3DS User Reviews

Poorly written/coded and created after the split with Marvelous. Court gave them the title but they did not have any of the development staff. Original development staff of previous Harvest Moon games now create a game called Story of Seasons. Has none of the charm of previous games. Characters are bland. Disappointing for sure and the story was nonexistent compared to previous entries by the original developers. Change over to Story of Seasons to find your satisfaction.

It's an okay game, don't get me wrong and as someone that enjoys these types of games, I wasn't disappointed. But those who are here for a good story and fleshed out characters may be disappointed.

Pros +Very streamlined controls +In depth crop system that allows for huge variety of crops +Entire mountain to cultivate & develop +You play direct role in town economy, you provide flowers to florist to sell, produce & food to restaurant, etc +Charming characters each w individual story line to unlock +Quests give constant purpose to each day +Cute story that has major influences on world & develops relationship w characters +Overall very simple relaxing game to pick up and play at the end of a stressful day Cons -Art quality is poor with hardly any detail, seems little effort was put in here -Very limited marriage choices -Can only have cows, sheep and chickens as livestock -No tool upgrades, limits how much you can farm (harvest sprites can do a lot of work for you if you befriend them but only work every other day and take weekends off...) -Festivals are incredibly bland (no decorations!), lacking in variety and repetitive. -Nitpicking but why have the dog involved in herding if it doesn't actually do anything? You still need the harvest sprite to move cows & sheep out of the barn (can't let chickens out for some reason) -In all but the crop system it is a huge step back from previous HM games content wise, very limited content here Summary: Lost Valley if reviewed without previous Harvest Moon games in mind is a charming little title that is relaxing and enjoyable to play. Its simplicity and ease to pick up makes it very accessible to a wide variety of gamers. However an HM veteran may feel cheated at the massive lack of content compared to previous games. I would have rated it at least a 5 as I had and continue to have a good time playing this game despite the significant downgrade in content compared to past titles, but the art is just so painfully bad with such little effort put in. Still I would recommend if you want a simple & cute farming game to pass the time with.

As is obvious, this game did not do well. However some still enjoyed it and I will focus on the reasons why I did. This game makes you work for everything. Not just unlocking new characters and areas, you have to work to unlock each season. It t is slow paced, be warned, but I found it to be rewarding and I really enjoyed the progression. I felt more motivated to fulfill objectives in this game than other HM games. I also liked the new concept of altering your environment and using this to create new crop mutations. I wont recommend this game to everyone, but if you enjoy sandbox environment crafting and slower paced games, then maybe you are the type to enjoy this game. I certainly did.

Harvest Moon: The Lost Valley is an ugly, watered down, and ultimately boring installment in this otherwise mostly great series. After a big step in the right direction with Harvest Moon 3D: A New Beginning there was an even bigger regression with this game. First, the graphics are downright terrible. Who thought giving everyone huge eyes and a chibi design was a good idea? I bet they thought it looked "cute" but all I see is "demonic and desperate". That's not to mention the Lost Valley itself. You'll be spending 2/3's of your time in this desolant waste land of re-used textures and terrible rendering. Until a few hours in, this place is empty. What happened to the varied landscapes and non-ugly characters in A New Beginning? Secondly, when you compare this to other Harvest Moon games, it's flaws become highly apparent. Giving you all farmland and no town to explore is a terrible idea, NPCs are few and far between and are so boring, the 3D landscape makes harvesting and watering plants a needless hassle, I could go on but I'll just say this, it's bad when the first game in the series, an SNES game, has more enjoyment and depth than this full-priced, 3DS game. Lastly, this game is borderline sleep inducing it's so boring! Unlike the highly addictive gameplay of the previous installments, there's no incentive to farm because it's so time consuming and uninteresting. I don't care if I'm broke or if I freeze to death because unlike other installments farming isn't streamlined or interesting. The only positive I can give this game is it isn't a glitchy mess and MIGHT be a better value than say something like FarmVille on the App Store. But even then, that games only costs a few dollars, you might have to pay over fourty dollars for this steaming lump of bile! Don't buy this game, if you want a proper 3DS Harvest Moon experience get A New Beginning or at the very least download a classic Harvest Moon title off the E-Shop's Virtual Console. Even the minimal Harvest Moon Gamebiy games will give you more enjoyment than this.

the game is similar to the old snes game it makes the player an even more free world to explore and change while natsume tries to make the game a more ope world farming game story of seasons make's the game about the connection's you make with the people and both have something to offer while i think natsume is experimenting to find their own way two different harvest moon games for two different groups of audience.

As a fan of the series i really think this game shouldn't be called Harvest moon, it lacks the feeling. the new aspects aren't bad but i feel like it replaced the core that should be in a harvest moon game. it's disappointing and if you are new to the series, don't buy this game, spent your money well and buy one of the older entries.

Having read about the split in the series known as Harvest Moon I was initially highly dubious about this first attempt by Natusme at their own farming game. However reading reviews about the actual game rather than those just upset at the split convinced me to give it a go. This game reminds me of the original Harvest Moon on the SNES as the only thing to do is farm. You can grow as many crops as you like (I currently have over 100 growing at once) and put them wherever you like in the valley. The growing conditions, height of the land, swamp or normal, season etc, can affect your crops giving you mutations. There are meant to be 10 types of each crop due to these mutations and I must admit this feature is the one that really made me try the game. At the beginning it is hard to get mutations as the valley is stuck in winter. However I have accidently made some flower mutations and one crop (strawberry). I am really looking forward to finding out what different conditions cause these effects so I'm avoiding walkthroughs so I get the thrill of discovering them for myself. Basic animals are available, cows, sheep, chickens, and horses. There are areas you can mine at some point and fishing is possible. These are more extras though than the huge mines seen in some previous installments like Animal Parade and Tree of Tranquility. There isn't a town to visit, people just come into the valley or outside your house on certain days of the week. If you love spending time in HM chatting to all the people in town, mining, fishing etc rather than watering crops and caring for cows then this isn't the game for you. If you are a bit of a hermit farmer like me then you will probably love this game like I do as it goes backs to the sheer basics of farming.

The game has very few things to do, so you spend a LOT of time doing the same things over and over. Someone may say that this is the default for Harvest Moon games, but when you wake up at 6am and finish watering you field on 1pm you'll know something is wrong. The minecraft element only makes things worse, you can't build with the terrain, you'll only be leveling the ground to get to somewhere, and if you don't you spend a few good minutes trying to make your way by jumping around. There is only a few different environments, and the one I missed the most was the city, NPCs just hang around of your house for no reason. Events and Quests are rare but annoying, Fishing event? Just catch a few of the same fishes. Quest for someone? She asks for a fruit that will take 15 days, and then a few more days waiting for the NPC to appear. You have to complete the main story to unlock all the seasons, meaning you spend the entire first year in the snow. I believe this is the HM game with the least content ever. Anyway gave it a three because of my passion for HM, I was able to - at least - try to move on in the game and not get pissed with it.

I'm honestly slightly disappointed with HM:TLV. It doesn't really even feel like Harvest Moon at all. Being a very huge fan of the series I had high expectations... Then again I usually base my ratings off of my favourites. If you're searching for the authentic HM experience then this won't be the game for you. I'm giving it a 4 because I haven't fully completed the game, and have some hope left.

You've never played a Harvest Moon game quite like this, Because this isn't Harvest Moon! It's a cheap knock off with nothing but the name! The TRUE Harvest Moon is Song of Seasons!

Sorry. This game is terrible. First things first, I am not even going to consider this as a Harvest Moon game. Natsume is acting like a child and using the name to produce their own version. This game plays like a cheap farming simulator flash game you can find on the internet. It attempts to incorporate elements from Minecraft, causing me to label it as yet another crappy Minecraft knock off. Anyone over the age of 6 will find this game boring, annoying to control, and laughable. On a side note, Story of Seasons, the REAL Harvest Moon is coming out March 31st! It is already selling well and getting favorable reviews in Japan. Can't wait!

Anyone wanting a new twist on the HM series, with more freedom of creation and a more relaxing environment, I highly suggest this game. As a long-time fan I was pleasantly surprised at the ability to shape most of my world however I wanted it. You still have your crops, trees, animals, and romance, but also get the ability to landscape your world, helpful skills to teach your animals, and a new interesting take on how to breed new types of crops. While the game-play is a bit slow paced for some, it was kind of nice to not have to run around like a chicken with it's head cut off in order to get things done every day. I for one am happy to see this new direction they're taking and with a bit of tweaking, this experiment of theirs could really enhance the series in future releases. Please Natsume, do not fear the reviewers who abhor change. Keep the new world design aspects, speed up the pace a bit. This new combination of world design, story and farm life is much welcomed. + large world(valley) to landscape and design + helpful skills/traits for pets to earn + relaxing atmosphere which DOES still feel like HM + interesting new crop mechanics (needs some fine tuning) - controls could use fine tuning - story line could be smoothed out, characters could use a bit more depth - no ability to experiment with recipes

A warning to users out there. This is not the same Harvest Moon series as previous ones. If you want to buy the next harvest moon game look for "Story of Seasons", it should come out in Jan or Feb 2015. Natsume had a falling out with the developers and since they owned the title of the game, they decided to use it to make a copycat.

Dismal. When the game first began I thought it was just really slow, even for a HM game. But as the seasons passed and I kept playing it became clear that yes, this really was all there is to it. No shops, no village, no sweeping storylines or romance subplots, just a single house with a single gigantic, tedious-to-maintain field; dig, plant, fetch quest, repeat. Forever.

Doing my homework and knowing what type of game this was going to be before taking off the packaging really helped to set my expectations for what it is - a combination of Minecraft + Harvest Moon with neither of the fully fledged features of either one, but what's there compliments one another so that I didn't really notice what was missing. Too many reviewers have gone in with a different set of expectations and given ridiculously low scores for a percieved shallow experience that didn't meet their classic Harvest Moon gaming familiarity. Rather than sit back and allow a massive corporation like Marvelous AQL (and their American publishing subsidiary XSEED) to strong arm the franchise away that they helped create here in the US, they've bravely taken the Harvest Moon franchise in an evolved and exciting direction (of course with missteps that any new game engine or IP would trip over, hence the 8/10). I can't wait to see what content they'll be bringing with future DLC and improvements they'll make with a longer development cycle now that the groundwork has been laid in this exciting reboot, it looks like the future of Harvest Moon is bright!

I should also mention that Harvest Moon 3D:The Lost Valley is actually a spin off game of the main Harvest Moon series. Let me do a quick explanation of this. The developers Marvelous AQL are the ones who develop the Harvest Moon games, and for the longest time Natsume would be the ones to localize it under the name Harvest Moon, as it was called Farm Story in Japan. However since Marvelous AQL recently purchased XSEED, XSEED has now become Marvelous of America (still referred to as XSEED). Marvelous AQL saw no reason to have Natsume continue to localize the series in the United States as they now have an in house publisher in the states that proved their worth with the localization of a few Rune Factory games. XSEED are now the ones who localize Farm Story in the United States, however XSEED does not have the rights to the name Harvest Moon, as that belongs to Natsume. So instead of the next mainline game being called Harvest Moon: Connect to a New World, it is simply being called Story of Seasons. So Natsume decided to use the Harvest Moon name to make their own farming sim under the same name, and thus Harvest Moon: The Lost Valley was born. However how does it stand up to the main series? Well Natsume bragged that this game would be akin back to the older games such as Harvest Moon 64, Back to Nature and Friends of Mineral Town. So let’s see if this game is able to stand on its own as an actual game in the Harvest Moon series. So without any further to do let’s get on with the review! Controls Now in my opinion a major driving factor to how good a Harvest Moon game is how fluid a game controls and how easy things are to do. In traditional Harvest Moon games you have a separate tool for everything you need to do, and to do what you need to do you have to swap between tools. This game decides to do away with traditional tool swapping and instead favors a single button method for most of your farming needs. So you press the a button to till the ground, the a button again to plant your seeds, press it again to water the plants and then you press it one more time to add fertilizer. Straight forward right? Well not exactly. You have to be lined up perfectly with the square you want to interact with. I can’t tell you the countless amount of seeds I have planted by mistake when trying to harvest a vegetable, or how much fertilizer I have wasted thinking I was about to water a crop but instead had the wrong one highlighted. Also another annoyance I found was that when you plant a seed you have to open a menu and select which seed you want to plant, however if you miss a square and instead either water, fertilize or harvest a crop, you have to go through a menu selection again and pick the seeds you wish to plant again. This may seem like I am being picky, however in other Harvest Moon entries, doing all this was a lot more stream lined as you had to actually select the tools you wanted to use beforehand and if you wanted to switch you had to manually do that giving the player a more sense of control. Now the game also has a bit of a world edit function on where you can either dig up or fill blocks on the ground. The game is trying to be like Minecraft where you can try and sculpt the landscape in any way you see fit. However like with farming these controls are still downright clunky, and you cannot do basic things such as plant seeds or even jump while in this mode. The camera movement isn’t too bad in this game, however there were several times where the camera would get stuck in positions that were almost impossible to play in, such as in higher altitudes. Overall the controls felt rather clunky and took a while to get used to. Not something I have come to expect in a Harvest Moon game. Features In the features department this game is also lacking. Sure you probably get the biggest amount of farm land in any Harvest Moon game to date (and even that’s debatable with how much extra land you can buy in games such as Magical Melody) but outside of that, that’s it really. There is no central town to explore like in other entries in the game, you are stuck in a snow covered mountain that will remain snow covered for the first several hours of your play through. And this right here is what bothers me the most about The Lost Valley, you constantly hear about this place called Hillside, the town in which everyone lives in, but you can never go to it, you are stuck seemingly forever ontop of this mountain. One thing I loved about other Harvest Moon games is being able to explore towns, and interacting with people, and that actually brings me to another gripe I have about this game. The player’s interaction with other people in the game. What I loved about Harvest Moon is the ability to befriend people through various different dialogues, events and gift giving. This game gets rid of all of that to a simple talk to person once a day to raise their chemistry level, and do the occasional request for them to increase it faster. This wouldn’t be too bad if the dialogue trees with everyone feel somewhat uninspired, and they can get very repetitive. You know what I liked about Rune Factory 4? The expansive dialogue tree. In that game it took me almost two in game years to start getting repeat conversations with people, and even then there would be triggers at certain points of the game to add onto that branch in the tree. Then coming into this game it feels like I am talking to robots. Also the Bachelorettes in this game are nothing to get excited over either. I think the one I was remotely interested in was Catherine, but outside of that April and Emily really didn’t interest me too much. Now I am not going to complain about the amount of bachelorettes in this game as A Wonderful Life only had three as well, and A Wonderful Life is probably my favorite game in the series. So overall from the whole lack of town to very minimal player to character interaction the features in this game to me feel very lacking. Story, and Flow This games story is actually very basic for a Harvest Moon game. The Harvest Goddess is in trouble and you have to awaken the Harvest Sprites to bring her back. However along with that you also have to restore the four seasons to the valley and to do so you have to go to hell and back (and no I am not kidding with that either) to get the gems to bring back the seasons. On paper this doesn’t seem like a bad idea, however the execution is done in a very sloppy manner. The story does not progress at a steady rate, and you sometimes will have to wait longer than others to trigger different events to progress in the story. Normally story progression is not a big deal, but in this case it feels like you are punished for not progressing the story further with the endless winter, and lack of access to features and tools. I went through the entire first season and I only managed to bring back spring with about two days left, and I still haven’t unlocked all the tools and features. This is a problem because you unlock abilities that require you to use the tools and features you have yet to unlock in the first part of the game. So overall the story is ok, but its execution is poorly done. Final Verdict Natsume set themselves up on a high pedestal by saying this Harvest Moon game would be a return to the series roots. However they apparently need to go back and play those said games they were trying to mimic as they seemed to have forgotten a lot of features that make the Harvest Moon series great. Such as the social aspect of the series. However if you are a person who just enjoys the farming aspect of a Harvest Moon game, I would say go ahead and pick this game up, however even then I have a hard time saying that because farming at times feels unrewarding and the tools are locked beyond some wonky one button press controls. As a farming game by itself I would probably have scored this game a little higher, and if Natsume did not set themselves on such a high pedestal I would probably have been a bit more understanding. However the clunky controls, the lack of social interaction with other players and the overall bad flow of this game leads me to give this game a 4/10. It’s a noble attempt, however Natsume went into this a bit too fast. If they had taken their time to make this game and kept a lot of features that have been staples in the Harvest Moon series it probably would have been a much better game. Final Score:4/10 +Large farm +Extensive customization -Clunky controls -Frame rate drops -lack of social integration -robotic like characters -Horrible flow of progression.

If you like Minecraft and are less than 8 years old, you'll love this game. If you're a long-time fan, you may want to stay away. As a fan of the Harvest Moon series, I was very disappointed in the huge changes made. I was so frustrated because I was expecting another A New Beginning, but instead got a Minecraft for tots. The world is just one giant unrealistic landscape of blocks. You pretty much have to dig and build your own stairs to get from one end of the farm to the other. On top of that, from the get-go, it's winter! But oddly enough you can still plant and watch crops grow. To top things off further, there's a typo on the back of the game case.

In a nutshell, The Lost Valley feels oversimplied and lacking the richness and depth that makes this series unique. It feels as though it's designed for a ten year old, leaving the older fans longing for what they remember spending hours playing. As a longtime fan of this series, I preordered the game from Natsume, expecting the Harvest Moon goodness that I've grown accustomed to. It's always been more than a farm simulation game - the more you play, the more you unlock, and the little cut scenes with the NPCs are always so cute. When I started the game, the graphics felt odd, lacking even. While I enjoy Minecraft as much as the next person, they captured that feeling while abandoning that which made the game feel like a beloved addition to the Harvest Moon series. Yes you have land to till, plants to water, Harvest sprites to save... (and the sprites are as adorable as ever) the overall feel of the map seemed too boxy and lackluster for the series. And no longer do you have to remember the NPCs favorite things, the foods they dislike... gift giving has been eradicated entirely from the game, which had been a core part of the game play. Of the features that Natsume abandoned, this has to be one of my least favorite changes. I also dislike the fact that there is no longer a town to explore.. your stores are literally just NPCs that walk around in front of your house on certain days. Gone are the days that you go to the clinic or the Marimba farm... It saddened me that "visiting" the store was as simple as talking to them while they parade around in my front yard. Stacking land and shaping the map the way you wanted sounded appealing to me before I played the game, as I was excited to have something similar to Magical Melody in that regard. But shaping the land becomes cumbersome after laying down the work to get your buildings and such situated. All these things aside, the game is still fun to play... as long as you don't have the mindset that it's comparable to its predecessors. If you're wanting a farm simulation game where you get to change the map, this is the game for you... If you're looking for a new game with nostalgic ties to games you played years ago, this isn't it. Pull out your Wii and play Animal Parade or Magical Melody. Natsume seemed determined to steer away from as much original content as possible with this installment. My hope is that Story of Seasons will have the classic feel that I was hoping for.