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A dystopia created farm sim actually sounds really awesome. I mean it would be basically the ending of Idiocracy just turned into a game. Also if they really wanted to have you travel around everywhere but still keep your farm why not just make teleporters or maybe have a spaceship that is your farm? I really wasn't prepared for the shrink ray of all things to deus ex machina our way out of that problem.
@@Enchie They thought they could carry on by IP alone, forgetting that they're not Call of Duty and the kind of workaday serene gameplay the brand was built on can in fact be buggered up pretty substantially if done poorly. And now we get to see just how poorly they grasped the concepts of things like gameplay loops and intrinsic player reward.
2:28 thing is, I can actually see a decent game being made around that concept, you just gotta take it a different way: Farm Boat. Imagine, being a farmer/sailor in a world that's mostly islands, going from one place to another and selling your fruits and milk to wherever pays the most for it, snagging the occasional rare animal or plant in the long-forgotten ruins of some society or something. Maybe even add in mechanics for dealing with (or even *being* ) pirates, make the fauna and flora really weird to make them part of the mechanics, etc.
And now I remember that I have a copy of Rune Factory: Tides of Destiny lying around. Not quite what you described, moreso a portal system and a giant statue you walk across the ocean.
80% of that is in "Raft". Nobody wants your stuff but since you're starving constantly, you'll want to keep it anyways. Even flirts with Modded Minecraft levels of piping, fuel processing and automating vertical farms towards the end.
It's probably more bland than anything. It doesn't excel at anything, but looks competent enough to actually do something. The sad part is it does nothing. It's not broken or anything, just bland.
@@twinkiesmaster69 Literally Randy Pitchford. He left a USB drive at a medieval themed restaurant in Texas that had private information about Gearbox in it along with Randy's personal collection of pornography. One of which happened to be squirt porn. He admitted it in an interview.
"So what you're saying is that I should spend yet another 100 hours playing Stardew Valley instead?" "Well, not per say but-" "Too late! Already doing it!"
I appreciate how Yahtzee used this review as an opportunity to say "Hey, did you realize this relatively famous simulator series actually got fucked up the butt at the start, but it's original creators are still making similar games under a different title? Titles like this one that's releasing this month? And isn't shit?"
I played on PSP. It was fun, but something feels off compared to usual SoS. Mainly the slightly grim atmostphere and the lack of romance. I probably would've enjoyed the grim tone more as an adult, the conversations with our father/creator was charming.
Yeah, Mineral Town in the last SOS game I’m gonna buy for a while, mostly because RF5 is coming and I still need to finish RF4 XD I bought the game twice, once on my 3DS (which I can’t find the charger for) and now on switch after hearing there’s a thing that you get in the fifth game if you have save data from the fourth.
Zero Punctuation prog rock track of the week: *General Air Of Wrongness* by the *Unusually Taciturn People With Very Delicious Haircuts* Runner-up: *Empty Corridor Maze Of Repeating Grass Texture* by *Gnome Exchange*
I've just started playing stardew valley this past week with my brother and it had been amazing! it's quickly becoming one of my favorite games. I can see why everyone loves it!
@@NathanCassidy721 Both in real life and in-game too... I still remember all my late-night mad dashes to my house wondering if my character will be able to get a good night's sleep or faint a mere few steps away from the bed.
I still love stardew valley due to the shit me and my brother would do. See his charchter as the most well looking and strapping farmer youve ever seen living the old big house and then theres my charachter who looks like a vampire he found in the attic, pale skin, red eyes and all. The fact that i spent entire ingame days fishing while wearing a hat to cover the sun helped into that RP.
One thing that Yahtzee forgot to mention was the interesting NPC characters that you can encounter such as 'Awkward Man'. (Sadly i'm not joking this is an actual character in the game).
They gave 0 fks about making any legit npcs other than baby makers and if it wasn't even worth giving these characters names and solid identities it just felt all the more insulting that Natsume thought their effortless drivel was worth my time to talk to or do quests for. If you didn't even care enough, why should i?!
You know.....a futuristic farm sim, where everyone has forgotten how to farm, or where crops come from, where your farm LITERALLY gets up and slowly walks from town to town, and you have to spend the seasons between cities growing food to meet demand and collecting soil from where you pass by to expand your plot of land.....sounds like it might be fun.
I'm glad Yahtzee likes farm sims instead of looking down on them like the average reviewer, so I can actually get a good idea of if one is worth looking into.
@@Sigilstone17 I beg to differ, he is definitely not a fan of competitive multiplayer games. His tastes are broad but he's very much a single player guy.
I hope Rune Factory 5 turns out well. Going to start Sakuna: Of Rice and Ruin soon too. Man, there's quite a few of these types of game popping up recently.
Sakuna is really good but it's about 2/3rds platformer and 1/3rd farming. And the farming is 100% rice, but the game goes all in how harvesting rice so it's a multi-step harvest with a lot of factors on how well the rice turns out each year.
@@Nova225 Ooh, that actually sounds interesting to me! Do you have to make a wooden rice thresher? I might not get into the game for a few more weeks. Got preoccupied by Loop Hero and Bravely Default 2.
@@dragmire3D you start of with a basic set to thresh with but I got to a point where I built a hand thresher that does it faster. What I found intriguing was that the game gives you no instructions at the beginning, you're just given some seeds at the start and you have to plant them. As you get further along the game gives you more tools. As an example after planting enough seeds, I'm able to see how far apart they need to be spaced for a good harvest, and so on.
And the new Story of Seasons, as far as my knowledge goes. It's awful. About 30 seconds of loading times (some of which you'll look at a fox balloon knot) a craft station for every single type of item for a total of like 24 which I think can only do a thing at a time and take so much space that they greatly reduce customization freedom. And some of the stuff that you could access through normal progression in the previous entries are now pay-wall locked.
@@RoyalKnightVIII Natsume's Harvest Moon aren't that bad. If anything they are just different. And being fair, Marvelous just released an update to reduce loading times and increase the crafting stations efficiency, they tinkered other stuff too. Also. There are a lot of bad Harvest Moon from Marvelous.
Yes, I knew that Harvest Moon had changed developers, and new titles by the original developers were called Story of Seasons. I knew that, and didn't just learn it.
Honestly a fantasy shop/villager setting where you can open a shop, open a farm or do other things in your standard RPG villages while also getting to explore dungeons for loot in order to improve your shop or other things is always my kinda jam, its why I love Recettear so much.
I was thinking more like you get one central base that you have to build up all the way and then the miniaturization thing that you can only use on a couple of small buildings and a vegetable patch that can keep growing while you're traveling so you can strike out and set up a farming outpost in every new village you find to eventually feed back resources to your main base but yeah an airship would be cool as well.
Ok but now I want to play a farming sim set in a dystopian future where humanity has forgotten how to plant and harvest food and you have some sort of traveling sci fi farm on a ship or something
I have found that Harvest Moon is like the SNL of gaming. Everyone insists the version they had growing up is best. Harvest Moon 64 is best in my own estimation.
And I don't like 64 very much. I prefer friends of mineral town or a wonderful life. The DS games were interesting for the progress based gameplay loop (unlocking new areas and NPCs felt rewarding), but had wonky controls.
Editorial criticism: If you're going to be comparing them to Dora The Explorer, then instead of "Put Babies In Me" it should be "Put Bebés In Me", to account for her randomly swapping words into Spanish.
To extend on the dystopian nutrient-cube farming concept: Perhaps you have a space ship that does farming/hydroponics and are traveling across the stars to reintroduce fresh produce to the galaxy. On each world you can explore for new plant types, possibly even cross-breeding (or genetically engineering) different species to make new varieties. It would explain how you bring your entire farm with you. If you want to throw in unnecessary combat mechanics, then you can have locust-like pirates hunting you and/or hostile fauna (and/or flora) on planets that you want to harvest plants from. Perhaps you could add some alien livestock to your farm-ship.
There's a game out called Verdant Skies that's _mostly_ what you're describing. Rather than going from planet to planet you're colonizing a single one, but there's several different biomes on the planet and an animal/plant gene modding system as well as the typical farming-crafting-social sim that these games normally have. No combat, but personally I consider that a positive in my farming games. It's on steam if you're interested.
Yahtzee, just wanna say thanks for the hot tip about Story of Seasons: Pioneers of Olive Town at the end there. I had no idea the series even existed and I wound up picking it up today. I'm midway through spring and having a great time. :D
I had a moment's realisation today. Yahtzee is probably the most consistently excellent content creator in the history of the Internet. I can't think of a single other creator I've followed since 2007 and the quality has never dipped in the slightest. Kudos to you sir.
Holy crap I just googled the female characters in Story if Seasons and it's absolutely hilarious. Fortunately all the male characters also look like children so it's slightly less weird lol
Even in the N64 Harvest Moon, they all came across as being teens. It was awkward. Especially the bakery girl, whose surrogate dad ends up being your romance rival... yuck
I always had it in my mind that they are super deformed like the original ff7 character. If they ever got into a turn-based battle they would transform into what they actually look like but the town is too peaceful...That's just how I mentally cope with that art style.
So what you’re getting at is that Stardew Valley, the game that’s a love letter to classic harvest moon, is now more harvest moon than current harvest moon games? Beautiful👌
ya know, the whole "people forgot how to farm" thing is spookily similar to dragon quest builders, in which everyone forgot how to create, but that was more intriguing because you got see people struggling to survive (you also far stuff in those games too)
"It's like when you play Civilization and they discover nuclear fission before they've discovered the wheel." So my bf, every fuckin time he plays Civ 6??
It's amazing to me that most of these complaints have been fixed in FREE UPDATES to Stardew which have blown these other games out of the water so hard it feels impossible to go back unless they really start to shake up the formula.
I only played one post-breakup Harvest Moon game on the 3DS, and they'd laid the farmland out on a Minecraft style grid. It became clear pretty fast that the people at Natsume (and whatever studio they pay to crank this shit out) have no idea what the actual appeal of Harvest Moon is.
The premise sounds like Dragon Quest Builders' one where everyone has forgotten how to build things due to a curse from the main villain of DQ1 (since this game takes place after the bad ending of that one) until you, the divinely ordained Builder (who is explicitly *not* a hero or even able to level up, and apparently looks kinda like a potato according to the general consensus) to teach them how. And instead of living in normal houses beforehand, the citizenry wander around the wild wearing tattered rags until you build a town and they figure out how to build stuff themselves from watching you.
I feel very validated in not falling for Natsume's tricks right for the get-go and sticking with Story of Seasons for all these years. I'd been hoping to see Yahtzee address what had happened with the publisher drama basically since it first happened. All I can say now is "Hurrah! I wonder if he'll tackle any of the Xseed published games after this." I'll be happy if he finds them at least half as enjoyable as Stardew Valley.
"Rune Factory 4 : A fantasy harvest moon" got a switch release, since you seem to love the farming sims so much maybe give it a try, they are my favorite in the franchise.
Can confirm new Story of Seasons game is quite good. They took the crafting stuff from Stardew Valley, but left out the combat. Overall it has a gentle start and does everything i want for a farm sim game. If you like harvest moon, Pioneers of Olive Town is absolutely fantastic, having largely just done QoL improvements and giving you more land to play with.
Am I the only one who was completely unaware that there WAS a new Harvest Moon game? I'm a bit perplexed as to why we even need one when Stardew Valley exists.
I really enjoyed Stardew, but I've already done everything that I've wanted to do in that game so I'm glad there's still new farming sims coming out lol. I just wish they were better
Yep, this seems to be Natsume's attempt at that. With Rune Factory being a spinoff of Mavelous Incs Harvest Moon games before they changed to XSeed it makes sense that Natsume would attempt something similar after the split I guess
I think when they came out with Harvest Moon save the Homeland is when the franchise started nose-diving , I mean they had a wonderful life which was awesome and another wonderful life but that's about it I mean besides the previous one which goes without saying we're a lot of fun and full of memories.
Honestly, that kind of sounds like Dragon Quest Builders, which actually did that sort of concept pretty well. You start off as a generic Dragon Quest protagonist and have to bring together all the humans and fight the demon king, along the way re-teaching the humans about basic concepts of cooking, mining, and building. I think DQB works while this doesn't because of a few things: 1) There's only four different islands you go to 2) You have a central base of operations that you return to after each island 3) Once you teach the humans how to cook food on island 1, you don't have to do the same thing on island 2
Are there any Civilization games where that's actually possible? In all the ones I've played (and I've played all the main series ones except 1 and 6 as well as Alpha Centauri, Beyond Earth and Civilization: Call To Power), as far as I can remember, the tech tree doesn't allow anything that anachronistic. Unless you do a lot of advancement via stealing techs from other civilizations, I suppose, which might allow you to skip researching The Wheel entirely because you end up with all the techs which have The Wheel as a prerequisite.
I think we need a Yahtzee-version of Urban Dictionary, full of his witicisms ... mostly because I'd love to have a mug with "It's hard to get a good sexual tension going when all the love interests are proportioned like Dora the Explorer" and that screen capture at 5:05.
You could say that but it had more empathizes on the dungeon crawling aspect and my god the difficulty spike in the last dungeon is insane even my level 99 cow that i got from the maze because i got pissed off at the spike was in trouble. Fun game and all but fuck the last dungeon that is not even the optional dungeon
I’m still playing Harvest Moon 64 on the Wii U since I rediscovered it during quarantine. I’m one of those people still showing the Wii U some love 🤷🏾♂️😅
So I looked it up and apparently, it is actually possible for bronze "ore" to occur naturally in places with large copper and tin deposits, but it's very, very rare. The more you know.
Yahtzee you are now obligated (at some point) to make us a game with cupcake bushes!! I would harvest the shit out of that. Picture it - a whole field of cupcake bushes!
What's saddest is that they'd already combined light farming and action-adventure-with-some-exploration, it's the bread and butter of Rune Factory, SoS's sibling, and it actually works quite well. Plus you can throw turnips at people instead of handing them over like boring people do.
I was that one person sat here wondering why Harvest Moon had gone to shit not realising the name had changed it all makes a lot more sense now, Glad i watched this video
I prefer Rune Factory, where you get all the farming of Harvest Moon, but then can take your in-game significant other into a monster filled dungeon, which you may or may not have grown on your farm, slay a demon and then tame a lesser dragon with some scrambled eggs you had in your pocket and make it do your farm work for you.
I fell into the same trap myself when I played Tree of Tranquility. I should've known what I was in for when the audio of the game immediately sounded like a person playing a stereo into a $5 microphone
Why not do something like spiritfarer and have the farm reside on like a vehicle? like a huge RV/truck. and you would need to go to places so that the weather can affect the crops, or to colect some sort of soil/worm to fertilize things. That seems interesting to me at least.
Y'know, in a pretty screwed up world losing hope by the minute, these game reviews give me genuine enjoyment and reason to wait for the next one. Thanks Yahtzee, may you be blessed with gourmet croissants and hecking awesome coffee.
Bronze was an ore in RF, too, being better than iron made it even worse. It's like a kid copying someone's homework and not checking it for obvious stupidity first :D
I mean, in fairness, Rune Factory defines the power of the metal by its value, not material quality, and Bronze is just the typical third place award. You can hate that if you want, but that's the way it works.
The artstyle is definitely similar. If someone showed me the bachelors/bachelorettes from the game and told me these were new gym leaders or rivals I probably wouldn't question it.
Oh no, does that mean we can now predict what future ZPs will based on the podcasts? So next one might be about, Day of the Tentacle, any of Yahtzee's older games, Zero Escape (fingers crossed), or Phoenix Wright (fingers crossed to the point of starting successful careers as contortionists)
Hmmm. Just debating if I should argue for Friends of Mineral Town. It is possibly the best use of town and overlay in mineral town, but the openness is nice, and then theirs Gwen in Magical Melody.... Screw it your right.
There's a kickstarter game with this premise just winding down their campaign today. It's called Roots of Pacha and the story is based around your nomadic tribe settling down into an agrarian one. Seems promising so far.
"It's hard to get a love interest going because they're all built like Dora the explorer" You obviously haven't seen the 19 year old who played her on the movie.
The only Harvest Moon that I enjoyed was Hero Of Leaf Valley. That one at least had some thing akin to a story going for it but it was also a remake of an earlyer title. I am told that the Rune Factory series gives of the same feel and has combat elements, and better story lines so that might be worth a shot.
If you like Harvest Moon at all, Rune Factory is the highest form of gaming zen to exist. I highly reccomend it! 1 is a bit clunky. 2 or 3 are good starting points, 3 and 4 are very similar, and playing 2 after either of them might be hard. Frontier has some flawed systems, and Tides has minimal farming.
Watch today's Zero Punctuation episode on Loop Hero & Everhood - www.escapistmagazine.com/v2/loop-hero-and-everhood-zero-punctuation/ - Watch it early on UA-cam and support our content via UA-cam Memberships!
A dystopia created farm sim actually sounds really awesome. I mean it would be basically the ending of Idiocracy just turned into a game.
Also if they really wanted to have you travel around everywhere but still keep your farm why not just make teleporters or maybe have a spaceship that is your farm? I really wasn't prepared for the shrink ray of all things to deus ex machina our way out of that problem.
Goddamn wheat fields
Ok im actually for prohibiting all gameplay now
"Everhood" sounds like a condom brand.
That whole history of Harvest Moon's copyright kerfuffle is actually quite dirty
Holy shit, Natsume.
What I want to know is why they did it.
@@Enchie "We've got to have *Money* "
@@Enchie They thought they could carry on by IP alone, forgetting that they're not Call of Duty and the kind of workaday serene gameplay the brand was built on can in fact be buggered up pretty substantially if done poorly. And now we get to see just how poorly they grasped the concepts of things like gameplay loops and intrinsic player reward.
@@Enchie "Oh, no room for Natsume, huh? Fine! We'll make our own Harvest Moon, with blackjack and hookers!"
Harvest Moon Copyright Kerfuffle sounds like a good name for a band.
2:28 thing is, I can actually see a decent game being made around that concept, you just gotta take it a different way:
Farm Boat. Imagine, being a farmer/sailor in a world that's mostly islands, going from one place to another and selling your fruits and milk to wherever pays the most for it, snagging the occasional rare animal or plant in the long-forgotten ruins of some society or something. Maybe even add in mechanics for dealing with (or even *being* ) pirates, make the fauna and flora really weird to make them part of the mechanics, etc.
This sounds amazing.
And now I remember that I have a copy of Rune Factory: Tides of Destiny lying around. Not quite what you described, moreso a portal system and a giant statue you walk across the ocean.
isn't this just Spiritfarer?
80% of that is in "Raft".
Nobody wants your stuff but since you're starving constantly, you'll want to keep it anyways. Even flirts with Modded Minecraft levels of piping, fuel processing and automating vertical farms towards the end.
Farm boat, Farm airship or Farm landship
"And that's it, really."
Yahtzee sounding especially world-weary there.
4:39 if anyone need the timestamp
"As romantically intriguing as a plank with a bad haircut"
Clearly Yahtzee has never seen Ed Edd n Eddy.
@@macmcskullface1004 Hence the bad haircut.
Plank is that hotness.
DIdn't Plank have "parents" and his mom had "hair"?
ed edd n eddy was doing it for a laugh, harvest moon is trying to be somewhat serious(and is the worse off for it)
@@ninetailedfox579121 The hair took everything out of the plank.
I see a bottom-5 candidate and we are just in March.
Don't forget about Werewolf: The Apocalypse: Earthblood
It's probably more bland than anything. It doesn't excel at anything, but looks competent enough to actually do something. The sad part is it does nothing. It's not broken or anything, just bland.
@@wdf70 agreed, it's not bad per se but considering there will be more competition in this genre in 2021 either this gets the bland or none at all
Sounds like it belongs in the blandest list.
Remember when Devil’s Third was the first game he reviewed that year
The backstory of the “Harvest Moon” title copyright dispute is honestly Randy Pitchford levels of greasy
But at least no one at Natsume has left a flash drive with sensitive company documents and also squirt pornography at a medieval themed restaurant.
@@hedgehoundable There's a story here that I would like to know about.
@@hedgehoundable give us at least a name
@@twinkiesmaster69 Randy Pitchford
@@twinkiesmaster69 Literally Randy Pitchford. He left a USB drive at a medieval themed restaurant in Texas that had private information about Gearbox in it along with Randy's personal collection of pornography. One of which happened to be squirt porn. He admitted it in an interview.
"So what you're saying is that I should spend yet another 100 hours playing Stardew Valley instead?"
"Well, not per say but-"
"Too late! Already doing it!"
I mean, Stardew Valley 1.5 is fucking phenomenal :)
@@MrSmokinDragon Aye!
Doing it? I did it 30 minutes ago.
Like, the tenth 100 hours. No I can quit whenever I want.
I appreciate how Yahtzee used this review as an opportunity to say "Hey, did you realize this relatively famous simulator series actually got fucked up the butt at the start, but it's original creators are still making similar games under a different title? Titles like this one that's releasing this month? And isn't shit?"
"Old mcanime had a farm
Ee wai ee waifu"
Genius writing
To be fair I could totally imagine a game like this asking you to harvest a cupcake bush
I am actually surprised that a game with mythical creatures did not ask you to do that yet a shame really
"Dystopian future where technollogy has taken over" , "Adventure + Farming"
Sounds like the game Innocent Life in PS2!
Still got mine for PSP, its a favourite. Its just a shame they never did a sequel.
I played on PSP. It was fun, but something feels off compared to usual SoS. Mainly the slightly grim atmostphere and the lack of romance.
I probably would've enjoyed the grim tone more as an adult, the conversations with our father/creator was charming.
@@ChemySh ah, see....me? I married 3times in all the games XD farm first, flirt second lol so it never bothered me so much.
That's because innocent life and rune factory were made by harvest moon, well the original devs.
Or My Time At Portia
considering his revelation about jrpgs in persona 5 strikers, i'm curious how yahtzee will take the upcoming rune factory 5.
@@gwouru as long as they don't change the farming mechanics, 5 should be fine. the numbered installments have remained pretty consistent.
Oh god what are they doing to 5?
@@Lucarioguild7 yes
i hope he will not skip the SMT 3 HD remake and SMT 5 (when it finally comes out)
Rune Factory vs Atelier Series. Let him go full weeb.
The Story of Season--Harvest Moon divorce is why I play Rune Factory
The Rune Factory games are awesome!
The first Rune Factory it's literally called "A Fantasy Harvest Moon" lol it's the same people as OG HM and SoS.
Yeah, Mineral Town in the last SOS game I’m gonna buy for a while, mostly because RF5 is coming and I still need to finish RF4 XD I bought the game twice, once on my 3DS (which I can’t find the charger for) and now on switch after hearing there’s a thing that you get in the fifth game if you have save data from the fourth.
Playing RF4 right now and can't decide who the hell to marry. HALP.
@@Guru_1092 all. Multiple save files.
01:49 "I say village... it's more like two houses on the edge of a cliff."
This sounds more like Bill Bailey describing the West Country.
Zero Punctuation prog rock track of the week:
*General Air Of Wrongness* by the *Unusually Taciturn People With Very Delicious Haircuts*
Runner-up:
*Empty Corridor Maze Of Repeating Grass Texture* by *Gnome Exchange*
Make sure to change your Gnomex every 30,000 miles. >.>
*"Dip a Biscuit in my Skull"*
by *Almost-Spherical Livestock*
I've just started playing stardew valley this past week with my brother and it had been amazing!
it's quickly becoming one of my favorite games. I can see why everyone loves it!
I remember playing it when it came out and it quickly became my “ITS MIDNIGHT ALREADY?!” games.
@@NathanCassidy721 Both in real life and in-game too... I still remember all my late-night mad dashes to my house wondering if my character will be able to get a good night's sleep or faint a mere few steps away from the bed.
@@NathanCassidy721 Not being able to save unless its in between days really does that to ya.
@@NathanCassidy721 "It's getting late."
My wife is still salty that I married Maru in game rather than her.
I still love stardew valley due to the shit me and my brother would do.
See his charchter as the most well looking and strapping farmer youve ever seen living the old big house and then theres my charachter who looks like a vampire he found in the attic, pale skin, red eyes and all. The fact that i spent entire ingame days fishing while wearing a hat to cover the sun helped into that RP.
so basically you're Shane with less emo?
One thing that Yahtzee forgot to mention was the interesting NPC characters that you can encounter such as 'Awkward Man'. (Sadly i'm not joking this is an actual character in the game).
They gave 0 fks about making any legit npcs other than baby makers and if it wasn't even worth giving these characters names and solid identities it just felt all the more insulting that Natsume thought their effortless drivel was worth my time to talk to or do quests for. If you didn't even care enough, why should i?!
Awkward Man: the superhero with the power to clear a room in six seconds with the power of awkward conversation!
You know.....a futuristic farm sim, where everyone has forgotten how to farm, or where crops come from, where your farm LITERALLY gets up and slowly walks from town to town, and you have to spend the seasons between cities growing food to meet demand and collecting soil from where you pass by to expand your plot of land.....sounds like it might be fun.
I'm glad Yahtzee likes farm sims instead of looking down on them like the average reviewer, so I can actually get a good idea of if one is worth looking into.
Yathzee just likes good games no matter the kind
@@Sigilstone17 I beg to differ, he is definitely not a fan of competitive multiplayer games. His tastes are broad but he's very much a single player guy.
I hope Rune Factory 5 turns out well.
Going to start Sakuna: Of Rice and Ruin soon too. Man, there's quite a few of these types of game popping up recently.
Of Rice and Ruin is an amazing game. I hope you enjoy it💜
Ever Since stardew valley it seem the genre is making a comeback
Sakuna is really good but it's about 2/3rds platformer and 1/3rd farming. And the farming is 100% rice, but the game goes all in how harvesting rice so it's a multi-step harvest with a lot of factors on how well the rice turns out each year.
@@Nova225 Ooh, that actually sounds interesting to me! Do you have to make a wooden rice thresher?
I might not get into the game for a few more weeks. Got preoccupied by Loop Hero and Bravely Default 2.
@@dragmire3D you start of with a basic set to thresh with but I got to a point where I built a hand thresher that does it faster.
What I found intriguing was that the game gives you no instructions at the beginning, you're just given some seeds at the start and you have to plant them. As you get further along the game gives you more tools. As an example after planting enough seeds, I'm able to see how far apart they need to be spaced for a good harvest, and so on.
You can tell he doesn't like a game when he recommends other games that haven't released yet before the review is finished
And the new Story of Seasons, as far as my knowledge goes. It's awful. About 30 seconds of loading times (some of which you'll look at a fox balloon knot) a craft station for every single type of item for a total of like 24 which I think can only do a thing at a time and take so much space that they greatly reduce customization freedom. And some of the stuff that you could access through normal progression in the previous entries are now pay-wall locked.
@@spark154 really? Wow Natsime set the bar low & I didn't think SoS would get close to that so quick
@@RoyalKnightVIII Natsume's Harvest Moon aren't that bad. If anything they are just different. And being fair, Marvelous just released an update to reduce loading times and increase the crafting stations efficiency, they tinkered other stuff too.
Also. There are a lot of bad Harvest Moon from Marvelous.
Man the credits gags for this one were great. Bravo.
Missed a prime opportunity for it to be "Ka-wai-i Wai-fu."
Stardew Valley looking down on Harvest Moon: "Look how old you've become."
More like - where did you steal your name, identity and purpose from?
'Cause this game wasn't MADE by the original Harvest Moon devs lol
You know its Wednesday when yahtzee tries to explain harvest moon
Yes, I knew that Harvest Moon had changed developers, and new titles by the original developers were called Story of Seasons. I knew that, and didn't just learn it.
Honestly a fantasy shop/villager setting where you can open a shop, open a farm or do other things in your standard RPG villages while also getting to explore dungeons for loot in order to improve your shop or other things is always my kinda jam, its why I love Recettear so much.
I thought you were explaining rune factory 4 until I got to the bottom.
@@SairinEarthsea Same deal! All fun interesting games!
This could work if the farm was on top of a traveling air ship
and you do stuff like collect seeds from different lands and quests
My love of the Mortal Engines books makes me insist that it would be better on wheels
Yes, that’s where I thought Yahtzee was going to say the concept was going. Alas... that would be too cool, just like the nutrient paste thing.
Farm on a traveling air ship? I didn't know I would like to play a game with that concept. I do now.
There's a game like this in development but you're on a dino and you have to take care of it/build trust
I was thinking more like you get one central base that you have to build up all the way and then the miniaturization thing that you can only use on a couple of small buildings and a vegetable patch that can keep growing while you're traveling so you can strike out and set up a farming outpost in every new village you find to eventually feed back resources to your main base but yeah an airship would be cool as well.
Ok but now I want to play a farming sim set in a dystopian future where humanity has forgotten how to plant and harvest food and you have some sort of traveling sci fi farm on a ship or something
5:05 A-and Yahtzee and all of us are now on at least one list.
@@manderic5436 i miss hoodsite : (
Hahaha, i feel sorry for anybody monitoring my Internet usage, i hope they get the help they so desperately need. Poor buggar
I laughed far too hard at the line I expect the FBI van to be outside my door in another 20 mins
FBI, OPEN UP!
I have found that Harvest Moon is like the SNL of gaming. Everyone insists the version they had growing up is best.
Harvest Moon 64 is best in my own estimation.
What's an SNL?
@@Jack0Corvus Saturday Night Live
@@MetalHeadbanger7 what's that?
@@Jack0Corvus bruh you're on youtube, just search it lmao
And I don't like 64 very much. I prefer friends of mineral town or a wonderful life. The DS games were interesting for the progress based gameplay loop (unlocking new areas and NPCs felt rewarding), but had wonky controls.
Human beings at one point thought that mice spontaneously appeared in sacks of grain, so this plot seems perfectly reasonable.
Weird that he posted this the day after the new Story of Seasons (the real Harvest Moon) game came out.
Editorial criticism: If you're going to be comparing them to Dora The Explorer, then instead of "Put Babies In Me" it should be "Put Bebés In Me", to account for her randomly swapping words into Spanish.
To extend on the dystopian nutrient-cube farming concept:
Perhaps you have a space ship that does farming/hydroponics and are traveling across the stars to reintroduce fresh produce to the galaxy. On each world you can explore for new plant types, possibly even cross-breeding (or genetically engineering) different species to make new varieties. It would explain how you bring your entire farm with you.
If you want to throw in unnecessary combat mechanics, then you can have locust-like pirates hunting you and/or hostile fauna (and/or flora) on planets that you want to harvest plants from. Perhaps you could add some alien livestock to your farm-ship.
There's a game out called Verdant Skies that's _mostly_ what you're describing. Rather than going from planet to planet you're colonizing a single one, but there's several different biomes on the planet and an animal/plant gene modding system as well as the typical farming-crafting-social sim that these games normally have. No combat, but personally I consider that a positive in my farming games. It's on steam if you're interested.
Yahtzee, just wanna say thanks for the hot tip about Story of Seasons: Pioneers of Olive Town at the end there. I had no idea the series even existed and I wound up picking it up today. I'm midway through spring and having a great time. :D
I had a moment's realisation today. Yahtzee is probably the most consistently excellent content creator in the history of the Internet. I can't think of a single other creator I've followed since 2007 and the quality has never dipped in the slightest. Kudos to you sir.
Holy crap I just googled the female characters in Story if Seasons and it's absolutely hilarious. Fortunately all the male characters also look like children so it's slightly less weird lol
Even in the N64 Harvest Moon, they all came across as being teens. It was awkward. Especially the bakery girl, whose surrogate dad ends up being your romance rival... yuck
What's funny is that they actually look older in the remake of Mineral Town compared to the original.
Devs are based and lolipilled
To be fair legal age of consent is weird there as well as in the US since it can range from 15 to 18
I always had it in my mind that they are super deformed like the original ff7 character. If they ever got into a turn-based battle they would transform into what they actually look like but the town is too peaceful...That's just how I mentally cope with that art style.
I really hope he does one on the new story of seasons. I've been playing it and it's quite good. Very relaxing
So what you’re getting at is that Stardew Valley, the game that’s a love letter to classic harvest moon, is now more harvest moon than current harvest moon games? Beautiful👌
Harvest Moon as it was still exists, they're just legally not allowed to call themselves "Harvest Moon" anymore.
ya know, the whole "people forgot how to farm" thing is spookily similar to dragon quest builders, in which everyone forgot how to create, but that was more intriguing because you got see people struggling to survive (you also far stuff in those games too)
🎶...an' a pair of kinky boots!
An' when we go on night patro-🎶
Wait, that's for something WAY different...
5:05 that frame was unexpectedly hilarious
"Hundred-yard swim down a factory runoff pipe."
Damn, Yahtzee. It'd been a while since I'd seen a review this negative.. he's still got it! ♥
"It's like when you play Civilization and they discover nuclear fission before they've discovered the wheel." So my bf, every fuckin time he plays Civ 6??
It's amazing to me that most of these complaints have been fixed in FREE UPDATES to Stardew which have blown these other games out of the water so hard it feels impossible to go back unless they really start to shake up the formula.
That thumbnail art is actually gorgeous
I only played one post-breakup Harvest Moon game on the 3DS, and they'd laid the farmland out on a Minecraft style grid. It became clear pretty fast that the people at Natsume (and whatever studio they pay to crank this shit out) have no idea what the actual appeal of Harvest Moon is.
Watch the stream of this, so glad to see the video he kept referencing
The premise sounds like Dragon Quest Builders' one where everyone has forgotten how to build things due to a curse from the main villain of DQ1 (since this game takes place after the bad ending of that one) until you, the divinely ordained Builder (who is explicitly *not* a hero or even able to level up, and apparently looks kinda like a potato according to the general consensus) to teach them how. And instead of living in normal houses beforehand, the citizenry wander around the wild wearing tattered rags until you build a town and they figure out how to build stuff themselves from watching you.
Dare I say, will we see a "Let's all laugh at an industry..." about the Natsume and Harvest Moon debacle in the near future?
I feel very validated in not falling for Natsume's tricks right for the get-go and sticking with Story of Seasons for all these years. I'd been hoping to see Yahtzee address what had happened with the publisher drama basically since it first happened. All I can say now is "Hurrah! I wonder if he'll tackle any of the Xseed published games after this." I'll be happy if he finds them at least half as enjoyable as Stardew Valley.
"Rune Factory 4 : A fantasy harvest moon" got a switch release, since you seem to love the farming sims so much maybe give it a try, they are my favorite in the franchise.
So basically Johnny Appleseed: The Game
Can confirm new Story of Seasons game is quite good. They took the crafting stuff from Stardew Valley, but left out the combat. Overall it has a gentle start and does everything i want for a farm sim game. If you like harvest moon, Pioneers of Olive Town is absolutely fantastic, having largely just done QoL improvements and giving you more land to play with.
Am I the only one who was completely unaware that there WAS a new Harvest Moon game? I'm a bit perplexed as to why we even need one when Stardew Valley exists.
The same reason why people try to imitate Batman games: gonna get me some of that sweet MONEY.
When was the last one anyway? The last one I remember was on the original DS.
I am personally not a big fan of Stardew Valley tbh. Maybe because I'm a weeb, but I still prefer to play Story of Seasons myself.
I really enjoyed Stardew, but I've already done everything that I've wanted to do in that game so I'm glad there's still new farming sims coming out lol. I just wish they were better
At least they evolved from sucking out of each others' tearducts to licking dew off the grass
Perhaps the sequel will be The Lost World: Harvest Moon and you learn the ins and outs of dinosaur husbandry.
That actually sounds really cool, I want to grow plants to dna infuse dinosaurs now.
I was looking forward to this one. ty [EDIT]: So what you're telling me is that they tried to be Rune Factory.
Yep, this seems to be Natsume's attempt at that.
With Rune Factory being a spinoff of Mavelous Incs Harvest Moon games before they changed to XSeed it makes sense that Natsume would attempt something similar after the split I guess
Happy 700th episode!
I dont know if this is true but I like it
I had no idea it was but happy 700 woooooo
Coincidentally, the video had exactly 700 likes when I clicked on it. Probably more, now.
I think when they came out with Harvest Moon save the Homeland is when the franchise started nose-diving , I mean they had a wonderful life which was awesome and another wonderful life but that's about it I mean besides the previous one which goes without saying we're a lot of fun and full of memories.
Honestly, that kind of sounds like Dragon Quest Builders, which actually did that sort of concept pretty well.
You start off as a generic Dragon Quest protagonist and have to bring together all the humans and fight the demon king, along the way re-teaching the humans about basic concepts of cooking, mining, and building. I think DQB works while this doesn't because of a few things:
1) There's only four different islands you go to
2) You have a central base of operations that you return to after each island
3) Once you teach the humans how to cook food on island 1, you don't have to do the same thing on island 2
Really hoping that one day the intro and outro music gets turned down by like 4db
I too like researching Fission before The Wheel
Are there any Civilization games where that's actually possible? In all the ones I've played (and I've played all the main series ones except 1 and 6 as well as Alpha Centauri, Beyond Earth and Civilization: Call To Power), as far as I can remember, the tech tree doesn't allow anything that anachronistic. Unless you do a lot of advancement via stealing techs from other civilizations, I suppose, which might allow you to skip researching The Wheel entirely because you end up with all the techs which have The Wheel as a prerequisite.
I think we need a Yahtzee-version of Urban Dictionary, full of his witicisms ... mostly because I'd love to have a mug with "It's hard to get a good sexual tension going when all the love interests are proportioned like Dora the Explorer" and that screen capture at 5:05.
I’m surprised he hasn’t touched the Rune Factory series yet since RF4 in particular is the best farming sim game ever made by a long shot.
You could say that but it had more empathizes on the dungeon crawling aspect and my god the difficulty spike in the last dungeon is insane even my level 99 cow that i got from the maze because i got pissed off at the spike was in trouble. Fun game and all but fuck the last dungeon that is not even the optional dungeon
@@JohnnyYeTaecanUktena Rune prana is pretty shit, but at least the rest of the game is fine
5:14 Very much appreciate The Wurzels reference there
I’m still playing Harvest Moon 64 on the Wii U since I rediscovered it during quarantine.
I’m one of those people still showing the Wii U some love 🤷🏾♂️😅
4:05 ... Is a possible Out Of Context T-Shirt
So I looked it up and apparently, it is actually possible for bronze "ore" to occur naturally in places with large copper and tin deposits, but it's very, very rare. The more you know.
I want more of Baby Yahtzee playing games and having fun
Yahtzee you are now obligated (at some point) to make us a game with cupcake bushes!! I would harvest the shit out of that. Picture it - a whole field of cupcake bushes!
Almost died with the McAnime joke. Love watching your videos from beginning to end. Keep it up Yahtzee.
What's saddest is that they'd already combined light farming and action-adventure-with-some-exploration, it's the bread and butter of Rune Factory, SoS's sibling, and it actually works quite well. Plus you can throw turnips at people instead of handing them over like boring people do.
That idea about running a farm in a future society where nobody knows how to grow stuff sounds interesting.
I was that one person sat here wondering why Harvest Moon had gone to shit not realising the name had changed it all makes a lot more sense now, Glad i watched this video
I prefer Rune Factory, where you get all the farming of Harvest Moon, but then can take your in-game significant other into a monster filled dungeon, which you may or may not have grown on your farm, slay a demon and then tame a lesser dragon with some scrambled eggs you had in your pocket and make it do your farm work for you.
I fell into the same trap myself when I played Tree of Tranquility. I should've known what I was in for when the audio of the game immediately sounded like a person playing a stereo into a $5 microphone
Why not do something like spiritfarer and have the farm reside on like a vehicle? like a huge RV/truck. and you would need to go to places so that the weather can affect the crops, or to colect some sort of soil/worm to fertilize things. That seems interesting to me at least.
Y'know, in a pretty screwed up world losing hope by the minute, these game reviews give me genuine enjoyment and reason to wait for the next one. Thanks Yahtzee, may you be blessed with gourmet croissants and hecking awesome coffee.
Bronze was an ore in RF, too, being better than iron made it even worse. It's like a kid copying someone's homework and not checking it for obvious stupidity first :D
I mean, in fairness, Rune Factory defines the power of the metal by its value, not material quality, and Bronze is just the typical third place award.
You can hate that if you want, but that's the way it works.
Did anyone get serious Pokémon vibes to this game before meeting Doc? I actually made a joke about meeting professor oak just before meeting Doc.
The artstyle is definitely similar. If someone showed me the bachelors/bachelorettes from the game and told me these were new gym leaders or rivals I probably wouldn't question it.
Ahh, the New Vegas wake up
Calling scones ‘biscuits’...damn, you’ve changed Yahtz
The Zero World joke on the end card made me laugh really hard. Nice.
Oh no, does that mean we can now predict what future ZPs will based on the podcasts? So next one might be about, Day of the Tentacle, any of Yahtzee's older games, Zero Escape (fingers crossed), or Phoenix Wright (fingers crossed to the point of starting successful careers as contortionists)
Can we agree the intro and outro music could be turned down just a scooch to closer match the video volume?
D-Did I just see chibi-yahtzee ? *rubs eyes*
I laughed at your McDonald parody song harder than I should have. XD
Hot(?) Take: Magical Melody is the best actually-called-Harvest-Moon Harvest Moon.
Hmmm. Just debating if I should argue for Friends of Mineral Town. It is possibly the best use of town and overlay in mineral town, but the openness is nice, and then theirs Gwen in Magical Melody.... Screw it your right.
You know what would be cool , the first farming sim, where you teach Stone Age man how to farm.
There's a kickstarter game with this premise just winding down their campaign today. It's called Roots of Pacha and the story is based around your nomadic tribe settling down into an agrarian one. Seems promising so far.
"It's hard to get a love interest going because they're all built like Dora the explorer"
You obviously haven't seen the 19 year old who played her on the movie.
Had noodle box the other day, nice to see an aussie reference in there :P
I was wondering what was going on with Natsume and harvest moon and now I know
So what you are telling me is that i should just continue playing Stardew Valley...
not gonna lie the fishing part could almost be transplanted word for word in a stardew valley review
One intro song I'll never skip
The text @5:25 won my "like."
The only Harvest Moon that I enjoyed was Hero Of Leaf Valley. That one at least had some thing akin to a story going for it but it was also a remake of an earlyer title. I am told that the Rune Factory series gives of the same feel and has combat elements, and better story lines so that might be worth a shot.
If you like Harvest Moon at all, Rune Factory is the highest form of gaming zen to exist. I highly reccomend it! 1 is a bit clunky. 2 or 3 are good starting points, 3 and 4 are very similar, and playing 2 after either of them might be hard.
Frontier has some flawed systems, and Tides has minimal farming.
so who's going to tell him that bronze is in fact a naturally occurring alloy and that this was how humanity found out what alloys are?
:O