- #HARVEST MOON DS FARM LAYOUT HOW TO#
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You have a non-gender-specific, badly-dressed rival called Jamie, whose constant progress has you striving to expand and develop your farm - even years down the line, he/she still nips at your heels. It also gives you goals beyond the usual simple and unfathomable compulsion to keep on farming. Farming feels like your farmer's job rather than the sole purpose of his existence there's much more choice in Magical Melody, and many more opportunities to things other than plant crops and raise livestock - things like socialising, dating, cooking, fishing and mining. The way your farmer conducts his business influences the town around him, causing new people to move in and set up shops until it becomes a bustling hive of activity.
#HARVEST MOON DS FARM LAYOUT HOW TO#
You've a choice of land, a choice of furniture for your house and a choice as to how to run your life, whether you'd rather spend the whole day farming, get most of your cash from fishing or mining or always leave a few hours free in the evening for an intoxicating 'juice' down Doug's bar.
Instead of being stuck with a run-down inherited plot of land miles away from your neighbours, you're given the choice to establish your farm in amongst the other villagers.
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Unlike its forebears, though, Magical Melody supports the base addictiveness and lovely nature that characterise the series with some real steps forward in structure. This is not the most efficient crop layout! Years of training confirms the superiority of the staple shape! It's terribly exciting for fans, but actually a bit overwhelming for newbies - expect a confusing hour or two spent figuring out how to use tools, eat meals and lay out the farm properly if you don't already have the benefit of six games' worth of instruction in virtual farming.
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It is a huge game, full of things to discover, drip-feeding you new festivals, tools, items and friends as you get on with your idyllic day-to-day farming life in Flowerbud Village. From the moment you harvest your first crop of turnips outside your tiny house until you're running a full-scale industrial operation with six cows, a flock of chickens and prize-winning pineapples, it grabs hold of your attention and keeps it until you've expended weeks wooing potential sweethearts, bought and furnished your own double-storey mansion and mined diamonds a hundred feet blow ground level. Like all Harvest Moon games, Magical Melody casts you as an honest farmer starting out in a new town.
Hear this, though, Rising Star: if you try to pull this trick again for the release of Tree of Tranquility later this year, I'm going to come after you with a hoe. Apart from marriage, every other aspect of this fantastic, addictive, captivating game has remained unchanged.
As a critic, though, the changes are unfortunate but essentially minor. As a female Harvest Moon fan, I'm incandescent that they've gone to the trouble to remove the option to play as a girl and marry one of the game's eleven bachelors for no good reason whatsoever (well, publisher Rising Star says it was to minimise delays, but after two years, who cares anymore?), and that this conversion isn't absolutely perfect. It's also an otherwise unchanged Wii conversion of the best Harvest Moon game ever made, released exclusively in Europe to make up for the fact that the Cube version never made it over here. Harvest Moon: Magical Melody is a port of a two-year-old GameCube title that makes little and entirely optional use of the Wii controls, runs at 50Hz and essentially removes half of the game by taking away the choice to be a girl farmer.