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The Series In General
Your character is a descendant of the Harvest Goddess
Why else would she do you so many favors and grant you so many boons? She looks after her own. Of course, this puts the games where you can marry her in a whole new light...- Look at a lot of the various deities in pretty much every mythology, that kind of stuff was very common.
The main Character is Actually an All Powerful Dictator/Messiah/Time Lord/God/Haruhi/Ect...
{S)He communicates with spirits, collects mystical objects, regularly talks to and orders a goddess to do his/her bidding, and has brain washed everyone with "gifts" into doing what ever (s)he wants.- Well, damn.
People in the land are sterile.
Think about it. In whichever town/village/valley/whatever you choose to play in, it's rare if any of your rivals and their spouses to actually have kids. Take Mineral Town for instance: Cliff and Ann are married for 80 years and have no kids.Sure, maybe they don't want to have more kids, but all five couples? A little unlikely. The reason why your character can have kids is because you're new to the land, so whatever makes the other people sterile (the water, radiation...) hasn't effected you yet. It will eventually, that's why you usually only have one kid.Whatever it is that affects them, it only affects your gender; that's why you can have kids with someone from the land.
- Note that this is not the case in HM64, IoH, Animal Parade, and Tree of Tranquility.
There is no rule against clergy of the church of the Harvest Goddess marrying, you just can't marry the priests in Harvest Moon games mostly because there would be nobody to preform the service.
And eventually, once enough games are concurrent with other games, the remakes will allow you to call a priest from another town to preside over The people of [insert location where game takes place here] are cursed to be forever young.
The Harvest Goddess must have done something to make them effectively ageless/immortal, or at least age VERY slowly (Like when Ellen dies: she was probably slowly and painfully dying for thousands of years and couldn't do anything about it.). It's a horrible life because you never mature and would probably run out of things to do. That's why a lot of people seem to wander aimlessly by the time you show up: their lives have become empty until another person showed up.- Except forget-me-not valley from Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life, where characters age.
Their world has an Alternate History from ours
Obviously they must have in one way or another been affected by their magical beings other then religion wise. Also, their world seems quite a mash of Europe and Japan. The main religion from where the games are set are a mash of Shintoism and Catholicism. Quite a few characters are European or at least not Japanese (as shown by their names in Japan, and their designs) and quite a few are Asian (mostly in the Wii games). A lot of the games are distinctly European, yet Japanese food and festivals are still ever to present. Something in their world caused Japan and Europe to become comfortable with each other, or possibly they're even one nation 3DS will be a remake of 64
It has been 12 years, and the 3DS has quite a few remakes of its sleep as of pre-release.- It will also have Sara as the female protagonist.
- Jossed; The two released 3DS games never went back to the 64 games, though there's been two remakes so far.
There are multiple Harvest Goddesses and Kings.
They look different in most games because they are different individuals, being regional deities. This also makes the WMG at the top of the page less squicky, since the MC can be descendant of a Harvest Goddess without being related to the one in his/her game. Harvest Moon takes place in the same world as Rune Factory
But in present day where as in Rune Factory is the middle ages, or even further back. Since the worlds work the same, the only thing is. "Where did the monsters go? Where did Rune magic go?" Once you find an answer for those two questions, you can just accept that the cities and towns in RF grew into large metropolises that exist in Harvest Moon but never see (Big Cities are forbidden in Harvest Moon games aside from mere mention)Possibly at one point in the future of Rune Factory there is a magical cataclysm which destroys all the gates leading to the Forest of Beginnings trapping the monsters there forever, and destroys magic itself. Except for a young woman who used her magic to protect the Elves, Half-monsters, Humans, Dwarves and Univer from the magical Cataclysm, but in the process despite she saves them, all except the humans were transformed into sprites who since then vowed loyalty to her, who in her selfless act was ascended to the role of Harvest Goddess. The humans thrive and continue to survive. Everything that happens is nothing but a figment of the main character's imagination.
Think about it; as several fans of the series will have noticed, virtually nothing happens unless you initiate it. Rather than the concept of the entire valley/island/town/land revolving their lives around you, it would almost make more sense if the main character caused or was the victim of some tragic event in the past; in order to escape the guilt/trauma of whatever happened, they created an alternate reality in which the world revolved around them and they were able to play hero all the time. Your protagonist is in purgatory.
Similar argument to the above - everything revolves around you. You initiate everything that happens in the town, right down to when other people get married. You can be a good person or a bad person, reinforced by things like the Golden Lumber, which effectively punishes you for Hubris. The people surrounding you have no lives of their own and are totally static until you intervene. Further points:- The actual gameplay, whilst absorbing for the player, must be mind-numbingly depressing for the protagonist. He has no access to any kind of distraction. The people around him only ever say a handful of different things in their entire lives. He can't leave. All he has to do is farm, mine, fish, and occasionally give gifts to people. Friendships and romantic relationships are at first a change, and then settle back into the cycle of repeated phrases and events.
- In most games, you live for years and years and nothing ever changes. In some cases, time doesn't even pass when you're indoors. Nobody ages, changes, moves in or away, or dies. Including you. There is no escape.
- This explains why in AWL, you die so young: you've escaped purgatory, having worked off your sins, and go to heaven where real people await you.
- I got most of this from playing FOMT, which I would point out is even worse than most considering the forms of 'entertainment' on offer: there is only one variety television channel, its episodes are two minutes apiece, only four of them are actually stories and it repeats every year. You have access to a tiny amount of records, and the music box you gain possession of s perpetually broken. Finally, all the books in the library are on farming.
SNES & GB/GBC
Pete had two children in canon
One was the 64 protagonists father or mother and another was one of the bachelorettes parents. 64, Back To Nature, and (More) Friends Of Mineral Town
Ellen in 64 is really Ellen 2
AKA she's not the Ellen from the original games, but her daughter who they named after their mother. What she said her job was is different from Ellen in SNES. That would also bring the potential Brother–Sister Incest / Kissing Cousins Unfortunate Implications of 64 into distant relatives, similar to the potential in DS and Cute.- Possibly Jossed since Ellen's grandmother is years older than the heroes father.
Someday there WILL be a remake of Harvest Moon 64
- I mean come on...This is the most beloved HM title out there.
Island Of Happiness/Sunshine Island
Charlie is part Harvest Sprite.
How else do you explain how a kid who can't be older than Eight can create talismans than can double your stamina, regenerate it, make people like you better, give you super speed and even slow down and speed up time?Karen and Popuri are "more than in-laws".
Popuri's glad Rick didn't come with them because he'd keep her from spending quality time with his wife.- Alternatively..
Popuri is Claire's girlfriend but is covering up using Kai
The main character can read minds.
Think about it. Maybe they can't read "minds," but they can read their hearts. That's why you have that page, the one that lists how close you are with people.Perhaps the player had a near-death experience when their ship was struck by lightning, and now they have this power. The male lead dyes his hair.
Think abou it: How could your/his wife have a brown-haired kid if they're both blonds or some other recessive gene? (Other than the idea of an affair, but this is Harvest Moon, people. Obviously, the boy has brown hair and just dyes it for some reason. (maybe to look different from other protagonists?)As to how to manages to get this dye, Chen did it?
- Genetics do not work that way. No matter how the parent changes themselves artifically, be it plastic surgery or hair-dying, the offspring will always inherit the original genetics of their parent. Believe it or not, but even if the chances are very slim in percentage, it is possible for a child who has two blonde parents to be born with black/brown hair, same with the eyes. (Parents have blue, child has brown.) It's most likely the same case here.
Taro is an older version of Pete.
Seriously, just look at him.- The manual and official sources stop just short of stating this outright.
Tree of Tranquility/Animal Parade
Julius has Single-Target Sexuality
He's every bit as camp as he looks, but like most people, he's got some "flexibility" (paging Kinsey). If it's Hello, [Insert Name Here] or Candace, it's OK.Alternatively...
Julius is actually straight as an arrow, but feels more free to express himself in a small community.
The Harvest Moon towns are generally pretty friendly, accepting places, and everybody knows everyone else pretty well. They're more like really big extended families, and thus they learn to deal with everyone else's weirdness. When Julius was growing up, he discovered he liked fashion and gems and other "girly" things. Because there probably weren't too many other kids around, he didn't get teased, and, in adolescence, there wasn't as much xenophobia (in the literal sense of fear of the different), so he didn't feel the need to hide his true self out of the assumptions others might make. And, as he grew up, everyone got to know him and who he was and was perfectly OK with him.Sure, Real Life small towns can be close-minded too, but the HM games are such a Sugar Bowl it's hard to believe that of one of them.
Julius used to be a member of a Visual Kei band.
It would certainly explain his FABULOUSNESS.- That... actually makes so much sense, it's scary. Though it doesn't explain why he went from music/fashion to... metalworking.
- After a couple years of performing, he realized he was more interested in the fashion and jewelry aspect than the music, with particular emphasis on the jewelry, so he decided to focus on that. There you go.
Toby is Gin Ichimaru from Bleach.
He manages to survive the whole series and eventually retires to a nice life spent fishing. Mira's husband is/was a mayor.
In the town's graveyard, there are many graves, but you can only read three. One is for Tom, who came back as a ghost to search for his lost love Anna; Mary; and the "Graves of mayors past". Since we can confirm Mira had a husband, not a wife, her husband's grave would have to be scattered about in the many mayor's. Jin was going to be female, but still the other half of Anissa's Rival/Love Interest pairing.
Someone on the Headscratchers page mentioned that Jin looks like a girl. It is true that his concept art is extremely androgynous, and seems plainly feminine if you misread the chain holding the sides of his lab coat in as an underbust shadow. Jin is also a Gender-Blender Name. According to the Harvest Moon wiki, Anissa will follow the romance events with a female protagonist, only stopping after "infatuation" but immediately before the option of marriage. Ergo, Jin was almost a lesbian. Their son was artificially conceived or used a sperm donor or something, if he wasn't adopted (possibly from a geographically distant family member, in the case of adoption). Both have been used before, the latter with Best Friend Ceremony adoptions and the former with livestock fertility potions.
Jin is Jin.
Same names, and don't tell me you don't ee the resemblance.
◊ It's utterly uncanny. Alternatively, Jin is Jin's ancestor.