PSP Review: Harvest Moon Innocent Life

Have the stresses and strains of twenty-first century urban life got you down? Do you long for a simpler existence where the passage of time and the changing of seasons is more significant than the superficial pleasures of picking the next American Idol or downloading songs onto your iPod? Neither do we. But for those weirdos out there who really do long for the rural life, the Harvest Moon series from Natsume is undoubtedly just your kind of game. We have spent the past week living alternative lives in the lush countryside of Harvest Moon: Innocent Life, and we offer our impressions of the game here, even though we have not fully completed the adventure (the formal storyline could take over 100 hours to complete). Sadly, after 30 hours of play time, we found it impossible to achieve even our modest evil agenda of enslaving everybody on the island and forcing them to work on our mechanized mega-plantation.

This latest installment of Harvest Moon takes the series in a slightly new direction. Innocent Life is set on Heartflame Island, a technological utopia where robots and off-road vehicles share space with mysterious ruins and wizened old farmers. At the beginning of your “life”, which automatically assigns you a young male avatar, you will learn that the island was once inhabited by a pair of advanced civilizations, who left the secret to peaceful living enshrined in a set of ruins that can only be unlocked through harmonious cultivation. In other words, you must farm your little heart out to save the island and its inhabitants, while learning the secret of life along the way. Thus, Innocent Life features a more rigid storyline than any previous Harvest Moon title, which may delight those who wished for more structure and annoy those who enjoyed the open-ended character of the other games.

As per the previous Harvest Moon Titles, everybody you meet on the island is incredibly nice. Even the most villainous characters in the game (played by a pair of modern capitalist suits) will do little more to your character than offer thinly-veiled insults via conversation. The entire game feels like one of those towns that populate Japanese console RPGs, where players can rest up, talk to the locals, and engage in some minor entertainments before heading back out onto the battlefield. The real difference with these games being that Innocent Life has no monsters to defeat, and takes place entirely in a supportive atmosphere where the locals seem genuinely nice, and really don’t mind when you barge into their houses to chat at 7 am.

Farming in Innocent Life is a curious blend of nature simulation and Japanese RPG (Developer Arte Piazza is best known for their work on the Dragon Quest games). At the beginning of the game, cultivating crops is a simple drudgery of steps: tilling the soil, planting seeds, watering and collecting the results after a set number of days have passed. You interact with your crops the same way that you interact with people in an RPG, by walking up to them and pressing the triangle button. This somewhat clunky control scheme works well enough, but made us long for the much more intuitive point-and-click interfaces of PC simulation games like Sim City. At first, the farming system does not offer very much complexity, but as you progress through the game, the introduction of new types of crops and farming techniques does open up some additional choices for the player. Moreover, weather effects become increasingly important when attempting to grow fragile crops such as strawberries and flowers.

One of the biggest pleasures of Innocent Life is simply walking (or driving) around and exploring the beautiful landscape of the island. The game world is presented in a fixed 3/4 overhead view, and all objects are rendered in 3D, with some nicely-drawn watercolor textures to bring out the fanciful and picturesque style of the game. Given the beauty of the presentation, it is slightly frustrating that the game offers no ability to change the camera position and look around in first-person view. While the locked camera is constraining, it works well enough and rarely leaves your player in a position where it is difficult to see what is going on. We did not encounter any framerate skips, and only noticed minimal loading times during our testing.

Overall, we enjoyed the non-linear concept behind Harvest Moon: Innocent Life. Growing crops is strangely addictive, even though the activity is not always clearly bound to larger game objectives (money quickly becomes redundant to progressing in the game). On the other hand, for a game that offers an unprecedented level of player freedom, the interactions and possibilities within the game world feel somewhat shallow. Interaction with characters on Heartflame Island rarely involves anything more than clicking through scripted conversations, and farming is dictated by a turn-based mechanic that does not demand excessive amounts of strategy on the part of the player. Harvest Moon: Innocent Life remains a title that will likely have limited appeal beyond fans of the niche, but those looking for a different and slower-paced style of game will find a lot to like here.

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Things we didn’t like:

Final Score: 7/10