Here's how to play Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life: Milk the cow, find something edible for the dog, scrub down the horse, bring your sweetheart some fresh flowers. Go fishing. Water your crops. Make dinner. Sleep. Repeat.
In many games, repetition is a script problem. In the new GameCube release Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life, it's the main point. The game's goal, it seems, is to capture the rhythms of a quiet, peaceful country life.
By that measure, A Wonderful Life works. The game's main character – a young man who takes over his father's abandoned farm – quickly figures out how to feed himself, grow his business and start a family. Next, he begins building lasting and fulfilling relationships with work, wife and surroundings.
Finding fulfillment is a pretty abstract goal – hardly the kind of thing you'd expect gamers to slap down $40 for. And A Wonderful Life has no explosions and no supervillains. You will wield hoes and sickles, not swords and firearms.
Still, A Wonderful Life can become dangerously addictive, especially during the first dozen or so hours. That's not just true for the kiddies who are this game's target audience: Playing A Wonderful Life encourages some deep thinking about being a responsible, well-rounded adult.
A Wonderful Life is the latest in a series of popular farming simulators. In Harvest Moon: Save the Homeland, the main character saves a village from developers, and in Harvest Moon: Back to Nature, he rescues his grandfather's farm. A Wonderful Life has less of a narrative. There's no specific mission – your character strives to find some stability and happiness in Forget-Me-Not Valley, the village where his farm is located.
Without having been given any kind of agenda, the little towheaded, wide-eyed guy is left to spend the day as he pleases. On the farm, there's a cow, a puppy, a few empty fields and a handful of tools. The town, with a population that seems to consist mostly of urban dropouts, has a bar, a traveling salesman, a productive fishing hole and a beach.
The young man does have to feed himself, and his animals, if he wants them to survive. He needs to sleep. And he needs to find a wife (or the game will find one for him). Otherwise, the day is spent exploring, working and watching the clock. Each second of playing time equals a minute of game time. A day is done in about 25 minutes; 10 days comprise a season and four seasons a year.
In other words, time passes pretty slowly in Forget-Me-Not Valley – you will play about 18 hours to get through the first year. And that's part of the problem. Though A Wonderful Life rewards routine and hard work, you may soon start to wonder: Why not spend this positive energy fixing up my real-world problems? Those same 18 hours could go a long way toward cleaning the kitchen....
Of course, A Wonderful Life makes solving problems seem pretty easy. That's one reason it becomes hard to turn off. Natsume, A Wonderful Life's publisher, has built a nearly perfect utopian world, where behavior is predictable and the neighbors are civil. In Forget-Me-Not Valley, there is a delicious, ever-shifting light, a gentle wind and plenty of edibles growing wild – it's as seductive a landscape as found in any family movie.
The Wonderful Life world is also environmentally friendly, with wind turbines, clean water and organic food – Monsanto has yet to arrive. The mere fact of a beautiful, untainted and peaceful place makes A Wonderful Life an anomaly in the video-game world.
A Wonderful Life does have problems, including some glitchy graphics. You will find yourself bouncing off of the ghosts of buildings – the game doesn't keep up with the character's movements. The small-town small talk is stifling and redundant, with the same people saying the same things, day after day. Playing can get a bit lonely.
Still, a few hours spent in A Wonderful Life can be a thought-provoking, invigorating experience. Power down your GameCube for a day or two, and you might even get homesick.
A Wonderful Life is rated E for everyone.
