A Wonderful Life was ahead of its time, challenging this repetitive simulator formula. Simulators often try to give the audience all that they want for as long as they want, and have no plans to pull the plug. These details are what made Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life a precious title in comparison to all others. With her death being plain to see in the beginning chapters of the game, A Wonderful Life makes it clear that every year should not be taken for granted and that players should enjoy their fellow villagers to the fullest. If players befriend her husband, they unlock a mini-game in cleaning her gravestone and her ghost appears to thank the player. Nina is an old woman who dies after the very first chapter, and her grave can be visited by the player and is constantly visited by her still-living husband. On top of seeing kids grow, the player also saw villagers die off. As an adult, her piano playing becomes graceful with no stops. In her youngest years, the player can hear her practicing piano and she constantly stops and starts again as she recovers from mistakes. A lot of loving details went into how characters changed, and Lumina's piano playing was a big example. The player got to see kids grow up, such as Lumina, who ages from a 14-year-old to a 22-year-old throughout the game. Time affected every villager in Forget-Me-Not-Valley, and not just physically. However, fans could still play in the Heaven content, where all is the same but the characters are all at their youngest. In the last chapter, the protagonist has a peaceful death and the game ends. Throughout the chapters, Harvest Moon players gets married, has a baby, and the baby grows slowly ages into a teenager and then an adult. Every chapter has a length of one to three years, and the villagers progressively age while some even die off. The village does not change through the years, but through the actions of the player, and those changes tend to be environmental instead of personal.Ī Wonderful Life was not part of this repetitive cycle, and is actually divided into six chapters. However, in Stardew Valleyand other Harvest Moon games, the characters never age and do not go through much change. This is interesting, considering many farming games include and have their mechanics built around the passing of seasons, and years upon years going by. Outside of A Wonderful Life and its female-protagonist remake, Another Wonderful Life, farming games have tended to skirt around the concept of human death, aging, and the march of time. RELATED: The Most Successful Video Game Spiritual Successors Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life And It's Ending However, one title stood above the rest and still does in terms of farming simulator stories, and that is the one where the main character dies in the end: Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life. These titles introduced many gamers to their first farming simulator in which they take care of farm animals, grow crops, befriend the local villagers, and eventually get married and have a kid. The series was called Harvest Moon from 1996 to 2013 before rebranding to its new name, and it had many titles from the first Harvest Moon for SNES to More Friends of Mineral Town for the GameBoy Advance. However, one series inspired many of the farming games today and that is Harvest Moon - known today as Story of Seasons. There is Stardew Valley, Farm Together, Verdant Skies, Farming Simulator, Minecraft, Staxel, Kynseed, My Time at Portia, Farmer's Dynasty, Garden Paws, Slime Rancher, Littlewood, and so much more, with other general simulator games like Animal Crossing taking notes. As of today, there is an overpopulation of farming simulator games.
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