I knew that Harvest Moon had essentially become Story of Seasons, but I didn't know the story behind it, thanks for covering the topic, this was super interesting.
Hey @@MattMcMuscles, have you seen Titan A.E. The Movie or the Game Demo? It's definitely worth doing a video on, quite the underrated Title still to this day.
I was obsessed with Harvest Moon: Tree of Tranquility on the Wii and I didn't even know there was a plot. I spent an entire in-game year building my farm and trying to get one of the townspeople to marry me before I randomly stumbled upon a fairy and discovered that there was actually a story buried in the sandbox. Good times. Great video :)
Something similar happened to me! I was obsessed with Tree of Tranquility too, and while I knew there was a plot I didn't think it was that important. So it wasn't until a year or two in-game that I started it and was amazed by all the new villagers moving in lol
Funny you say that because idk anyone else who played Tree of Tranquility, but I always defend it as a great game in the midst of their lineup of mediocre or even bad games
I also love Tree Of Tranquility and Animal Parade for the Wii. I don’t really know anyone else in person who’s played them. It’s nice to see some fans.
The hundreds of hours I've spent playing Friends of Mineral Town, I love it. Sadly, like Matt said changing their name to a different brand than the popular Harvest Moon, while needed, is still hurting them to this day. I still see people being confused or unaware that Story of Seasons IS the Harvest Moon they knew and love.
@@Ladywizard pretty much just the rival marriages were cut, since Japanese players were apparently not fans of that. Which while kind of a shame isn't really a huge thing either.
@@Ladywizard I just didn't like a lot of the redesigns. Karen was a completely new person and some designs like doctor was too bland. Plus i really wanted them to expand the world a bit more and finish a lot of the cliffhanging storylines a few villagers had unresolved in the original.
I recall when the change actually happened, most of the fandom for Harvest Moon was treating this as a possible good thing since it meant two farming life sim series and competition in that very niche genre. We were optimistic, at least.
Yea I tried out lost valley when it first came out cause I felt the same way. The whole genre is super niche and even nowadays there aren't much others jumping into the ring although I do wonder how the SE thing is going to turn out.
I was with you there. Fortunately Stardew came in and did what the split failed to. Hopefully something interesting with grow out of the indie scene sometime soon.
@@RaspbrylZ It doesn't involve farming as far as I am aware but Potion Permit feels like a really fresh take on the feel and idea behind Story of Seasons. And it has a much better setting, writing, and characters than Stardew Valley which granted is a low bar.
This might very well be the most wholesome What Happened? of them all. Not just for the subject, but also because it felt so... well... there weren't any "toxic" problems in the franchise. No crunching, no abusive micro-transactions, no lies. It was just a matter of companies merging, and the IP trading hands, and confusion about publishing rights.
Well. There was a lot of ego. Instead of taking the hit and buying Natsume, Marvelous tried to strong-arm them out the game. And ended up causing irreversible harm to their brand in the end.
@@andrearosario8512 The brand wasn't harmed in Japan as they continued the same path since the SNES days. The only thing harmed is the American brand Harvest Moon while the American brand Story of Seasons fared much better seeing as the games released in the West are the latest Bokujo games XSEED localized. Also, it's Natsume Inc's fault for hiring studios that have made those terrible original Harvest Moon games, so they're the cause of the HM's brand being harmed since 2014.
@@andrearosario8512 I don't think Marveouls was in the wrong though Similar changes has happened to other IPs ( Neptunia being published by Compa since their problems with NIS of Japan, which then they published on their own company instead of NIS of America ) or the situation with XSEED and NISA over The Legend Of The Heroes IP
@@KumiChan2004 played an emulator of it after years of wanting it and found it supremely frustrating. The days are so short you barely have any time to do anything.
@@lookingfortherain I'm hunting it more as a collector now. I see it as a gem that I am missing. The hunt is typically part of the fun. But it is kind of weird that they haven't actually re-released it like they have other titles.
@@patheticdog6498 I think how simple it is gives it a lot of charm. I also love the sprites and top-down view. It gives the game A Link to the Past vibes, which is probably what drew me in as a kid since ALttP was the first game I ever played. I'd love to see it remastered with bug fixes, a better translation, and some quality of life updates.
I was a big Harvest Moon fan in my childhood, but stopped gaming after the Wii days. So when my parents went to buy my Switch for Christmas, the first game they were looking for was Harvest Moon. If I had known their plan, I would've told them about the change beforehand, but thank the universe - the guy working at the store actually knew about the situation (and told them to get an eshop card so I can buy Stardew Valley - which was my plan xD). And to this day I'm so grateful for him, because I still see so many people online who didn't know about the name change! I guess the name change wouldn't even be a problem if the new Harvest Moon games were any good...
You would never think a cute and wholesome sim series about farming would be involved in such a tangled web of legal snafus and franchise name hot potato but damn...
The two companies had "different ideas of where the franchise was going" apparently Natsume thought it should become a pile of shovelware garbage? Weird direction but ok 🤷♀️
To be fair Natsume was in a tricky position, their only real claim to fame was publishing the Bokujo Monogatari games and they now suddenly had no access to it, so they scraped their assets and worked with what they had.
I never met anyone who even knew of phalanx growing up. I don't even remember how we got the game, maybe my cousin gave it to us. We had no clue what to expect when we first played it. My kid self thought it was going to do with banjos haha
I love harvest moon / story of seasons. People just need to remember story of seasons is the real harvest moon now and the natsume version of “harvest moon” is basically a cheap mobile game with the same name because they own the rights to the name not the actual franchise.
I still to this day don't know why people try to defend Light of Hope. The graphics alone is jarring. They couldn't get the running animation to sync with the run speed, it looks WEIRD!
@@RealBradMiller stardew is a good game I played about 100 hours until the friends of mineral town remake came out and haven’t touched stardew. I prefer the cute chibi graphics of story of seasons and it’s mood better and of course the 3D graphics.
@@kalythai it just has a cheap feel to it and the game play sucks. It’s like a cheap really bad knock off. Story of seasons also as a name fits the REAL series better anyway.
I will say though Natsume kinda got a raw deal in all this If my main source of income left me out to dry, I'm not sure I'd be too capable of getting on my feet again either. It's kinda surprising they didn't just go under and have the name forcibly brought back when that happens
Man, this series means so much to my mom and I. It was one of the things the two of us were able to bond over when I was in elementary school and she still remembers me crying over the sudden death of my character in the GameCube game and hating my choice of husband because "he was a useless man" and would never help me with my chores lol
I got tricked a few years ago into buying a newer Harvest Moon for the Switch not knowing about the brand name change... I had just started getting into it after getting a used copy of one the games for my 3DS.
Damn sorry about that, man I've been so used to the whole difference between Harvest Moon and Story of Seasons for years now (as I read all about it at the time when the change happened) but it never occurred to me that other people who are newer to the series or have been out of touch since the early titles wouldn't have clue about whole fiasco and the divergence.
@@DRAG0NSPIRIT10 i honestly felt weird for me as I haven't played any title and began looking for the recent games And something felt wrong about those Like they felt more like those cheap social media games or famrvile with litle effort on character design What confuses me is why Natsume still uses the name and the style as well, as I am sure they do own the name but they don't own the original IP ( if they decide to make a Remake of Mineral Town, which already exist, that could complicate things I think for Natsume for the worst )
@@xXSoulGeoXx Easy answer on the IP - the IP has value. As shown in these comments (this one and others) people HAVE been tricked by this. Without that name, they would have likely gotten almost no attention (because their games look AND run badly, and are just an overall mess). And without no attention, no sales, and thus they go out of business. They can't obviously remake Mineral Town - Even though they have the series name, they don't have the rights to other aspects of that game or any of Marvelous' other series.
The split is a fucking nightmare. I've given up on explaining it to my friends, instead just pointing them to a graphic that explains the split. Stardew valley has cracked the gameplay loop but can be lacking in other areas that the new story of seasons a series tries to satiate. But the latest one, Pioneers of Olive Town, is unfortunately not capable of learning from starview valley and capitalizing on the potential market available. I now use the series to practice my Japanese reading. It saddens me how much the series is fallen.
me, a long time harvest moon fan, preparing a cozy drink and blanket everytime someone asks what happened and someone inevitably has to explain the natsume decision: ☺️☕️
I haven't really played the series since it switched back to Story of Seasons, but I loved it. I'm literally playing RF5 now. Edit: and playing Breeze in the outro gave me massive nostalgia whiplash. A Wonderful Life was the first Harvest Moon game I played. I hadn't heard that song in years. I'm not crying, you're crying
How's RF5? I bought it but it came out around the time of another big release and I just never got around to it. Absolutely Loved RF Frontier, RF2, and RF4, but how would you compare RF5 to what's come before it?
I'm enjoying it so far. I hear the story is pretty short, and required before getting married, but aside from that it seems just as good as any other I've played. It doesn't push the limits of graphics or anything, but I like the art direction they're on with the series on more powerful hardware. Honestly, my biggest gripe so far has been the weird buffer spaces required between furniture and other furniture/walls, which has been handled by modders on pc.
@@EasyCure0 RF5 is great. There is a bit of jank, though, and my guess is that the team struggled a bit with the transition from the top down fixed camera of RF4 to the fully 3D RF5. You kinda feel it in a few spots, but it's a minor complaint compared to all the stuff they got right.
Yeah, many people were upset by the framerate issues, but it feels like an old team struggling to transition to new technology. Otherwise, RF5 has a really solid cast and fun gameplay. If people want the “best” version, consider the recent PC port, as it doesn’t have the technical issues.
Hey Matt! I don't comment as much as I should, but I just wanted to say thanks for all your great videos, been subscribed for years, keep up the amazing work!
@@ZeroDeMighty it is truly worth it. I have played video games forever and love it, and even my mom loves it. It's the rare game that is perfect for everyone.
@@ZeroDeMighty Be warned though: *_It's addictive as all hell._* I made the mistake yesterday of opening the game at 10 PM thinking "I'll just play for one in-game day or two". I didn't stop playing until 4 AM... LOL
To be honest I've tried and tried to get into it but while I love quite a few of the Harvest Moon / Story of Seasons games I just loathe Stardew Valley. Mix of 1), not liking the aesthetics, 2), hating the controls, and 3), how you can't bring up the series anymore without people telling you to just play it instead.
I remember playing Harvest Moon (ToT) at my cousin's house on his wii. When my mom got me my own copy, my sister and I played it for hours on end. The game is very slow paced compared to AP (also on the wii), but it's still my favorite one to this day.
Ah Tree of Tranquility. The game is okay, but dear lord is that pacing a massive issue. Having to start from the ground up means you basically don't get to farm properly for at least a few in game months. Thankfully they learned from this for Animal Parade
Nice to see another fan of ToT! I agree it was one of the best titles, especially at the time since the DS games were all pretty lackluster. I never really had an issue with the pacing when I played it, but I guess that's a rare opinion, heh.
@@KimblesTheBrave it's certainly one of the better titles, but one of the best is a very high bar since it has certain big issues no other game suffers from (like not being able to run a farm properly until hours upon hours into the game.) Though it's moreso just looked at less fondly since Animal Parade did basically everything better.
@@Robbie_Haruna I do agree with you AP does many things better, I just personally prefer ToT over it because characters feel more fleshed out in ToT and I like the story better.
I’d love to see a What Happened on Rune Factory 5, but I’m not sure there’s actually enough info on its development out there to get anything. Shortly after Rune Factory 4 released in the west in 2013/2014, the developer Neverland went under. Most RF fans assumed this meant the death of the franchise until a 2019 Nintendo Direct revealed a Switch port of RF4 and that RF5 was in development for a 2020 release. Well, uh, then COVID. The game didn’t end up coming out in Japan until 2021 and in the west until 2022, and it was plagued with glitches, stuttering, bad graphics, and sometimes even crashing. The western release seems to have been based on the post-patch versions of the original so it runs better at launch than the Japanese version did at its launch, but there’s still some horrendous oversights (my personal favorite of these oversights being that if you have a town event going, sometimes story bosses straight up won’t spawn and you can just skip them). It got a Steam port recently that runs much better but the utter mess that the original Switch version was makes me so curious about its original development.
I should throw in that Rune Factory DID see a re-release of RF3+4 in Japan sometime before that 2019 Nintendo Direct to show the series was still alive at the time, but people still didn't know what its status was at overall.
What gets me is that Rune Factory 5 was officially greenlit before Neverland went under. It's hard to say how much progress was made before it was eventually scrapped.
A big part of RF5’s issues is that the devs were reduced to more or less a skeleton crew. From the people who have looked into the game’s code (easier than expected thanks to the new engine), the response was unanimous: “Where did the programmers go.” Most of RF5’s backend is just RF4’s code, and the game was poorly optimized on top of that. It’s such a shame what happened there, because 5 had such potential. But, at least we still have RF4S, and apparently Square wants to try their hand at this style of game with “Harvestella,” so hopefully that goes well.
@@Randomness-hz7kj So I know it's been a long time since you posted this comment, but lately I've been looking into why exactly RF5 turned out the way it did and I was wondering if you had a link or anything to the datamines that said the game was built essentially on RF4's decaying corpse? I can absolutely believe it, but for a project I'm doing I need a source, and most of the datamines I've found have related more to cut content or item drop rates
The creator of Harvest Moon literally handed over the "spiritual" reigns to the franchise to Eric Barone who made Stardew Valley. While he was impressed with Barrone's game, I believe he didn't like the path his own franchise had embarked on.
I don't blame him, even with the story of season games I feel that way too, way too much complicated stuff to account for, I really like how stardew has that more relaxed feel connected back to the older games
His GDQ talk is also pretty illuminating in that respect. From the sound of it, he was always more interested in the little story vignettes with the townsfolk than he was with the farming itself, which he viewed as "repeatable action" that would keep the game moving rather than be the main focus.
You should do a "What Happened" episode on the Wario Land series or "Wario Land: Shake it" specifically! The last entry was around 14 years ago and it essentially got dropped and overtaken by the WarioWare series and left to die. I'd to love to see an in-depth video on the franchise and it's history and why Nintendo no longer sees it as profitable despite it's cultish popularity. It's even inspired some indie devs to create their own "Wario Land"-esque games like Pizza Tower and Antonblast which are both pretty popular.
I would say that the IP had a similar fate to F-Zero. Both of them got their roles filled-in in the eyes of Nintendo (that being some more advanced Mario platformers and Kart), although it's not true at all, and fans try to poke the stubborn giant about it ever since
I don't think it would be a very long, controversial story. WarioWare is cheaper to make and, to the public eye, is more unique/instantly recognizable and thus more marketable. I'm not sure about exact numbers, but I wouldn't be the least bit surprised Smooth Moves sold more copies than Shake It. The two series could technically coexist, and as a hardcore Wario Land fan I'd love them to, but WarioWare is just the easier option, especially when the 2d platformer genre is as saturated as it is now.
@@anons_anonymous I don't necessarily think it's the "easier" option...While the games themselves might come off as super simple, coming up with all them, designing/making them, and everything that comes along with that is probably just as tough as any other game. Honestly, I'd say it might even be tougher, in some regards, because it all has to fit a particular art style & humor, has to be fun and engaging to play, and they also had to take advantage of all the new "gimmicky" they introduced with almost every title (which I think they always managed to do amazingly. I remember playing Touched! for the first time and feeling the touchscreen finally didn't feel like a pointless gimmick). All in all, you can really tell a lot of work and passion went into the making of those games. So I don't think it's exactly fair to write them off as being easier to make than any other game. As a big fan of both series, I would love for both to be around but I'm glad that Wario was able to evolve and stay relevant by finding his own little "niche". If the Warioware titles never existed and he was still stuck just doing the platform games, would we even still be talking about him nowadays or would be something we only look fondly on in the past? Also, while it's been years...Fingers crossed, I think that we will eventually see another Wario platformer someday.
Harvest Moon was the first game series that got me into emulation. I am a very casual gamer- I don’t do the FPS thing, I don’t have a very good reaction time, and I’m looking more for something peaceful and quiet and happy. I played a couple of these as emulated games before I discovered Stardew Valley and my life was forever changed.
I've loved Harvest Moon since the SNES days and while I was aware of Story of Seasons, I really didn't know much about it or what (literally) had happened to it. This video is not only interesting but throughout informative, and I think it will benefit the brand greatly! It's kind of insane to think this did a much better job at explaining it than marketing ever did, so I thank you for that!
Honestly Matt, thanks for doing this! So many of us know the SoS/Harvest Moon thing in a vague sense. So this really helps give an understanble timeline and context.
I know it has nothing to do with what's being said in the video or the comments but I came here to say Harvest Moon 64 has a beautiful OST and everyone should listen to it. That is all.
This was a great overview of what I never had the paitence to look into and put it in a nice format to just watch and be like ohhh neat. Since I wasn't particularly invested in either franchise as a kid and saw it as one of those games I wasn't sure I'd like if I rented as a kid
It's so weird that one of the most chill series out there has such a complex web behind the scenes. I grew up on 64 and Magical Melody, and didn't really get back into the SoS series until the Friends of Mineral Town remake. XSeed has implied the next remake is already in development, and I have to imagine (or at least hope) that remakes of the earlier games with the classic cast of characters might help with the brand recognition. The split is such a weird part of the series history, and even now a lot of people aren't aware of what happened. Glad to see ya covering it!
if they're working on another remake i REALLY hope it's a double remake of A wonderful life/ Another wonderful life. (just merge the two together you could even include all the special extra stuff from the special edition as well just imagine being able to play those two again
I always assumed Harvest Moon lost popularity because everyone went to Stardew Valley, but I guess there really is more to the story. It's a shame because I think there's room for both to be popular simultaneously.
it is a part of that story, i heard about Nasume Harvest Moon departuare from Story of season before Stardew Valley =]] Basicly them both too slow or not even consider to step on PC, then there's a game call Stardew Valley took the storm of farming simulator and growth out to be best game on PC gone over both historic IP Harvest Moon and Story of season =]]
1:15 I had my bluetooth headphones on and was listening to the video while I was loading laundry in the other room. When I heard, but didn't see, "it was so different from what you'd normally see on the shelf...except for that one," I immediately thought, "he's showing the Phalanx box isn't he."
Thank you so much for making this video. As a kid, Harvest Moon: Back to Nature was so close to my heart, and it still is to this day. Some of this information came to my attention a few years ago, but I didn't investigate much into it mainly because it made me sad more than anything else. Now that I know everything about it I think I'm gonna try Stardew Valley for the first time, which is crazy because I was debating whether I should do just that a couple days ago. Hope it's amazing.
Recently in the last few years, I was really craving to play a harvest moon type game that isn't Stardew valley, but over the years i keep hearing that the Harvest moon games has gone downhill, so I never bother to try those newer games. I was actually shocked to hear that the game just basically change into "Story of the Seasons" and the HM IP has turned into a Zombie Knock off of its original self. I had to learned that realization from randomly purchasing Rune factory one day because I was told that it similar to HM but with more action segments.
This was such a wonderful episode! I've been a fan since Harvest Moon 64 (which I still own a copy of) and its nice to get the full story of exactly what happened.
Friends of Mineral Town on the GBA was my jam for... an unreasonable amount of time back in the day. I haven't really had the patience for farm sim games lately, never even got around to Stardew, but the recent remake Minerals Town got under the Story of Seasons umbrella has been tempting me lately.
Fond memories of this series. I knew about the whole split but you of course explained it much better Also 20 mil sales for Stardew Valley holy shit, I had no idea
As someone who lives in a family of Harvest Moon fans, I already knew about some of this, mainly the franchise split, but a lot more of this was new to me, and it was still entertaining. Good video!
At first I thought it was sad to hear that Hometown Story was ANOTHER farming game from Wada, as if the dude wasn't tired beyond belief of making farming games, but it's nice to hear that Toybox has gone on to (slowly) diversify their portfolio and make games that aren't so samey. I can't imagine making basically the same sort of game for almost 25 years and not wanting to change it up at some point. They're still sort of in the same camp of "chill & family friendly" so I wonder if that's simply his philosophy towards game creation.
Nice to see someone make a video and describe the situation. It was always so difficult to explain the reason why 'harvest moon' had become a minecraft like game was because of the split and xseed now publishing the real series. Tried that 3d minecraft gane btw, got stuck in the story because the i couldn't mine, and i couldn't get the tool to start mining.
Harvest Moon/Story of Seasons has to be one of my favourite set of games ever- so it was an absolute joy to see you do a video on the series, and finally seeing all this confusion explained properly! Some parts of it I knew myself, but there was a lot of details I didn't know, so this was fascinating to watch. Thank you for taking the time to cover it, Matt!!
I'm so glad someone finally was able to explain it so coherently. most of the time all I can tell people that ask is the two wanted different things so they divorced.
Glad you covered this, more people need to know about this. Natsume has been scamming people with mediocre Harvest Moons. They knew these games where bad because they never released them in the Japanese market. Also the Harvest Moons they translated where poorly done and even introduced a softlock in HM64.
Exactly. Natsume didn't like being replaced as the localization team, but their localization work was mediocre at best anyway with a number of games having a decent amount of typos or even some bugs. Hell there was some dialogue in Friends of Mineral Town that they just forgot to translate lmao.
@@Robbie_Haruna They also really effed up dialogue and translations in A new Beginning. Seriously, on my character’s birthday I went to the Harvest Goddess and the text was all screwed up.
Story of Seasons has also gotten bad, it hasn't reached the quality of its older titles in recent years. It's not good to single out one party in the debacle.
@@dogg-paws Most of the Story of Seasons titles were damn solid entries though. Not breaking ground as the new bests (frankly nothing has managed to beat Animal Parade to date.) They certainly aren't all without fault, but they're still easily better than or on par with a lot of old Harvest Moon games.
These games have an extra special place in my heart as my mom was willing to buy any of these games for us just because she was happy that they weren't a shooter/violent type of game. Any game we didn't have to pay our allowance/birthday money for was appreciated and welcomed no matter the type
Man I didn't know that Harvest Moon had such a confusing time and history!! I knew it because my late grandma LOVED Harvest Moon 64. I still have her file. But man I had no idea this was all going on even to this day.
Interesting story to say the least. As for a suggestion, I'd love to see Paper Mario Sticker Star, and maybe somehow get Chuggaaconroy as a guest as he absolutely despise the game. His hatred for the game is practically a meme at this point.
Right. I tend to not want to do episodes based solely on people's hatred for a particular game, there needs to be more to it. And I honestly don't think there's much to say about the later Paper Mario games other than they wanted to do something different. Not a very interesting story there, and trying to get info about Japanese Nintendo games is pretty much impossible.
Sticker star really is a mediocre RPG with neat graphic ideas for 3DS and a terrible combat system. But the wrath of old paper Mario fans aside, The games got nothing to talk about. Its development didn't derail, it sold decently, and it spawned two sequels.
@@MattMcMuscles I think the Paper Mario fandom is a textbook example of a subset of a game’s audience being incredibly taken by certain elements, but not being reflective of the overall market for the product. Personally I find the games to be more aesthetically interesting than anything else.
@@pokepress For this last entry, sure The two before it, (three if we count paper jam) Didn't really have the spirit either, outside of color splash having a few good jokes Super was a massive shift, and yet people have only ever warmed up to it more over the years
I absolutely loved these games as a kid. Very underappreciated, and, in a way, it was kind of an early life sim, like Animal Crossing before Animal Crossing. A Wonderful Life for GameCube is something of an unsung masterpiece. I've never played any of this series' successors, like the Rune Factory series, which combines Harvest Moon's farming with JRPG mechanics, but those games look very fun and I'd love to try it one day.
Oh man, Harvest Moon/Story of Season. This was such a good topic to cover so thanks for doing this Matt! Love it! Also, i have to give you props for using my favourite Harvest Moon music to begin this video.
As a longtime harvest moon fan since the ps2 area and quickly catching on that story of seasons is the actual GOOD one, this was an eye opener considering I got a simplified version of the whole Natsume fiasco. What a ride.
Always great to see Harvest Moon covered, and it's great to see the issue of the Marvelous/Natsume split covered since even nowadays there are plenty of people who don't realize what happened. I am an enormous Harvest Moon fan, and absolutely love virtually every game in the Bokujō Monogatari series. I didn't know about the split until after I had purchased and played The Lost Valley and experienced what a.. uh, experienced how different it was from the games before it. I was so shocked and confused after playing it that I went online and asked on several different gaming boards what the deal was, and even went back to the game store I had bought it from and talked to the people there. Thankfully, I more or less got the story and started getting the Story of Seasons games and now all is right in the world for me. Love them so much. Unfortunately, I haven't really enjoyed Natsume's take on "Harvest Moon" much, except for One World which I actually grew to really enjoy. Oddly enough, even though it gets such high praise, I also didn't enjoy Stardew Valley, despite people saying it's going to overtake Harvest Moon/Story of Seasons as THE farming game to get. I dunno.. I just don't feel it.
I booted up Stardew Valley for one night, and didn’t like the beginning, the customization, or the setting. I’m used to the cutesy atmosphere of Harvest Moon before the split. SNES and GBA Friends of Mineral Town are masterpieces in my eyes.
I played Stardew Valley for a spell before quickly becoming overwhelmed by how many things you needed to do. Instead of feeling relaxed, I got super intimidated. 😅 Switched over to World's Dawn after that, which is more story-driven than task-based. It's a smaller game with not much customization, but the characters are so cute and likeable.
I’m so happy you made this! This story is one of my favorite video game facts to rattle off. My wife has probably heard it like a dozen times, so I’m sure it’s nice to have it said in a more detailed way. It came at the right time, too, we’re both stuck at home with covid and this really brightened my day!
My favorite Harvest Moon is Harvest Moon 2 for the Gameboy Color I feel like it is like the super Nintendo version but with more features and is better optimized so less slow down
Harvest Moon 3D: A New Beginning was quite solid imo, and was the last Harvest Moon released before changing to the Story of Seasons brand. When it came time for me to get a farming sim for Switch, I was really torn between Stardew Valley and the Mineral Town remake, but Stardew won out because it was cheaper and had more features.
I remember harvest moon magical melody, me and my family would literally play that all the time. We ended up loosing the disc but i homebrewed my wii to get some games and decided to download that one again, and my mom got hooked again. And, to our suprise our old saves were still there (due to the wii holding certain game saves on console)
I had to research this topic for a video a few years back and boy was it confusing! I was so happy to see this uploaded. Thanks for making this one! I think many casual Harvest Moon fans will benefit from it.
My sister and I grew up on the Harvest Moon games, with Back to Nature being the one that started it for us, and we got almost every game in the franchise... until Harvest Moon: The Lost Valley. We were like, WTF is this? These characters are so unappealing and it just didn't feel like any of the previous games in the franchise. Then we learned about the (very confusing to us at the time) split between the companies and have now become big fans of the Story of Seasons and Rune Factory franchises.
@@dogg-paws SoS going downhill is a coincidence not from the split, since Natsume never made any of the games. T he first one called SOS was even made before then, it's just been a rough switch to well.. the Switch. The BokuMono series has ALWAYS had a flop or two on every new system(like Island of Happiness' horrid touch only controls) in the growing pains/adjustments, but once they get on a pace they then start to churn out some amazing games (like Grand Bazaar, same system as IoH but from it's graphics to smoother play, it went so much better).
This one really hits close to home for me. I grew Up with Harvest Moon and later on learning about the whole Harvest Moon to Story of Seasons thing and seeing how "Harvest Moon" had declined just really hurt
Even with all the ups and downs the Harvest Moon series has had over the years, I'm glad that the series hasn't...bought the farm! I'll see myself out...
@@ZelosXT Oh, I'm definitely gonna stay... I've been hooked on What Happened for nearly half a year now, and I'll ALWAYS find myself coming back for more!
I was very confused when you kept going on about the new Harvest Moon games because I remember seeing a Story Of Seasons game in my local shop and wondered if that was just rebranded Harvest Moon, Story-Of-Seasons-formerly-Harvest-Moon, or if the properties had been folded into one again. Nope, turns out they were both two independent series continuing to release concurrently. Because OF COURSE they were.
I wouldn't have guessed Harvest Moon was that complicated. I've never played any of them. Several years ago, some of my buddies from college and I had our late night Stardew Valley run for about a month or two.
I see... As someone who only got into Harvest Moon around the 3DS “A new Beggining” entry, following with Story of Seasons releasing and not knowing the difference and thus refraining from buying it, this was super informative and interesting! Maybe a short dive What Happened into Rune Factory could come in the future? It’s Harvest Moon with RPG mechanics/monsters/magic/plot and just more fun, but sales were horrible and we all thought RF4 would be the last entry, only for RF5 to come out last year on the switch, to sadly less than stellar sales. And now Square is gonna have their own crack at the genre soon... This rabbit hole keeps going...
I'm so happy that a big content creator is talking about this. A lot of people are still confused over the change from HM to SoS. I myself didn't know all the details aside from Natsume stealing the name and making Fake Moon games.
i remember very vaguely playing the game where you have a little shop.. never knew it was all connected! I loved the positive spin at the end, warmed my heart!
Thanks for always making this kind of content Matt. Been binge watching a lot of your What Happened videos on your channel lately. Keep up the good work!
i loved to play harvest moon ds with my sister back in 2010. for years we asked ourselves why the new harvest moon games were so different (and really bad) and wished for one just like the ds. it really took me until 2020 to figure out its just story of seasons now... maybe the marketing in germany wasnt as clear as in the english speaking realm
Das offizielle Marketing sowieso nicht. 😅 Ich habe nur den Bruch mit den Minecraft-Elementen mitbekommen und dann 1-2 Jahre später zufällig gelesen, was Sache ist.
You have no idea how much im happy this video exists. HM/SoS and RF are one of the most important gaming franchises that spawned so many spiritual sequels and its so upsetting seeing what happened to them with Natsume, now i'll finally have a proper informed video to show friends and explain what happened to the devs and franchise itself. Thank you so much Matt!
I’m so happy you finally covered this series. I always wanted to learn more about my second favorite game series, and you’ve done it so expertly. If you can, I would love for you to explore the development of the first game, Harvest Moon 1996. Because it’s kind of wild. From the game being made by three people, to the fact the director disappeared from the face of the earth. It’s wild!
Today I found out that all these weirdly named farming simulation games were basically harvest moon this whole time. Almost bought pretty much every non harvest moon titled game rune, seasons, etc. Idk if I knew it was harvest moon if I would've actually bought it
"Without decades of experience developing farm sims, it's just been really hard for Natsume to crack the code." Yeah.. Stardew Valley was made by one guy. If entire development teams can't figure out how to make an enjoyable wholesome farming sim then I think there's bigger problems with Natsume than just not getting it.
Eric Barone was in love with the Harvest Moon series and had played it himself, so he may have had a much deeper understanding of what the series actually needed than some development team without those personal stakes. Also, he wasn't in it for the money, he just wanted to make a really good game. He wasn't on a fixed schedule, and he didn't have to meet anyone's expections with regard to graphics. I'm not sure any development team would have been bold enough to lean into pixel art the way he did, but for an indy game with a definite retro vibe, this happened to work extremely well. Obviously, it is insane how much time and energy he must have put into the game, and it is astonishing that he actually set a standard in terms of gameplay that the professional development team is struggling to meet . But he was dedicated and personally invested in the series / genre. And I think that is what set him apart.
So happy I found this channel. I appreciate the information and the effort you put forth trying to distinguish the Natsume differences. I played harvest moon for the first time on the game cube ( a wonderful life) and it was the first game of its kind I ever experienced. I found Stardew Valley years later and never made the connection it was a direct inspiration of one of my favorite games. It has been nice to come full circle and still be able to appreciate Harvest Moon and see their mechanics at work in other games like it.
7:45 "They had to trust the their overseas fans are savvy enough to know what's what" Nope. That didn't happen immediately. People were slow on the uptake. Many people still bought Natsume's new Harvest Moon games expecting a good HM game but didn't. So they bitched and moaned at "why did the devs make such shitty games after such good games?" The subreddit get the same questions asked to this day.
Man that Wonderful Life theme really gets my nostalgia flowing. Wasnt even my favorite game on the gamecube but there's some fond memories there for sure
I tried HM: The Lost Valley when it was new, and I honestly liked the whole Minecraft style terrain system. That game had potential, it just needed either more time, more experienced leadership, or probably both.
The next game, Skytree Village, improved on the system I think. Games after that have kind of shifted away from letting you change the terrain, but give you different kinds of areas to plant in for triggering/avoiding mutations (swampy ground, dry ground, etc).
Can't say I expected this subject for "What Happun", but with the mess resulting from the localization split with Natsume, this is very much appreciated. Thanks.
I wish both companies could team up.. While "Story of Seasons" games tend to be much better I actually like what Natsume is doing with the character designs.
![How FAST can you get married in the ORIGINAL Harvest Moon? [SNES WR History]](/img/n.gif)
I knew that Harvest Moon had essentially become Story of Seasons, but I didn't know the story behind it, thanks for covering the topic, this was super interesting.
Ty!!!!
I 100% agree. I’ve always loved this series, and seeing it get some recognition makes me super happy.
Always assumed it evolved into stardew Valley! Keep up the hood work man
Hey @@MattMcMuscles, have you seen Titan A.E. The Movie or the Game Demo? It's definitely worth doing a video on, quite the underrated Title still to this day.
yup same I knew some vague details but now I know most of the gist of the story. I didn't even know Harvest moon was still putting out games actually
I was obsessed with Harvest Moon: Tree of Tranquility on the Wii and I didn't even know there was a plot. I spent an entire in-game year building my farm and trying to get one of the townspeople to marry me before I randomly stumbled upon a fairy and discovered that there was actually a story buried in the sandbox. Good times. Great video :)
Something similar happened to me! I was obsessed with Tree of Tranquility too, and while I knew there was a plot I didn't think it was that important. So it wasn't until a year or two in-game that I started it and was amazed by all the new villagers moving in lol
I need to go back and finish that one.
Funny you say that because idk anyone else who played Tree of Tranquility, but I always defend it as a great game in the midst of their lineup of mediocre or even bad games
I also love Tree Of Tranquility and Animal Parade for the Wii. I don’t really know anyone else in person who’s played them. It’s nice to see some fans.
Same with me when I first played rune factory 3. It was summer of year 2 when I fought the first boss in that game lol.
The hundreds of hours I've spent playing Friends of Mineral Town, I love it.
Sadly, like Matt said changing their name to a different brand than the popular Harvest Moon, while needed, is still hurting them to this day. I still see people being confused or unaware that Story of Seasons IS the Harvest Moon they knew and love.
I just hated how much Marvelous cut from Friends of mineral town when they gave it modern remake...
@@Ladywizard pretty much just the rival marriages were cut, since Japanese players were apparently not fans of that.
Which while kind of a shame isn't really a huge thing either.
@@Robbie_Haruna was cut by 2/3's of the events from the gba version when I checked the old fogu site event count compared to the new one's
@@Ladywizard
The remake had a whole dirth of content added to it and barely anything taken, what are you moaning about
@@Ladywizard I just didn't like a lot of the redesigns. Karen was a completely new person and some designs like doctor was too bland. Plus i really wanted them to expand the world a bit more and finish a lot of the cliffhanging storylines a few villagers had unresolved in the original.
I recall when the change actually happened, most of the fandom for Harvest Moon was treating this as a possible good thing since it meant two farming life sim series and competition in that very niche genre. We were optimistic, at least.
Yea I tried out lost valley when it first came out cause I felt the same way. The whole genre is super niche and even nowadays there aren't much others jumping into the ring although I do wonder how the SE thing is going to turn out.
I mean, competition did happen.
Not by Natsume, but by a certain ConcernedApe.
I was with you there. Fortunately Stardew came in and did what the split failed to. Hopefully something interesting with grow out of the indie scene sometime soon.
@@RaspbrylZ It doesn't involve farming as far as I am aware but Potion Permit feels like a really fresh take on the feel and idea behind Story of Seasons.
And it has a much better setting, writing, and characters than Stardew Valley which granted is a low bar.
@@haruhirogrimgar6047 Gonna look that up
This might very well be the most wholesome What Happened? of them all. Not just for the subject, but also because it felt so... well... there weren't any "toxic" problems in the franchise. No crunching, no abusive micro-transactions, no lies. It was just a matter of companies merging, and the IP trading hands, and confusion about publishing rights.
Well. There was a lot of ego. Instead of taking the hit and buying Natsume, Marvelous tried to strong-arm them out the game. And ended up causing irreversible harm to their brand in the end.
@@andrearosario8512 Idk, i guess? I feel like its more so confusion than full on harming the brand.
@@andrearosario8512 Not like natsume is any better, they are only using the title of Harvest moon, the game they are making are shit shovelware
@@andrearosario8512 The brand wasn't harmed in Japan as they continued the same path since the SNES days.
The only thing harmed is the American brand Harvest Moon while the American brand Story of Seasons fared much better seeing as the games released in the West are the latest Bokujo games XSEED localized.
Also, it's Natsume Inc's fault for hiring studios that have made those terrible original Harvest Moon games, so they're the cause of the HM's brand being harmed since 2014.
@@andrearosario8512 I don't think Marveouls was in the wrong though
Similar changes has happened to other IPs ( Neptunia being published by Compa since their problems with NIS of Japan, which then they published on their own company instead of NIS of America ) or the situation with XSEED and NISA over The Legend Of The Heroes IP
You know, I never really thought about how much this franchise deserved an episode of “What Happened”.
It really was a bumpy ride though.
The SNES Harvest Moon and Back to Nature were huge parts of my childhood. Thanks for doing a video on this series!
I'm still hunting down a physical copy of SNES Harvest Moon. I might have to bite the bullet and buy it online.
But been a fan since HM64
@@KumiChan2004 played an emulator of it after years of wanting it and found it supremely frustrating. The days are so short you barely have any time to do anything.
@@lookingfortherain
I'm hunting it more as a collector now. I see it as a gem that I am missing. The hunt is typically part of the fun.
But it is kind of weird that they haven't actually re-released it like they have other titles.
Imo the harvest moon snes is greater than other titles it's just lack some mechanics.
@@patheticdog6498 I think how simple it is gives it a lot of charm. I also love the sprites and top-down view. It gives the game A Link to the Past vibes, which is probably what drew me in as a kid since ALttP was the first game I ever played. I'd love to see it remastered with bug fixes, a better translation, and some quality of life updates.
I was a big Harvest Moon fan in my childhood, but stopped gaming after the Wii days. So when my parents went to buy my Switch for Christmas, the first game they were looking for was Harvest Moon. If I had known their plan, I would've told them about the change beforehand, but thank the universe - the guy working at the store actually knew about the situation (and told them to get an eshop card so I can buy Stardew Valley - which was my plan xD). And to this day I'm so grateful for him, because I still see so many people online who didn't know about the name change!
I guess the name change wouldn't even be a problem if the new Harvest Moon games were any good...
Wait name change? Wasn't Stardew Valley a third party game?
@@r1konTheAutomator they meant harvest moon to story of seasons
Not stardew valley
@@faezor3326 copy that
Friends of mineral town for switch is good tho
@@James52172which is under sos
You would never think a cute and wholesome sim series about farming would be involved in such a tangled web of legal snafus and franchise name hot potato but damn...
There was Cooking Mama, if you wanted something comparable.
To be fair, farming does frequently involve potatoes
Finally someone talks about the weird confusing history of the two different Natsume's. It's even crazier than I thought
The two companies had "different ideas of where the franchise was going" apparently Natsume thought it should become a pile of shovelware garbage? Weird direction but ok 🤷♀️
@@sadie9728 clearly thought their previous reputation of the series could carry them and let them basically turn it into an attempted money printer
ikr.
To be fair Natsume was in a tricky position, their only real claim to fame was publishing the Bokujo Monogatari games and they now suddenly had no access to it, so they scraped their assets and worked with what they had.
@@sadie9728 natsume lacks the imagination and skill to create a rewarding farming sim. They should stick to just publishing
Oh my god. The Phalanx box art with the banjo guy just unlocked a memory of being in my local video store from almost 30 years ago. Damn.
I need to see if I can find info on it, because I recognize it too and have literally no idea what it could possibly be lol
That always made me think “wtf?” when I would see it in stores when I was a kid.
@@Road_to_Dawn It's a space shmup. Unfortunately, there are (to my knowledge) no elderly men playing banjos in the game itself.
@@ButtonMasherReal False advertising, I say! Elderly banjoists fit perfectly into space shmups lol. I appreciate the info!
I never met anyone who even knew of phalanx growing up. I don't even remember how we got the game, maybe my cousin gave it to us. We had no clue what to expect when we first played it. My kid self thought it was going to do with banjos haha
I love harvest moon / story of seasons. People just need to remember story of seasons is the real harvest moon now and the natsume version of “harvest moon” is basically a cheap mobile game with the same name because they own the rights to the name not the actual franchise.
Yeah, I was VERY confused. Luckily in the search for a return to Harvest Moon led me to Stardew Valley.
I still to this day don't know why people try to defend Light of Hope. The graphics alone is jarring. They couldn't get the running animation to sync with the run speed, it looks WEIRD!
@@RealBradMiller stardew is a good game I played about 100 hours until the friends of mineral town remake came out and haven’t touched stardew. I prefer the cute chibi graphics of story of seasons and it’s mood better and of course the 3D graphics.
@@kalythai it just has a cheap feel to it and the game play sucks. It’s like a cheap really bad knock off. Story of seasons also as a name fits the REAL series better anyway.
I will say though
Natsume kinda got a raw deal in all this
If my main source of income left me out to dry, I'm not sure I'd be too capable of getting on my feet again either.
It's kinda surprising they didn't just go under and have the name forcibly brought back when that happens
Man, this series means so much to my mom and I. It was one of the things the two of us were able to bond over when I was in elementary school and she still remembers me crying over the sudden death of my character in the GameCube game and hating my choice of husband because "he was a useless man" and would never help me with my chores lol
Haha, that sounds adorable :') Was the gamecube game you're talking about A Wonderful Life, by any chance?
Sounds like it could have been Gustafa the wandering minstrel from Another Wonderful Life
Nothing hurts more than your own parents criticizing your waifu/husbando 💀
All jokes aside, that sounded so wholesome
I got tricked a few years ago into buying a newer Harvest Moon for the Switch not knowing about the brand name change... I had just started getting into it after getting a used copy of one the games for my 3DS.
Oof I feel bad for you
Damn sorry about that, man I've been so used to the whole difference between Harvest Moon and Story of Seasons for years now (as I read all about it at the time when the change happened) but it never occurred to me that other people who are newer to the series or have been out of touch since the early titles wouldn't have clue about whole fiasco and the divergence.
F
@@DRAG0NSPIRIT10 i honestly felt weird for me as I haven't played any title and began looking for the recent games
And something felt wrong about those
Like they felt more like those cheap social media games or famrvile with litle effort on character design
What confuses me is why Natsume still uses the name and the style as well, as I am sure they do own the name but they don't own the original IP ( if they decide to make a Remake of Mineral Town, which already exist, that could complicate things I think for Natsume for the worst )
@@xXSoulGeoXx Easy answer on the IP - the IP has value. As shown in these comments (this one and others) people HAVE been tricked by this. Without that name, they would have likely gotten almost no attention (because their games look AND run badly, and are just an overall mess). And without no attention, no sales, and thus they go out of business.
They can't obviously remake Mineral Town - Even though they have the series name, they don't have the rights to other aspects of that game or any of Marvelous' other series.
The split is a fucking nightmare. I've given up on explaining it to my friends, instead just pointing them to a graphic that explains the split. Stardew valley has cracked the gameplay loop but can be lacking in other areas that the new story of seasons a series tries to satiate. But the latest one, Pioneers of Olive Town, is unfortunately not capable of learning from starview valley and capitalizing on the potential market available.
I now use the series to practice my Japanese reading. It saddens me how much the series is fallen.
me, a long time harvest moon fan, preparing a cozy drink and blanket everytime someone asks what happened and someone inevitably has to explain the natsume decision: ☺️☕️
Lmao same
I haven't really played the series since it switched back to Story of Seasons, but I loved it. I'm literally playing RF5 now.
Edit: and playing Breeze in the outro gave me massive nostalgia whiplash. A Wonderful Life was the first Harvest Moon game I played. I hadn't heard that song in years.
I'm not crying, you're crying
How is RF5 for you?
How's RF5? I bought it but it came out around the time of another big release and I just never got around to it.
Absolutely Loved RF Frontier, RF2, and RF4, but how would you compare RF5 to what's come before it?
I'm enjoying it so far. I hear the story is pretty short, and required before getting married, but aside from that it seems just as good as any other I've played. It doesn't push the limits of graphics or anything, but I like the art direction they're on with the series on more powerful hardware.
Honestly, my biggest gripe so far has been the weird buffer spaces required between furniture and other furniture/walls, which has been handled by modders on pc.
@@EasyCure0 RF5 is great. There is a bit of jank, though, and my guess is that the team struggled a bit with the transition from the top down fixed camera of RF4 to the fully 3D RF5. You kinda feel it in a few spots, but it's a minor complaint compared to all the stuff they got right.
Yeah, many people were upset by the framerate issues, but it feels like an old team struggling to transition to new technology. Otherwise, RF5 has a really solid cast and fun gameplay. If people want the “best” version, consider the recent PC port, as it doesn’t have the technical issues.
Hey Matt! I don't comment as much as I should, but I just wanted to say thanks for all your great videos, been subscribed for years, keep up the amazing work!
Harvest Moon: How legal shenanigans led to 1 guy outdoing the devs at their own genre
I still need to play Stardew Valley, I had it downloaded on my switch for 3 years now
@@ZeroDeMighty Stardew valley is a black hole from which there is no escape
@@ZeroDeMighty it is truly worth it. I have played video games forever and love it, and even my mom loves it. It's the rare game that is perfect for everyone.
@@ZeroDeMighty Be warned though: *_It's addictive as all hell._*
I made the mistake yesterday of opening the game at 10 PM thinking "I'll just play for one in-game day or two".
I didn't stop playing until 4 AM...
LOL
To be honest I've tried and tried to get into it but while I love quite a few of the Harvest Moon / Story of Seasons games I just loathe Stardew Valley. Mix of 1), not liking the aesthetics, 2), hating the controls, and 3), how you can't bring up the series anymore without people telling you to just play it instead.
I remember playing Harvest Moon (ToT) at my cousin's house on his wii. When my mom got me my own copy, my sister and I played it for hours on end. The game is very slow paced compared to AP (also on the wii), but it's still my favorite one to this day.
Ah Tree of Tranquility.
The game is okay, but dear lord is that pacing a massive issue.
Having to start from the ground up means you basically don't get to farm properly for at least a few in game months.
Thankfully they learned from this for Animal Parade
Nice to see another fan of ToT! I agree it was one of the best titles, especially at the time since the DS games were all pretty lackluster. I never really had an issue with the pacing when I played it, but I guess that's a rare opinion, heh.
@@KimblesTheBrave it's certainly one of the better titles, but one of the best is a very high bar since it has certain big issues no other game suffers from (like not being able to run a farm properly until hours upon hours into the game.)
Though it's moreso just looked at less fondly since Animal Parade did basically everything better.
@@Robbie_Haruna I do agree with you AP does many things better, I just personally prefer ToT over it because characters feel more fleshed out in ToT and I like the story better.
I’d love to see a What Happened on Rune Factory 5, but I’m not sure there’s actually enough info on its development out there to get anything.
Shortly after Rune Factory 4 released in the west in 2013/2014, the developer Neverland went under. Most RF fans assumed this meant the death of the franchise until a 2019 Nintendo Direct revealed a Switch port of RF4 and that RF5 was in development for a 2020 release.
Well, uh, then COVID.
The game didn’t end up coming out in Japan until 2021 and in the west until 2022, and it was plagued with glitches, stuttering, bad graphics, and sometimes even crashing. The western release seems to have been based on the post-patch versions of the original so it runs better at launch than the Japanese version did at its launch, but there’s still some horrendous oversights (my personal favorite of these oversights being that if you have a town event going, sometimes story bosses straight up won’t spawn and you can just skip them).
It got a Steam port recently that runs much better but the utter mess that the original Switch version was makes me so curious about its original development.
I should throw in that Rune Factory DID see a re-release of RF3+4 in Japan sometime before that 2019 Nintendo Direct to show the series was still alive at the time, but people still didn't know what its status was at overall.
What gets me is that Rune Factory 5 was officially greenlit before Neverland went under. It's hard to say how much progress was made before it was eventually scrapped.
A big part of RF5’s issues is that the devs were reduced to more or less a skeleton crew. From the people who have looked into the game’s code (easier than expected thanks to the new engine), the response was unanimous: “Where did the programmers go.” Most of RF5’s backend is just RF4’s code, and the game was poorly optimized on top of that. It’s such a shame what happened there, because 5 had such potential. But, at least we still have RF4S, and apparently Square wants to try their hand at this style of game with “Harvestella,” so hopefully that goes well.
@@Randomness-hz7kj So I know it's been a long time since you posted this comment, but lately I've been looking into why exactly RF5 turned out the way it did and I was wondering if you had a link or anything to the datamines that said the game was built essentially on RF4's decaying corpse? I can absolutely believe it, but for a project I'm doing I need a source, and most of the datamines I've found have related more to cut content or item drop rates
The creator of Harvest Moon literally handed over the "spiritual" reigns to the franchise to Eric Barone who made Stardew Valley. While he was impressed with Barrone's game, I believe he didn't like the path his own franchise had embarked on.
Oh really? Tell me more. Have a source to that comment?
@@manuelalbertoromero9528 there is a video where both of them are together discussing their games on TH-cam if you search it
Thus laying Natsume's relevance to rest once and for all.
I don't blame him, even with the story of season games I feel that way too, way too much complicated stuff to account for, I really like how stardew has that more relaxed feel connected back to the older games
His GDQ talk is also pretty illuminating in that respect.
From the sound of it, he was always more interested in the little story vignettes with the townsfolk than he was with the farming itself, which he viewed as "repeatable action" that would keep the game moving rather than be the main focus.
You should do a "What Happened" episode on the Wario Land series or "Wario Land: Shake it" specifically! The last entry was around 14 years ago and it essentially got dropped and overtaken by the WarioWare series and left to die. I'd to love to see an in-depth video on the franchise and it's history and why Nintendo no longer sees it as profitable despite it's cultish popularity. It's even inspired some indie devs to create their own "Wario Land"-esque games like Pizza Tower and Antonblast which are both pretty popular.
I would say that the IP had a similar fate to F-Zero. Both of them got their roles filled-in in the eyes of Nintendo (that being some more advanced Mario platformers and Kart), although it's not true at all, and fans try to poke the stubborn giant about it ever since
I don't think it would be a very long, controversial story. WarioWare is cheaper to make and, to the public eye, is more unique/instantly recognizable and thus more marketable. I'm not sure about exact numbers, but I wouldn't be the least bit surprised Smooth Moves sold more copies than Shake It. The two series could technically coexist, and as a hardcore Wario Land fan I'd love them to, but WarioWare is just the easier option, especially when the 2d platformer genre is as saturated as it is now.
@@anons_anonymous I don't necessarily think it's the "easier" option...While the games themselves might come off as super simple, coming up with all them, designing/making them, and everything that comes along with that is probably just as tough as any other game. Honestly, I'd say it might even be tougher, in some regards, because it all has to fit a particular art style & humor, has to be fun and engaging to play, and they also had to take advantage of all the new "gimmicky" they introduced with almost every title (which I think they always managed to do amazingly. I remember playing Touched! for the first time and feeling the touchscreen finally didn't feel like a pointless gimmick).
All in all, you can really tell a lot of work and passion went into the making of those games. So I don't think it's exactly fair to write them off as being easier to make than any other game.
As a big fan of both series, I would love for both to be around but I'm glad that Wario was able to evolve and stay relevant by finding his own little "niche". If the Warioware titles never existed and he was still stuck just doing the platform games, would we even still be talking about him nowadays or would be something we only look fondly on in the past?
Also, while it's been years...Fingers crossed, I think that we will eventually see another Wario platformer someday.
Harvest Moon 64 is how I killed time in middle school. Such fond memories for that and HM: A Wonderful Life.
Karen besto waifu
@@briansanchez9899 Yes ❤️😂
Ayy. A wonderful life and Another wonderful life are my favorites! That's childhood happiness right there.
Harvest Moon was the first game series that got me into emulation. I am a very casual gamer- I don’t do the FPS thing, I don’t have a very good reaction time, and I’m looking more for something peaceful and quiet and happy. I played a couple of these as emulated games before I discovered Stardew Valley and my life was forever changed.
I've loved Harvest Moon since the SNES days and while I was aware of Story of Seasons, I really didn't know much about it or what (literally) had happened to it. This video is not only interesting but throughout informative, and I think it will benefit the brand greatly! It's kind of insane to think this did a much better job at explaining it than marketing ever did, so I thank you for that!
Honestly Matt, thanks for doing this! So many of us know the SoS/Harvest Moon thing in a vague sense. So this really helps give an understanble timeline and context.
I know it has nothing to do with what's being said in the video or the comments but I came here to say Harvest Moon 64 has a beautiful OST and everyone should listen to it.
That is all.
This was a great overview of what I never had the paitence to look into and put it in a nice format to just watch and be like ohhh neat. Since I wasn't particularly invested in either franchise as a kid and saw it as one of those games I wasn't sure I'd like if I rented as a kid
It's so weird that one of the most chill series out there has such a complex web behind the scenes. I grew up on 64 and Magical Melody, and didn't really get back into the SoS series until the Friends of Mineral Town remake. XSeed has implied the next remake is already in development, and I have to imagine (or at least hope) that remakes of the earlier games with the classic cast of characters might help with the brand recognition. The split is such a weird part of the series history, and even now a lot of people aren't aware of what happened. Glad to see ya covering it!
if they're working on another remake i REALLY hope it's a double remake of A wonderful life/ Another wonderful life. (just merge the two together
you could even include all the special extra stuff from the special edition as well
just imagine being able to play those two again
@@Mermain123 yup, and add bachelor/bachelorote from ds/ds cute
I always assumed Harvest Moon lost popularity because everyone went to Stardew Valley, but I guess there really is more to the story. It's a shame because I think there's room for both to be popular simultaneously.
it is a part of that story, i heard about Nasume Harvest Moon departuare from Story of season before Stardew Valley =]]
Basicly them both too slow or not even consider to step on PC, then there's a game call Stardew Valley took the storm of farming simulator and growth out to be best game on PC gone over both historic IP Harvest Moon and Story of season =]]
Sadly, that's not untrue. I've heard people, even knowing about Story of Seasons, say they'd rather just play Stardew Valley
1:15 I had my bluetooth headphones on and was listening to the video while I was loading laundry in the other room. When I heard, but didn't see, "it was so different from what you'd normally see on the shelf...except for that one," I immediately thought, "he's showing the Phalanx box isn't he."
Thank you so much for making this video. As a kid, Harvest Moon: Back to Nature was so close to my heart, and it still is to this day. Some of this information came to my attention a few years ago, but I didn't investigate much into it mainly because it made me sad more than anything else. Now that I know everything about it I think I'm gonna try Stardew Valley for the first time, which is crazy because I was debating whether I should do just that a couple days ago. Hope it's amazing.
Recently in the last few years, I was really craving to play a harvest moon type game that isn't Stardew valley, but over the years i keep hearing that the Harvest moon games has gone downhill, so I never bother to try those newer games. I was actually shocked to hear that the game just basically change into "Story of the Seasons" and the HM IP has turned into a Zombie Knock off of its original self. I had to learned that realization from randomly purchasing Rune factory one day because I was told that it similar to HM but with more action segments.
This was such a wonderful episode! I've been a fan since Harvest Moon 64 (which I still own a copy of) and its nice to get the full story of exactly what happened.
8:55 Shout out to Natsume's period of making first-party shovelware, Ruff Trigger being a particular "wait, that's real?" game from that list
Friends of Mineral Town on the GBA was my jam for... an unreasonable amount of time back in the day. I haven't really had the patience for farm sim games lately, never even got around to Stardew, but the recent remake Minerals Town got under the Story of Seasons umbrella has been tempting me lately.
Thank you for making this! I'm such a huge fan of the series and it's good to see the history of this series shown to a much wider audience.
Fond memories of this series. I knew about the whole split but you of course explained it much better
Also 20 mil sales for Stardew Valley holy shit, I had no idea
As someone who lives in a family of Harvest Moon fans, I already knew about some of this, mainly the franchise split, but a lot more of this was new to me, and it was still entertaining. Good video!
At first I thought it was sad to hear that Hometown Story was ANOTHER farming game from Wada, as if the dude wasn't tired beyond belief of making farming games, but it's nice to hear that Toybox has gone on to (slowly) diversify their portfolio and make games that aren't so samey. I can't imagine making basically the same sort of game for almost 25 years and not wanting to change it up at some point. They're still sort of in the same camp of "chill & family friendly" so I wonder if that's simply his philosophy towards game creation.
Nice to see someone make a video and describe the situation. It was always so difficult to explain the reason why 'harvest moon' had become a minecraft like game was because of the split and xseed now publishing the real series.
Tried that 3d minecraft gane btw, got stuck in the story because the i couldn't mine, and i couldn't get the tool to start mining.
Never have I said "Oh no" to just a video title so quickly after seeing it.
Harvest Moon/Story of Seasons has to be one of my favourite set of games ever- so it was an absolute joy to see you do a video on the series, and finally seeing all this confusion explained properly! Some parts of it I knew myself, but there was a lot of details I didn't know, so this was fascinating to watch. Thank you for taking the time to cover it, Matt!!
I'm so glad someone finally was able to explain it so coherently. most of the time all I can tell people that ask is the two wanted different things so they divorced.
That was a crazy story. I never knew what was happening but had a feeling when all the games felt the same but worse later on.
Glad you covered this, more people need to know about this. Natsume has been scamming people with mediocre Harvest Moons. They knew these games where bad because they never released them in the Japanese market. Also the Harvest Moons they translated where poorly done and even introduced a softlock in HM64.
Exactly.
Natsume didn't like being replaced as the localization team, but their localization work was mediocre at best anyway with a number of games having a decent amount of typos or even some bugs.
Hell there was some dialogue in Friends of Mineral Town that they just forgot to translate lmao.
@@Robbie_Haruna They also really effed up dialogue and translations in A new Beginning.
Seriously, on my character’s birthday I went to the Harvest Goddess and the text was all screwed up.
Story of Seasons has also gotten bad, it hasn't reached the quality of its older titles in recent years. It's not good to single out one party in the debacle.
@@dogg-paws Most of the Story of Seasons titles were damn solid entries though. Not breaking ground as the new bests (frankly nothing has managed to beat Animal Parade to date.) They certainly aren't all without fault, but they're still easily better than or on par with a lot of old Harvest Moon games.
@@Robbie_Haruna I think the Rune Factory series has become Marvelous' star.
Thank you for sharing and answering this long held question!!
GameCube/PS2 version of Friends of Mineral Town was my favorite format!!
These games have an extra special place in my heart as my mom was willing to buy any of these games for us just because she was happy that they weren't a shooter/violent type of game. Any game we didn't have to pay our allowance/birthday money for was appreciated and welcomed no matter the type
Man I didn't know that Harvest Moon had such a confusing time and history!!
I knew it because my late grandma LOVED Harvest Moon 64. I still have her file. But man I had no idea this was all going on even to this day.
Interesting story to say the least.
As for a suggestion, I'd love to see Paper Mario Sticker Star, and maybe somehow get Chuggaaconroy as a guest as he absolutely despise the game. His hatred for the game is practically a meme at this point.
Right. I tend to not want to do episodes based solely on people's hatred for a particular game, there needs to be more to it. And I honestly don't think there's much to say about the later Paper Mario games other than they wanted to do something different. Not a very interesting story there, and trying to get info about Japanese Nintendo games is pretty much impossible.
@@MattMcMuscles That's fair, thanks for responding anyway.
Sticker star really is a mediocre RPG with neat graphic ideas for 3DS and a terrible combat system.
But the wrath of old paper Mario fans aside, The games got nothing to talk about. Its development didn't derail, it sold decently, and it spawned two sequels.
@@MattMcMuscles I think the Paper Mario fandom is a textbook example of a subset of a game’s audience being incredibly taken by certain elements, but not being reflective of the overall market for the product. Personally I find the games to be more aesthetically interesting than anything else.
@@pokepress For this last entry, sure
The two before it, (three if we count paper jam)
Didn't really have the spirit either, outside of color splash having a few good jokes
Super was a massive shift, and yet people have only ever warmed up to it more over the years
I absolutely loved these games as a kid. Very underappreciated, and, in a way, it was kind of an early life sim, like Animal Crossing before Animal Crossing. A Wonderful Life for GameCube is something of an unsung masterpiece. I've never played any of this series' successors, like the Rune Factory series, which combines Harvest Moon's farming with JRPG mechanics, but those games look very fun and I'd love to try it one day.
Rune Factory is amazing. Haven't played 4 or 5, but I've heard they're great. Frontier, Tides of Destiny/Oceans and 3 are all great.
Oh my Gosh, Harvest Moon is one of my favorites and I was thinking of doing something on this series! Very cool to see someone cover it!
Oh man, Harvest Moon/Story of Season. This was such a good topic to cover so thanks for doing this Matt! Love it!
Also, i have to give you props for using my favourite Harvest Moon music to begin this video.
As a longtime harvest moon fan since the ps2 area and quickly catching on that story of seasons is the actual GOOD one, this was an eye opener considering I got a simplified version of the whole Natsume fiasco. What a ride.
/DROPS EVERYTHING BECAUSE HARVEST MOON/ STORY OF SEASONS DISCUSSION
Not even talking about HM. That ad break transition at 6:16 was actually amazing. Subbing just for the professionalism.
Always great to see Harvest Moon covered, and it's great to see the issue of the Marvelous/Natsume split covered since even nowadays there are plenty of people who don't realize what happened. I am an enormous Harvest Moon fan, and absolutely love virtually every game in the Bokujō Monogatari series. I didn't know about the split until after I had purchased and played The Lost Valley and experienced what a.. uh, experienced how different it was from the games before it. I was so shocked and confused after playing it that I went online and asked on several different gaming boards what the deal was, and even went back to the game store I had bought it from and talked to the people there. Thankfully, I more or less got the story and started getting the Story of Seasons games and now all is right in the world for me. Love them so much.
Unfortunately, I haven't really enjoyed Natsume's take on "Harvest Moon" much, except for One World which I actually grew to really enjoy. Oddly enough, even though it gets such high praise, I also didn't enjoy Stardew Valley, despite people saying it's going to overtake Harvest Moon/Story of Seasons as THE farming game to get. I dunno.. I just don't feel it.
I booted up Stardew Valley for one night, and didn’t like the beginning, the customization, or the setting.
I’m used to the cutesy atmosphere of Harvest Moon before the split.
SNES and GBA Friends of Mineral Town are masterpieces in my eyes.
I played Stardew Valley for a spell before quickly becoming overwhelmed by how many things you needed to do. Instead of feeling relaxed, I got super intimidated. 😅 Switched over to World's Dawn after that, which is more story-driven than task-based. It's a smaller game with not much customization, but the characters are so cute and likeable.
Cool seeing SoS and HM getting videos. It’s an incredibly interesting series both in game and out game.
Great video! I've always wanted an explainer on this debacle.
Glad it was helpful!
I’m so happy you made this! This story is one of my favorite video game facts to rattle off. My wife has probably heard it like a dozen times, so I’m sure it’s nice to have it said in a more detailed way. It came at the right time, too, we’re both stuck at home with covid and this really brightened my day!
I hope you're feeling better now.
@@stardustsdd Much, thank you
It’s been a shit week (today included, 6 day work week for me).
I needed something like this today.
My favorite Harvest Moon is Harvest Moon 2 for the Gameboy Color I feel like it is like the super Nintendo version but with more features and is better optimized so less slow down
Harvest Moon 3D: A New Beginning was quite solid imo, and was the last Harvest Moon released before changing to the Story of Seasons brand. When it came time for me to get a farming sim for Switch, I was really torn between Stardew Valley and the Mineral Town remake, but Stardew won out because it was cheaper and had more features.
I remember harvest moon magical melody, me and my family would literally play that all the time. We ended up loosing the disc but i homebrewed my wii to get some games and decided to download that one again, and my mom got hooked again. And, to our suprise our old saves were still there (due to the wii holding certain game saves on console)
to this day i still play HM BTN occasionally. it's probably my most played game of all time
I had to research this topic for a video a few years back and boy was it confusing! I was so happy to see this uploaded. Thanks for making this one! I think many casual Harvest Moon fans will benefit from it.
My sister and I grew up on the Harvest Moon games, with Back to Nature being the one that started it for us, and we got almost every game in the franchise... until Harvest Moon: The Lost Valley.
We were like, WTF is this? These characters are so unappealing and it just didn't feel like any of the previous games in the franchise. Then we learned about the (very confusing to us at the time) split between the companies and have now become big fans of the Story of Seasons and Rune Factory franchises.
Story of Seasons also got reduced in quality since the split, which allowed Stardew Valley to take over both, almost by default.
@@dogg-paws SoS going downhill is a coincidence not from the split, since Natsume never made any of the games. T he first one called SOS was even made before then, it's just been a rough switch to well.. the Switch. The BokuMono series has ALWAYS had a flop or two on every new system(like Island of Happiness' horrid touch only controls) in the growing pains/adjustments, but once they get on a pace they then start to churn out some amazing games (like Grand Bazaar, same system as IoH but from it's graphics to smoother play, it went so much better).
This one really hits close to home for me. I grew Up with Harvest Moon and later on learning about the whole Harvest Moon to Story of Seasons thing and seeing how "Harvest Moon" had declined just really hurt
Instant click to watch for my favorite franchise
Yeah, What Happun?! Is the best franchise in the MCU (McMuscles Commentary Universe)
Back to Nature was the Apex of harvest moon to me.
I love every character, and their backstories.
Even with all the ups and downs the Harvest Moon series has had over the years, I'm glad that the series hasn't...bought the farm!
I'll see myself out...
No....Stay....
@@ZelosXT Oh, I'm definitely gonna stay... I've been hooked on What Happened for nearly half a year now, and I'll ALWAYS find myself coming back for more!
No they didn't... they inherited it from their late grandfather.
I was very confused when you kept going on about the new Harvest Moon games because I remember seeing a Story Of Seasons game in my local shop and wondered if that was just rebranded Harvest Moon, Story-Of-Seasons-formerly-Harvest-Moon, or if the properties had been folded into one again. Nope, turns out they were both two independent series continuing to release concurrently. Because OF COURSE they were.
There should be a spin-off game focusing on cows, called "Harvest Moo".
I wouldn't have guessed Harvest Moon was that complicated. I've never played any of them. Several years ago, some of my buddies from college and I had our late night Stardew Valley run for about a month or two.
I see... As someone who only got into Harvest Moon around the 3DS “A new Beggining” entry, following with Story of Seasons releasing and not knowing the difference and thus refraining from buying it, this was super informative and interesting!
Maybe a short dive What Happened into Rune Factory could come in the future? It’s Harvest Moon with RPG mechanics/monsters/magic/plot and just more fun, but sales were horrible and we all thought RF4 would be the last entry, only for RF5 to come out last year on the switch, to sadly less than stellar sales. And now Square is gonna have their own crack at the genre soon... This rabbit hole keeps going...
Last Year? Rune Factory 5 literally came out 4 months ago back in March.
What are you talking about? Rune factory 5 sold 500 000
@@Nerdthatdreamsofelectricsheep thats borderline failing for a switch game. Gotta see how much a game cost to make too
God I must be high. Why does it feel like the past 4 months have been 5 years?
Very interesting. I sort of suspected that Story of Seasons was just a rebrand of Harvest Moon, but I never knew the details of it.
I'm so happy that a big content creator is talking about this. A lot of people are still confused over the change from HM to SoS. I myself didn't know all the details aside from Natsume stealing the name and making Fake Moon games.
Natsume actually didn't steal anything, both companies just got into a fallout. Neither series are as good as they used to be.
@@dogg-paws SoS Trio of Town is the best best game in the series if you ignore nostalgic bias. But pop off queen.
i remember very vaguely playing the game where you have a little shop.. never knew it was all connected! I loved the positive spin at the end, warmed my heart!
I think it's amazing that this whole saga never once led to any legal dispute.
Now I have a video to link to whenever I have to tell someone what happened to my favorite series. Thank you.
Another fantastic entry in your series, and I would absolutely be down for more vids that look moreso at a franchise at large every now and then~! :)
Thanks for always making this kind of content Matt. Been binge watching a lot of your What Happened videos on your channel lately. Keep up the good work!
i loved to play harvest moon ds with my sister back in 2010. for years we asked ourselves why the new harvest moon games were so different (and really bad) and wished for one just like the ds. it really took me until 2020 to figure out its just story of seasons now... maybe the marketing in germany wasnt as clear as in the english speaking realm
Das offizielle Marketing sowieso nicht. 😅 Ich habe nur den Bruch mit den Minecraft-Elementen mitbekommen und dann 1-2 Jahre später zufällig gelesen, was Sache ist.
My thanks for ending on that "Wonderful Life" music for the outro. My first HM game and one I still play.
damn... my life used tobe happy, playing harvest moon everyday and everythings ok
Hey man it gets better
i also like how the video is about harvest moon but the youtube preview is fighting game footage lol
Four minutes in and I had to restart the video so as to not get any more lost.
Thanks for doing this one Matt! It was nice to see the confusing, yet wholesome tale of my favorite farming sims.
You have no idea how much im happy this video exists. HM/SoS and RF are one of the most important gaming franchises that spawned so many spiritual sequels and its so upsetting seeing what happened to them with Natsume, now i'll finally have a proper informed video to show friends and explain what happened to the devs and franchise itself.
Thank you so much Matt!
I'm actually playing Legend of the River King gbc on my 3ds. I started it 3 days ago.
I’m so happy you finally covered this series. I always wanted to learn more about my second favorite game series, and you’ve done it so expertly.
If you can, I would love for you to explore the development of the first game, Harvest Moon 1996. Because it’s kind of wild. From the game being made by three people, to the fact the director disappeared from the face of the earth. It’s wild!
Today I found out that all these weirdly named farming simulation games were basically harvest moon this whole time. Almost bought pretty much every non harvest moon titled game rune, seasons, etc. Idk if I knew it was harvest moon if I would've actually bought it
"Without decades of experience developing farm sims, it's just been really hard for Natsume to crack the code."
Yeah.. Stardew Valley was made by one guy. If entire development teams can't figure out how to make an enjoyable wholesome farming sim then I think there's bigger problems with Natsume than just not getting it.
yep, games like stardew valley are made by literally one person. yup. perfectly reasonable gamer here.
@@LowProfile0247 it really is just one person tho lol
@@LowProfile0247 It's literally just one person, and he is the man, the legend!
Concerned Ape
Eric Barone was in love with the Harvest Moon series and had played it himself, so he may have had a much deeper understanding of what the series actually needed than some development team without those personal stakes. Also, he wasn't in it for the money, he just wanted to make a really good game. He wasn't on a fixed schedule, and he didn't have to meet anyone's expections with regard to graphics. I'm not sure any development team would have been bold enough to lean into pixel art the way he did, but for an indy game with a definite retro vibe, this happened to work extremely well. Obviously, it is insane how much time and energy he must have put into the game, and it is astonishing that he actually set a standard in terms of gameplay that the professional development team is struggling to meet . But he was dedicated and personally invested in the series / genre. And I think that is what set him apart.
So happy I found this channel. I appreciate the information and the effort you put forth trying to distinguish the Natsume differences. I played harvest moon for the first time on the game cube ( a wonderful life) and it was the first game of its kind I ever experienced. I found Stardew Valley years later and never made the connection it was a direct inspiration of one of my favorite games. It has been nice to come full circle and still be able to appreciate Harvest Moon and see their mechanics at work in other games like it.
7:45 "They had to trust the their overseas fans are savvy enough to know what's what"
Nope. That didn't happen immediately. People were slow on the uptake. Many people still bought Natsume's new Harvest Moon games expecting a good HM game but didn't. So they bitched and moaned at "why did the devs make such shitty games after such good games?" The subreddit get the same questions asked to this day.
Man that Wonderful Life theme really gets my nostalgia flowing. Wasnt even my favorite game on the gamecube but there's some fond memories there for sure
I tried HM: The Lost Valley when it was new, and I honestly liked the whole Minecraft style terrain system. That game had potential, it just needed either more time, more experienced leadership, or probably both.
The next game, Skytree Village, improved on the system I think. Games after that have kind of shifted away from letting you change the terrain, but give you different kinds of areas to plant in for triggering/avoiding mutations (swampy ground, dry ground, etc).
Can't say I expected this subject for "What Happun", but with the mess resulting from the localization split with Natsume, this is very much appreciated. Thanks.
I wish both companies could team up.. While "Story of Seasons" games tend to be much better I actually like what Natsume is doing with the character designs.