Forum:Picking a new HM game!

Hey guys! So I have a small dillema. I've allowed myself the purchase of one new harvest moon game (so far I have four, two Wii and two handheld, so as you can see it's already partially a problem), and I can't pick which to get. The main two I am tossing around are HM3DS: A New Begginning and the upcoming (for my region) Story of Seasons. Price isn't really a deciding factor for me, even though I know one is obviously more expensive than the other. I'm more interested in the sort of comparisons- for example I love both rabbits and cactus irl, but one game does cactus, the other rabbits, so again I'm at a dillema for just in general which game would be interesting to me/newer/more fun. Maybe this is weird, and a little rant-esque, but I need your help and opinions. Thanks ~

Luph (talk)

You should have written this on the blog page so people can comment, y'know.

But anyway, it depends on your preference, really.

ANB:

ANB has customization, and the entire village is yours to shape. You can move people's house to any part of the village you like. You can do the same thing with your farm. Depending on what kind of person you are, this can be fun and/or annoying. I find it to be annoying myself.

The first Spring is reeeeeeally slow. You only have like 5 people living in the entire village and there aren't many things you can do. The way I overcomed this is by planting as many crops as possible, foraging the mountain for fishes and critters like 2-3 times a day, and feed the wild animals. You can also try to invest early in your cow by taking her to graze in Neil's farm so you can get higher product quality faster, but once you do, the whole day will pass, so make sure you do any farm chore beforehand.

ANB requires you to complete a series of town plans to revitalize the whole village and bring more people in. The requirements sometimes require you to unlock festivals and/or participating in festivals and win, or items that are out-of-season or require you to be in year 2 or later. So, even unlocking the whole villagers will be quite slow process.

Characters (especially the villagers) are not too interesting, and bachelor/ettes are lackluster/cliched compared to the ones in SoS.

When stores close, you will have unskippable mini-events. This can be annoying if you've seen it multiple times. The only way to avoid it is to stay away from the town area during the closing hours.

SoS:

SoS is better and worse than ANB in some areas.

Customization is limited to your farm only now. I find this to be more tolerable since I don't want to spend hours IRL just to customize the entire village. I pretty much gave up on that idea knowing I don't have that much time to play games.

Characters have more personality and events generally are more personal than casual. SoS is like "Here is my story and what I'm thinking right now..." and ANB is like "Hello, what a coincidence that I meet you here! Can you help me with whatever I'm doing right now?" thing.

You have rival farmers for now, which will compete with you to have more lands. As the year progresses, they become harder to beat, so you can't neglect/slack off in your farm!

They have Seedling Mode (beginner's mode) and Normal Mode (veteran mode) which adjust difficulty (read: tedium) level of the gameplay.

SoS is more, more grindy and more tedious than ANB. If ANB stalled your progress with unlocking things in later years, SoS stalled you with requiring to ship insane amount of things. For example, here's the requirement to unlock The Tropical Country:

Original Mode = 100 tools, 500 seeds, 15,000 crops, 15,000 cooked recipes, 10,000 processed goods, 600 clothes.

Seedling Mode = 70 tools, 350 seeds, 10,500 crops, 10,500 cooked recipes. 7,000 processed goods, 420 clothes.

Seedling Mode reduces the number of items you have to ship (other than reduced stamina cost and cheaper price on items at stores). But you still need to ship 10,000+ items, and that's not my idea of fun. It's not so much "difficulty," but more about "tedium."

Overall, I think ANB and SoS have their own good and bad points, regardless which one you'll pick. I personally think SoS is a little bit better since I like fewer "happy-go-lucky" characters and SoS characters are less flat than ANB's. But the bad thing is I have to deal with the tedium. Of course, opinion may vary and I suggest you to get both just to know which one you like better.

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Oops! I didn't realize... I'm new to this whole wiki/wikia thing and have no clue what I'm doing, as is now obvious. I'll move this over to my blog tab and see how that goes. Thank you for telling me that, and thank you for your input! I definitely like a game that is faster paced, so the lengthy-ness of SoS throws me a little, but it definitely sounds wayyy more interesting and a better overall play, so I'll still have to give it more thought, but thanks again! You really helped. :-)