Harvest Moon: Tree of Tranquility
Released:2008
Game system: Wii
Players: 1 Player
Rating: 6
Story:
Basically you're a young man or woman who comes to Waffle Island in hopes of becoming a master Rancher: growing crops, raising animals, fishing... even finding the love of your life and starting a family. As time goes on in your new home, you begin to realize that not everything is as good as it should be. Storms are commonplace, making it hard for people to travel to local islands. A giant tree called the Mother Tree, once vibrant and full of life, is dead, and it seems like it is the main source of all the troubles going on. You will need to gather items to help the Harvest Sprites bring back the Mother Tree, and save the island!
Gameplay:
In case you haven't noticed, the goals of the game are kinda weird. A tree is causing storms? Gathering items? It's better than what they had you do in Magical Melody for the Gamecube, but it still doesn't really make any sense. Anyway, besides gathering different items, from things like flowers and herbs to ores and cooked items and fish, the gameplay itself is exactly like other harvest moon games: grow crops, raise animals, mine, fish, gather lumber, and woo the potential bride and grooms.
But there are some big changes. The design of the game itself is much different. I'm not sure what to call it, but it's not the same as other harvest moon anime-style drawings. Instead of tilling fields of 3X3 squares to grow your produce, you now use one row of six. Lots of things from the Magical Melody game are in here, too: the ability to buy up to three other houses, growing trees, and picking to be a guy or a girl. You can now grow an even larger group of items, including watermelons and honeydews, and lots of new flowers. Did you see the large list of animals in the post? After a long time, you can raise ALL of these animals on your farm. Yeah, you can raise an ostrich. The ostrich always comes last, and while its very pricy at 13500 gold, it can lay eggs and you can ride it like a horse, and to be truthful, it's funny looking, but riding the horses will also send you into a fit of laughter at how strange it looks. The silk worms will live with the chickens, which is kinda dangerous, don't you think? Silk thread will appear every four days, and can be changed into silk thread. Also, there are some color variations for cows, horses, and even the sheep are a little different, with either white or black faces. If you buy more than one cow or horse, each one will more than likely be different than the others, which is pretty cool... So why can't we have black chickens yet??? Also you can mine up a new item called a Wonderful. Wonderfuls are in several colors and can be refined by a woman named Mira into gems such as diamonds, rubies, and emeralds.
So, as you can tell, there's plenty of new stuff. However, the houses are right next to each other, the trees take up too much of the fields, which are much, much smaller than in other games, and the characters themselves aren't very... interesting. And I'm not just talking about the characters you can play as.
The one thing I've always loved about the series is that each character has a unique personality. Like on the 64, there was a sweet girly flower girl, a shy bookworm, a tough bargirl, a hardworking baker, and a tomboyish ranchhand you could pick as your birde. On this game all the girls and guys have jobs, and they all talk about their favorite things, but... it's still kinda boring, in my opinion. Sure, there's four events you do with each character: they give you a gift, there's a special event where they need something from you (and it switches for each character), you have dinner, and then one final event. Besides that one I mentioned, all the events occur the same way every time. And they have the tendency to repeat the same stuff over and over until the very end. Even for other people in the town, it gets really old really quick. The only positive about the people is that when other characters get married, they will have a child after one month, and a month later, their child will be grown up enough that you can talk to them! It still takes about 2 years for your own child to grow up, though.
All in all, there's plenty of new stuff, including the minigames, which can be troubling sometimes. There's a lot of problems with the character's personalities and the storyline itself, but I still play it. If you're looking for a Harvest Moon game with good storylines, try the DS games or the Wonderful Life game and its variations on the Gamecube and PS2. But if you're a big fan of growing a large group of stuff, and raising new animals like the silk worms and ostriches, then by all means, this game's still pretty good.
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