YMMV / Harvest Moon: Magical Melody

• Adaptation Displacement: The game was originally released in Japan exclusively as an Obvious Beta named "Shiawase no Uta". The international release is "Shiawase no Uta For World".
• Broken Base:
  • Much like The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker broke the Zelda fan base up, this games visuals are controversial. It's often complained that the bodies are disproportionate or they look like children. It doesn't help that it was preceded by the Darker and Edgier Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life.
  • Fans are torn on whether they like the characters or find them too bland. The characters come off as shallow due to having a limited amount of dialogue. Each has roughly one line that they almost always say until you get their friendship level up. This is presumably due to the large amount of characters. It's expected they had to cut corners to get them all in well enough.
• Epileptic Trees: Some fans interpret the rival couples as the grandparents of the main Harvest Moon 64 characters. The biggest point is that Ann (whose SNES version is explicitly 64 Ann and Gray's grandmother) is paired with Blue, who is an expy of Gray.
• Fan Nickname: "Melody" for the female protagonist (Canon Name "Amanda").
• LGBT Fanbase: Jamie is popular amongst nonbinary fans thanks to their androgynous appearance.
• Memetic Mutation: Dan's jarringly high-pitched voice is a joke amongst fans.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: The game is often deemed "Story of Seasons meets Animal Crossing" by fans due to its art-style. In 2020, Animal Crossing: New Horizons introduced some Farm Life Sim traits, such as the ability to till the land and grow vegetables.
• Nightmare Fuel: Meryl. Whatever is wrong with the girl is never stated but she's obviously terrified. She has lines like "Everyone's a liar. They say that growing up isn't scary.", "I planted...some flowers. While...planting, I forgot about many things.", "I don't want to die. It's scary. Why... do people die?", and "I think...about nothing but scary things when I sleep...I have nothing but bad dreams. But I don't have bad dreams when I sleep with Uncle Ronald." It's easy to presume her parents died however how they did is another issue, and the fact we never learn about her Dark and Troubled Past is all the more frightening. One cutscene has her expressing the belief that she won't go to Heaven because of something she did in her past. Again, we never learn anything about this.
• Older Than They Think:
  • The various references to the SNES and 64 titles are lost to many fans who began after Back to Nature.
  • The Super-Deformed design is often thought to be Marvelous riffing off of Animal Crossing (2001). The style is an evolution of the art-style used in games like Harvest Moon 64.
  • This isn't the first game where you can keep a pig, that would be Harvest Moon 3.
• Porting Disaster: Considering a significant part (if not the majority) of the fanbase is female, the Wii version forcing you to play as male is a very questionable decision.
• Scrappy Mechanic: The Wii version, for whatever reason, removed the option to play the game as a girl. This leaves half the marriage candidates completely unavailable. Needless to say, fans were not happy.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: The above mentioned removal of the girl option in the Wii version.
• Underused Game Mechanic: The whole competing with a rival farmer aspect doesn't really go anywhere, as there are no actual gameplay implications with it; you are never rewarded for shipping more than them, but are never punished either for getting outshipped. So you can just ignore it entirely and play at your own desired pace without missing out on anything.
• Vindicated by History: While always popular amongst gamers in general, the hardcore Harvest Moon fandom originally had a mixed reaction to the game. Fans critiqued the Super-Deformed art-style and felt the characters were too shallow compared to its contemporaries. Over the years, more people have warmed up towards the game. It's praised for featuring so many unique characters, its various Mythology Gags to previous games, its various recipes, and its plot.