Harvest Moon: Friends of Mineral Town is a game that hates you.
A retrospective on the emotionally-abusive granddaddy of "cozy farming sims."
If you’re reading this, there is a good chance you’re aware of Stardew Valley, a farming sim in a pixel art style that has, as far as I know, precipitated the current decade-long fascination with “cozy gaming” and farming sims in particular. Stardew Valley takes the the tedious tasks of farming and ranching and creates rewarding loops (wake up, do farm stuff, sell farm stuff, make money, buy more stuff, go mining, collect ores, upgrade tools to do more farm stuff...) Throw in a weirdly entrancing fishing minigame, a marriage/friendship mechanic that rewards engaging with the villagers that populate the surrounding town, and a broader “main quest” that encourages you to engage with all of the systems in the game, and you can understand why this appeals to many, many people who don’t find farming itself very compelling. There are some “difficult” or tedious elements if you want to achieve 100% completion, but if you just want to enjoy things at your own pace, Stardew Valley is very low-stakes, forgiving, and dare I say cozy.
But before there was Stardew Valley and every soulless, indieslop farming-fishing-mining cash-grab unfinished cozy game that jumped on its coattails with a quickness1, there was the Harvest Moon series. And the game in the series I was most attached to as a child was Harvest Moon: Friends of Mineral Town for the Game Boy Advance.
Harvest Moon: Friends of Mineral Town is kind of like if Stardew Valley fucking hated you. A reflection, sure, of an era where the average person owned fewer games and had more patience for inscrutable, tedious, downright hostile bullshit within them, but God is it punishing. Nearly every one of this game’s core elements (farming, mining, marriage, festivals, the town itself) has at least one aspect to it that feels, if not actively hostile, then purposely obtuse. And I love it.
First, in my current playthrough, I’m actually playing Harvest Moon: More Friends of Mineral Town, which is the version of this game that allows you to play as a female main character and marry a male character.
This was something the Harvest Moon series did frequently: the main title for each console was the Boy Version and only allowed you to play the game as the Boy Farmer. The Girl Version usually came with some important bugfixes and small tweaks, but in essence you were paying for the ability to play as and/or date your preferred gender.2
Anyway, I’m going to discuss both of the Friends of Mineral Town (FoMT) games interchangeably because they are essentially identical, and the recent remake of this title even combined them into one game that finally allows you to be gay.
The first thing you’ll notice upon loading up FoMT is that your starting inventory is cruel. Your Rucksack includes only three tool slots and three item slots. Notably, this includes the item you’re currently holding in your hand, which means that you can only have two items stowed away and the third slot is really just there for carrying something you are about to use. (You do not want to be walking around holding an item in town because of another deeply infuriating mechanic I will explain later.)
This game also seemingly does not want you to hold onto things. There is no easy storage solution. There is a tool chest for storing and swapping out equipment (watering can, hoe, hammer, axe, etc.), but as far as other items go, your choices are to ship, give away, or throw out every item that ends up in your hands lest you semi-permanently lock up one of your precious three tiles of inventory. You can eventually order a shelf and a refrigerator from the Home Shopping Network, but you cannot quickly obtain these in early game. And that’s all you get. There is no shed lined with player-crafted wooden chests. Three measly slots.
But remember when I said you don’t want to walk around holding onto a third item that you can’t stow away? If you’re holding an item and happen to press the A button errantly, you will just drop that item on the ground and lose it forever. No “drop ___?” dialogue window, no short timeframe where you can run over the dropped item to collect it again. That rare X-type milk you only have a 1 in 255 chance of obtaining from a fully leveled-up cow is with God now. This would be bad enough, but dropping items in most parts of the map counts as littering, which instantly decreases your relationship with every person in the town whether they witness it or not. Kind of a cool mechanic that encourages a positive social behavior, kind of a Mental Illness Simulator in that you are constantly fucking up and making people dislike you via a behavior you keep accidentally repeating no matter how hard you try and stop.
You can atone for being a dirty litterbug during Catholic confession, which is held three times a week at the church in town. Upon entering the confession booth you will have the option to confess to one of three randomly-chosen sins—I littered in the road, I hurt my animals, the townspeople don’t like me, I overworked myself—for a small chance of absolution. Most of the time, the priest will tell you the Harvest Goddess does not forgive you, usually after berating you about how horribly you have forsaken the Goddess, the town, and yourself.3
With all of this mindlessly running around to make barely 250G a day, punctuated by no fuck I was clearly facing the fucking thing why did it make me drop it on the ground now I have nothing to sell today fuck, you might be wondering, “When will I have time to start befriending and wooing the townspeople?” The answer is, I don’t know, but you’d better hurry up because this game has a romantic rivarly mechanic.
For every bachelor or bachelorette in the game, there is another NPC of your player’s gender who is your romantic rival. Over time, you can trigger romantic cutscenes between your desired bachelor/ette and your rival, and if you see all the scenes, the two characters will get married, removing one of your marriage prospects from the running permanently.
These scenes are fairly easy to trigger. It is totally possible to be going about your day and wander into an unskippable cutscene of Kai the Hot Summer Boy macking on your girl, making the romantic rival system into a kind of Cuck Mechanic. As far as I’m aware, it is totally possible to trigger every single rival marriage in the game and—short of marrying the Harvest Goddess, which doesn’t work the same way and comes with a whole host of other tedious requirements—doom yourself to eternal singledom.
There are many other things about this game that are, I feel, actively hostile to the player, but in the interest of not making this a 3,000 word SubstCrack shitpost, I am including a roundup of some more features of note that make me hate (love) this game so much…
Golden lumber: Placing this extremely durable and rare-to-obtain material on your farmland will cause a litany of townspeople to line up in the morning and march up to your door, one by one, to scold you for being so gauche and inconsiderate. They will continue to do this every single day until you remove the Golden Lumber from your farmland. The Golden Lumber cannot be used in any other way.
Put enough Golden Lumber on your farm and even God herself comes down to scold you. x Cockfighting: The town’s “Chicken Festival” has you literally cheering on your chosen chicken in the ring as it battles a rival chicken. This is legal and fine. Having more affection with your chicken increases your chance of winning.
Bottom text. x Gotz’s depression: It is possible to trigger an event where Gotz, the town carpenter who you rely on to upgrade your house, barn, coop, etc., becomes depressed and will not work any job for you until you raise your relationship with him to the highest level, a task that could take the better part of an in-game year. This actually happened to me as a kid and made me abort my playthrough because it was so annoying.
Same. x
In conclusion, I hate this game very much. It is very tedious and annoying and I think you should play it. It’s a relic of a time when “cozy gaming” was not really a genre and games of this kind did not operate on the idea that any inconvenience/challenge/time constraint was decidedly un-cozy and had no place in a game where you farm cute animals and have an ageless baby with the town’s doctor (who is, importantly, named Doctor). This is not a game where you make a lot of money very quickly, reasonably achieve 100% completion, or create the perfectly aesthetically coherent and optimized farm. This is a game where your animals die of old age and the townsfolk yell at you for being a fuckup and you just dropped another egg on the ground again shit goddammit and I love it for that.
I’m glad they never made a remake where they redesigned all of the characters and totally changed the artstyle and made everything look like absolute shit.
This should be its own post—maybe someday.
Playing these games as a kid, I typically only had the Boy Version and was “stuck” running around as a Boy and wooing, dating, and marrying Girls, a thing which did not bother me at all and seemed totally natural and cool. Wonder why that is.
Further notes on Confession: Desperate for the small NPC relationship boost you get when the Goddess forgives you for the sins of being disliked or littering in the road, I spent some time this evening trying to save-scum Catholic confession by saving the game before entering the booth. Something about repeatedly resetting the game until I roll the correct sin and then actually attain forgiveness for that sin feels extremely dark to me, and the cumulative 10 minutes I spent being yelled at by a priest for being a despicable piece of shit who nobody likes and whose deeds will catch up to her in time has psychically damaged me in a real way.
I love your writing! ha ha. This experience sounds kinda like RimWorld on hard settings!