Harvest Moon has been around for many years now and serves as a benchmark for the life simulator genre. Although farming sounds like an odd subject matter you are offered plenty to do than just farm crops. You have to smash rocks, cut up logs, take care of farm animals, go fishing, get married, extend your house and do plenty of dancing.
Several years later we come to Island of Happiness a slight story twist and plenty of improvements but still offers the same thing only to sacrifice the magic that made Harvest Moon popular.
Allow me to expand, you start off with just yourself and a shipping company manager's family along with a dried up farm and some happy little elves still watching over it. Your told to revive the farm and bring life back to the island but the fine print is that your going to be stuck here for a very long time and boy does the game know it.
Through at least half of the 1st season you go through a series of tutorials in an effort to understand… more »

Harvest Moon has been around for many years now and serves as a benchmark for the life simulator genre. Although farming sounds like an odd subject matter you are offered plenty to do than just farm crops. You have to smash rocks, cut up logs, take care of farm animals, go fishing, get married, extend your house and do plenty of dancing.
Several years later we come to Island of Happiness a slight story twist and plenty of improvements but still offers the same thing only to sacrifice the magic that made Harvest Moon popular.
Allow me to expand, you start off with just yourself and a shipping company manager's family along with a dried up farm and some happy little elves still watching over it. Your told to revive the farm and bring life back to the island but the fine print is that your going to be stuck here for a very long time and boy does the game know it.
Through at least half of the 1st season you go through a series of tutorials in an effort to understand everything, once you've learnt everything you can start growing your crops and spend the rest of the time gathering materials.
Now for the annoying bits. You can get both wood and stone material but your shed can only store wood until it's upgraded but when the carpenter arrives on the island his prices are beyond anything I could afford. The inventory screen uses touch screen controls so frequent mistakes become an annoyance. Controls are just as bad as you have to touch every area you want to use your tools on. The villagers don't really respond much when I try to speak to them.
Overall I didn't really mind, as long as my crops grew and I sold them for a decent price; the game will get going and the magic will return only for this next thing to happen. The crops didn't grow and died when the season changed. When that happened I stopped playing and sold it soon afterwards.
For all the innovation and DS functions Harvest Moon forces on you it loses all it's simplicity and magic. So what your left with is a broken game, so broken that it's beyond repair.