). Sunshine Islands even trolls you by giving Alisa heart events like a marriageable girl, but having her turn you down. You can marry her in Tale of Two Towns, but since she is a priestess, you can't have a child with her. (Something that Lara from Rune Factory Frontier does the opposite way.) Hopefully you'll respect her decision at least.
Reception for Marian has been overwhelmingly positive for being an exceptionally beautiful man and for being a canon gay character that's handled tastefully. The fact that it's extremely common to find someone mistake him for female (and then be shocked to find out his real gender) certainly adds to his memorability.
Eda, the old lady who helps train you into a farmer. Her cheekiness, Granny Classic appearance and nature, and Friendly Enemy status note She and three other farmers serve as your rivals for extra land make her one of the most recognized characters in the game.
Klaus and Reager are usually at the top of popularity polls or people's top choices for SoS bachelors.
Fandom-Specific Plot: A game series that has a loose plot of "go to the country, be a farmer" and "woo and marry a resident" opens itself up to lots of people writing Self-Insert Fic about life in a small country town—good or bad—and pairing the player character with the bachelor(ette) of choice.
Fandom Rivalry: With Spiritual SuccessorStardew Valley. Unusually, it's mostly one-sided. Most Harvest Moon fans enjoy (or are at least neutral to) Stardew Valley while Stardew fans have been known to be negative towards Harvest Moon (especially since many haven't played Harvest Moon/Story of Seasons games, as while Stardew Valley has been released on PC, PlayStation, and Xbox the Harvest Moon series was a predominantly Nintendo focused series for years). This in turn causes Harvest Moon fans to backlash against Stardew Valley.
"Jill" for the first two female player characters after Sara, until their names were eventually revealed to be Claire [the blonde] and Pony [the brunette]. Most fans still use "Jill" over "Pony".
The Grand Bazaar protagonists have no official names, but the fans call them either "Hansel" and "Gretel" or "Oliver" and "Anita." (In Japan they were named Luft and Aria.)
The female Magical Melody protagonist is often called "Melody" instead of her canon name "Amanda" ("Tina" in Japan).
Doctor's name being "Tim" is this. It comes from mixing him up with another character. In most games he is "Doctor", but in the DS games he's "Trent".
The Save the Homeland protagonist's name is likely "Toy" but fans overwhelmingly call him "Tony" instead.
There's quite a bit of overlap between Fire Emblem fans and Harvest Moon fans, probably due to the Support system in the former having similar attributes to dating in Harvest Moon.
Harvest Moon and Animal Crossing fans tend to get along due to the several similarities between the two.
Germans Love David Hasselhoff: Japan isn't fond of the rival marriage system, which is why many games after Grand Bazaar lack rivals (or only show the events but don't have rival marriages). The English-speaking fandom, however, is overall very fond of the rival system and wish it were in more games and would come back. This stems from two different ways of thinking: Japanese players feel bad about "stealing" someone's love interest and leaving them single from that point on, while international players enjoy seeing the other characters pair up and think it adds depth and doesn't leave everyone else in town single ad unmarried except you. Notably the full rival system hasn't been present since Tale of Two Towns, outside of cut scenes that will play, but won't result in a rival marriage and can only activate to a certain level.
The weeds, in a way; it's impossible to get rid of them completely.
In Harvest Moon 3, you can just turn your entire farm into a watery grave with the shovel.
In some gamesnote Specifically, Harvest Moon: Back to Nature, the Mineral Town games and Harvest Moon DS and DS Cute, you could invest a ton of money into putting grass everywhere you're not planting other seeds. You can technically do it in Harvest Moon: Island of Happiness and Sunshine Islands, but since you have to water grass in those games, it's far more trouble than it's worth.
Good Bad Bugs: The series is infamous for them, often related to Natsume's translation.
Harvest Moon DS has several pointless glitches (tapping the bottom left corner of the title screen where the characters are lining up turns everyone into Leah), several annoying ones (going to the island during a festival results in the bottom screen blacked out) but lots of good bad ones. Examples include the infamous billionaire cheat, Lord Fa's cheat for unlimited wool, and that saving, turning off your DS and reloading the game clears out the entire mine floor of monsters (except, strangely, the moths).
In Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life you can cause your inventory to become flooded with several dozen copies of literally every item in the game.
In Harvest Moon 3 there's a shipping glitch where if you have two different types of items, and you had more of one than the other then you could ship more of the thing you had less of. So if you had 16 turnips, but one gold egg, then by this glitch you could ship 15 golden eggs.
Giving the Harvest Goddess a gift she likes on her birthday in Harvest Moon: A New Beginning has the code for a portrait change in the text box instead of an actual message.
A typo in DS has Cliff use <palyer> instead of the player's name during one scene.
Harvest Moon 64 had one of these, up to and including the fact that Natsume spelled their own name wrong on the title screen. The game's dialogue also isn't translated in a fluent manner and the grammar is sometimes off.
The names of the Harvest Moon DS characters were changed to match their original names, since the Japanese ones had new names for plot related reasons. This however caused a few small plot-holes.
Growing the Beard: Depending on who you ask, you may get different answers.
The general consensus are that the game started becoming really good with Harvest Moon 64, with its deep characterizations, rivals, and interactive festivals.
Some says it started in Harvest Moon: Back to Nature with the number of different collections (e.g. Beauty Stars, Cooking Recipes, House Extensions and Legendary Fishes) and unlockable contents (e.g. Special crops).
And finally, some are much happier with the way XSEED translated the games and how many of the games under their translation have opened up the possibility of queer representation.
Ash in Tale of Two Towns seems to talk about Cam a lot. Oddly, Cam never mentions Ash.
Can be accomplished between your male farmer and Kai in Harvest Moon: Back to Nature. Have him give Kai a lot of gifts, and then choose Kai to watch the fireworks with rather than any of the girls. The result is some wonderfully Ho Yay text about how "we saw a lot of fireworks together."
Zack with Won in the Mineral Town series. There's only one bed and they share the house...
Gray doesn't exactly turn down Pete if shown the Blue Feather in Friends of Mineral Town.
Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life and its rereleases games gave smaller seasons, long days that run the risk of getting boring, love interests with no rivals who are much quicker to woo, a much smaller town, a huge rucksack, and in general is very simplified compared to other games. Since it's less of a challenge, it worked as good way for newcomers to the series to get the hang of the general play through before going to the harder games.
Starting with Tale of Two Towns it was possible to customize your character to appear as the opposite gender, even if the game still treated them as what was picked. You could completely crossdress your character and then marry whomever of the "opposite" gender you chose.
Story of Seasons:Pioneers of Olive Town gained a following as it was the first major game where your characters can not only get into homosexual relationships, but also get married as well. This was also present in the Friends of Mineral Town and A Wonderful Life remakes, the latter of which allows characters to be nonbinary.
A blue feather is used in many of the games as a proposal gift (akin to an engagement ring). As a result, amongst gamers it gets referenced a lot and many people discuss wanting to propose (or be proposed to) with one in real life.
"This series hates little old ladies." Ellen in Harvest Moon 64, Nina in A Wonderful Life, and Eda in Story of Seasons all are sweet little old ladies who die. Ellen's can be avoided, but there's nothing you can do to keep the other two alive—Nina dies in between chapters and Eda's death is part of the plot.
Mis-blamed: A lot of people mistake Natsume as being the developers of the game series, when in reality they were only the localization company for the Americas. Marvelous (after many name changes and buyouts) are the developers. Thus errors and glitches in gameplay that aren't related to Natsume (such as the mailbox being locked in a lot of games) are from Marvelous but got Mis-blamed to Natsume. It can be unclear who caused what sometimes, though, as some glitches appear in the North American versions that aren't in the original Japanese. This is no longer on Natsume's head, as they were dropped as translators in 2014 and now XSEED Games does it all.
The Harvest Moon series isn't the first game to feature playable pregnancy; that accolade goes to the 1992 Super Famicom game, Dragon Quest V, which is the first one to accommodate this.
Claire wasn't the first female protagonist in the series—Sara was.
Claire debuted in a PlayStation game called Back to Nature: For Girl before appearing in the remake More Friends Of Mineral Town.
Fans of the older Harvest Moon games claim that Victor Interactive Software made the Harvest Moon games right, before it merged with Pack-In-Video Co. to become Marvelous Entertainment.
Many fans feel that the series began slumping after Wada left and Hashimoto took over.
Quicksand Box: Experienced Harvest Moon players will likely have an idea and clear goals in mind when they first start a game, but for a neophyte, the complete freedom and lack of concrete goals can be easily overwhelming. Grand Bazaar seems to be an intentional attempt to avert this trope.
In Harvest Moon: Tree of Tranquility/Harvest Moon: Animal Parade, Luna and Selena are not well liked by the fandom. The former gets more flak mainly because Gill's rivalry scenes with Luna have her act very immature to Gill's calm nature. (Doesn't help that if the player tells Luna that she likes Gill, she'll act like a complete bitch to you by saying, "I'm prettier than you." Not something you say to the player that can decide your fate and make you single because of it.) Almost all of the bachelorettes act pretty catty when the player discourages them from confessing, but they're really just hated because they marry the most popular guys in the game, similar to poor Shrinking Violet Sabrina from Harvest Moon: Island of Happiness.
The Slacker Rock from Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life (and the rereleases and remake) isn't exactly a well-loved character (especially since Jerk with a Heart of Gold Marlin is a very popular bachelor in comparison in Distaff CounterpartAnother Wonderful Life), but Harvest Moon DS (Cute) ranks up Rock's Casanova Wannabe traits to Jerkass levels. There's a scene in DS Cute where he'll try to ask the female player out despite the fact that you already have a husband—and if Rock is married to Lumina, there's a scene in both versions where he hits on Muffy, which really upsets Lumina when she walks in on it. In fact, some fans have been known to marry Lumina themselves in Harvest Moon DS and claim to have done so purely to save her from an unhappy relationship with Rock.
Some players dislike Rick from the Mineral Town series because he hates Kai, but he softens up a lot once he gets married, and even, eventually, is OK with his sister marrying him.
Muffy initially got a lot of hate from certain parts of the fandom because of her femme style, flirtatious nature with the player character, and mode of dress; this came off as catty Slut-Shaming. As the years have passed many fans have been a lot nicer to her and sympathetic to her love woes and feelings of sadness at getting older and seeking a stable relationship. Some even consider her to be a woobie, what with her seemingly chronic loneliness. And as of the A Wonderful Life remake, you can marry her regardless of gender.
Michelle in Harvest Moon: A New Beginning because of her third and final heart events, which reveal she doesn't love you at all and just considers you a sucker that's willing to give her free stuff—free expensive stuff. Due to it only being able to be seen if you start dating her, the hate is mostly from people who either dated her thinking she was the best bachelorette or people that read her event details on a website.
Seem to pop up with regularity in the DS games, including the cooking mechanics in Harvest Moon: Island of Happiness and Sunshine Islands, the animal mini-games in Harvest Moon DS and DS Cute, the storage system in Grand Bazaar and the farm expansion and tool upgrade systems in Two Towns.
For players that hoard items, any of the games that have it so that farm vesture (crops, milk, eggs, flowers, etc) rapidly drop in quality and become rotten in just a few days.
The damn ball in Harvest Moon DS and DS Cute. If you sell it, Thomas will come by, scold you and give you a new one. If you leave it out somewhere, Thomas again will come by and tell you that you lost the ball. You'll have to keep it in your backpack—which is space-consuming—so he will stop bothering you about it. Fortunately, after you've bought the cabinet, you can put it there permanently so you won't have to carry it and Thomas won't bother you about it.
Ironically, the whole marriage thing in Harvest Moon 3. People asked, even after this game came out, to be able to marry the other main character; in this game the opposite character is the only character available for marriage. People didn't want the wife to work while pregnant; play as a boy and the girl won't work for 60 days. (Play as a girl and you can't even play past marriage, since the game ends when you do get hitched.)
Marriage in general can be this under some circumstances. Sure, you get a boatload of happiness points and the possibility of children, but in the first game you can no longer stay up into the night to finish crucial farm work without losing your spouse's approval, and a lot of said spouse's dialogue gets replaced with very generic-sounding advice and lovey-doveyness, regardless of whom you married or whether it would be in-character for them to say that. If you're the kind of player who enjoys characters for their personality rather than their game play benefits, you might want to wait a year to see all of an NPC's unique dialogue and behavior before tying a ring on them.
Sequel Displacement: A large portion of the fandom in the 2000s were introduced to the series through Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life and Harvest Moon: Friends of Mineral Town. It's thus not uncommon for people to think the series began with either game—though with the release of certain games on Virtual Console, Nintendo Online, and Playstation Network it's becoming less frequent.
The fandom is completely devoted to this aspect of the series, and we ain't talkin' about what you do with your crops. Makes a certainly amount of sense, since the games are practically half Dating Sim anyway.
Because they lack rival couples or even hints of pairings, Harvest Moon: A New Beginning, Tale of Two Towns, and Story of Seasons (2014) are the few installments in the series where the bachelors/bachelorettes are shipped with each other as often as they are with the protagonist, as fans take to imagining who the likely pairings would be if they existed.
In many games, there's frequently little to nothing stopping you from marrying your beloved the moment you get their affection high enough (which means they'll agree to marry you even if that's really the first they've heard of your feelings for them), and you can still wait as long as you'd like to marry. Not so in Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life (and its Distaff CounterpartAnother Wonderful Life), where the plot hinges on your marriage. If you haven't proposed to someone by the end of the year, the game will simply throw the character with the highest affection at you when the end of the first year comes, and hit you with a Non-Standard Game Over if you turn them down. Celia and Muffy say they love you, but with Nami, she initially marries you for a more political reason if you don't propose to her.note She wants to stay in Forget-Me-Not Valley, but she's out of money and can no longer stay at the inn, making her only option to go back home and live with her drunken father. Marrying you means she would be able to stay there and prevents any unfortunate implications that an unwed woman staying at an unwed man's house may cause.
The latter point is especially egregious in Grand Bazaar, where the dialogue of the marriage candidates only changes when they're inside their houses/bedrooms, during certain times of the day. It only really changes until after marriage. Chances are, you might not notice it, which leads to this trope.
It's better executed in Harvest Moon: Animal Parade: as you build up hearts with a marriage candidate, they actually woo you back, giving you gifts, sending you love letters, and even going on dates with you!
Tale Of Two Towns is also better about building a more complex relationship. The way flower events work means you have to take your intended partner out on quite a few dates, and many of the suitors with families won't accept your proposal until their household all approves of you. If you're a girl and hold out on a guy, some of them will eventually bite the bullet and propose to you. On the other side of the coin, once you start going on dates, letting one partner monopolize your time long enough will start making the other jealous.
In Harvest Moon: A New Beginning, Story of Seasons (2014), and Story of Seasons: Trio of Towns you must officially "commit" to a bachelor/bachelorette with a dating ring before you can see their later heart events and work your way towards proposing. Unlike in Tale of Two Towns, both bachelors and bachelorettes will eventually confess to you and propose if you don't take the initiative.
In Harvest Moon 3, you can only marry Pete or Sara, the other protagonist that you didn't choose. What's even worse is that their personality isn't all that deep—and if you get married while playing as Sara the game ends after the wedding. At least you don't really have to think about the decision!
Some fans have this view on on the games after Harvest Moon 64. Others have this view on Harvest Moon: Back to Nature/Friends of Mineral Town/More Friends of Mineral Town, compared to Harvest Moon 64 and Harvest Moon DS/DS Cute—and those get compared to Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life (and Another Wonderful Life/Special Edition) and Friends of Mineral Town/More Friends of Mineral Town, with many complaints being that the games that came after the best one made things too "easy" or less "sad." Often, it can be traced back to whatever game the fan started with being the "best" in the series.
Many fans seem to feel that way with Harvest Moon: Island of Happiness and its many "innovations" (the all-stylus controls, the Fullness meter, the weather/crop growing mechanic, the reduced [compared to other games in the series] cooking system, etc.). Sunshine Islands adjusted some of these mechanics and was better received for it.
In general, fans don't take well to the system in later games like Tale of Two Towns, Harvest Moon: A New Beginning, and Story of Seasons (2014) in which the time passes in exact seconds, the method of catching bugs, and the quality rank of the items you pick up.
The art style has changed quite a lot over the course of the series. Just compare the bachelorettes and bachelors between the early 2000 titles and early 2010 titles. Some fans say the series is just adapting to the newer styles in Japanese anime and games while others think they're intentionally pandering to people who prefer bishonen and bishojo characters. The art style and character designs in newer titles is a source of debate with older fans often preferring the cuter, less flashy designs and later fans preferring the newer designs.
Values Dissonance: As the series has gotten more bishoujo, some of the bachelors and bachelorettes (like Luna, Mistel, or Fritz) have looked a bit too young. This squicks out many western fans but cute, Older Than They Look characters are popular in Japanese games.
What Do You Mean, It's Not for Little Girls?: The game was originally aimed at a gender-neutral audience, but you wouldn't know it by its heavily female fandom. The first few games had male-only protagonists but eventually they added females, either in a Game-Favored Gender manner (women couldn't play past marriage) or in their own Distaff Counterpart games. Modern games always have an option to chose your gender. Starting with Harvest Moon: Tree of Tranquility, incarnations of the game have began to look a lot more Bishoujo than before, with things coming to a head in the 2014 remake of the original game.
May: When I talk to Grandpa about Mom he grows all quiet. When I see Grandpa looking sad or angry, it makes me want to cry. Then Grandpa tells me I'm a good girl.
Poor Muffy seems heartbreakingly lonely at times, especially in games where the protagonist doesn't marry her and rival marriage isn't an option, like in Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life.
Grant in Harvest Moon DS, where he's obviously struggling to raise his daughter alone after his wife left them. Kate isn't grateful for it at all, berating him constantly and blaming him for every little thing that goes wrong. Admittedly, she is somewhat of a Jerkass Woobie herself, but the fandom still tends to dislike her for her treatment of her father nonetheless.
Marla the mermaid from Harvest Moon 3. She once had a lover named Rocky, who had a twin brother named Ricky. Ricky was envious and loved Marla too, so he basically kills Rocky because of this. Marla doesn't know this and waits for her lover. She's so lonely that she sends bottles out to sea on the slim chance that someone will find them, let alone send back messages that she may never find. Her whole story is pretty easy to miss too, meaning that she'll probably never meet anyone new if you don't find her.
An Iron Woobie example. If you raise Candace's heart level in Harvest Moon: Animal Parade while playing as a girl or when you're married as a boy, Candace says that Luna didn't cry when their parents died in order to help Candace and Shelly cope.
; that accolade goes to the 1992 Super Famicom game, Dragon Quest V, which is the first one to accommodate this.