While Harvest Moon: Home Sweet Home was released to very little fanfare back in August of this year, that did not stop me from getting curious to try it out. Following the release of the latest update, which added controller and cloud save support, two of which were heavily criticized, I thought that it might be the perfect time to try out the game.
You can say whatever you want about the current state of the Harvest Moon franchise, because I have never seen a series get into such a convoluted state, to the point that we even need YouTube videos to educate us on the difference. However, when Harvest Moon: The Winds of Anthos released, I had the feeling that Natsume had finally found a direction with the series ever since they cut their ties as the original localizers of the series before XSEED took over. So let’s pack our bags and head on over to our home, sweet home.
Back to Our Hometown
In Harvest Moon: Home Sweet Home, our player character returns from the city to their hometown village of Alba, after being away for a little over a decade. They decide to start up a farm on their own, and thus receive a letter from Christina, their childhood friend, on how the village has seen better days, and many of its inhabitants have decided to move out to the city.
Perhaps my biggest problem is just how insufferable it is to go through the beginning parts of the game. To be fair, Natsume had this issue in the past with Winds of Anthos, where the prologue of the story was never that properly defined to begin with, and suffice to say, Home Sweet Home suffers largely from the same issues.
This is pure speculation of course, but I always have this sort of feeling that Natsume wants to do a sort of “Harvest Moon timeline”, connecting all of their games into this one big universe. And it seems to me that said universe started in Harvest Moon: One World, then advanced in Winds of Anthos, and Home Sweet Home feels like it’s supposed to sit right in the middle. But the storytelling doesn’t do a great job at explaining that, to put it bluntly.
A Slow Start
The main objective of Home Sweet Home is to collect Happiness, which is stored in a star-shaped bottle. Lots of things can fill it up, but the biggest sources come from delivering crops to villagers and shipping high-quality items. The game takes quite a while to open up. At the beginning, you’ll be probably just going to water your crops and tend to your animals, and before the clock can even hit 4 PM, your stamina will likely be insufficient to do anything more than that. I feel the game only truly starts to open after Chapter 4 and thereabouts, and that’s being generous.
Unfortunately, the game doesn’t introduce anything new, and it’s an extremely basic farming sim. Unlike Winds of Anthos, which had the whole open world aspect going for it, Home Sweet Home is strictly limited to the town of Alba and its residents. And trust me, you will probably get bored of it alarmingly fast, especially because filling the Happiness bottle can feel like a tedious process at times, and it’s incredibly easy to overflow past the capacity the game asks of you, which will result in all that excess being completely wasted.
Now, let’s talk about a pet peeve I’ve been having lately, and that is how it seems that the charming 2D portraits that were common in past Harvest Moon games have all simply vanished. I get that we’re no longer bound by the limitations of past hardware, but I still think the expressive portraits are something that should come back. As it stands, Home Sweet Home largely borrows from Winds of Anthos, where the characters’ 3D models talk to each other.
Lacking Innovation
Since the main character model is directly lifted over from Winds of Anthos, I had somewhat expected we would see more customization options, and unfortunately, the answer to that is nope. You can only change your hair and eye colors, but as far as I could tell, you’re completely unable to customize your hair style, per se. You’re also limited to this “trendy purple clothing” from the city until very later in the game.
Your house is also not able to be customized however you want. You can change how things look but the overall layout is going to stay largely the same. Talk about a bummer. And unfortunately, the same can be said for all of the characters. They all have this cookie-cutter design that barely varies from person to person.
The game also retains a lot of the same mechanics that Natsume has implemented in their past attempts ever since they severed their ties with Marvelous and have been developing the games themselves. This might not be a bad thing, but Home Sweet Home lacks one key factor: Innovation. A lot of the mechanics are recycled in some way or another, which begs the question: Are there any exclusive mechanics to the game? And the answer is a big no, I’m afraid.
Home Sweet Bugs
Harvest Moon: Home Sweet Home is a game that even at its current version update, still presents some bugs and what I can only assume are straight up game design oversights. The first problem is that animals will not perform their eating animation until you enter the Barn yourself. This means that, if you decide to put them out to graze without ever entering, they won’t eat their food, and will get hungry.
Another oversight is that NPCs will sometimes get stuck in the entrance of buildings. There are moments where the developers did not bother to program a sitting animation, so they’ll walk over to the bench, and then just proceeded to sit there for the remainder of the day. Luckily, I have not had a single crash or freeze that required the game to be restarted, but still. These oversights should’ve been stamped during the QA process.
Touch and Go
Harvest Moon: Home Sweet Home features two control schemes. You can either use the touch screen, where you tap where you wish to go, or hold and drag your finger with a sort of virtual joystick. The game will always pull out the right tool for the job depending on what you’re tapping. So for example, tapping your cow twice will do the usual sequence of brushing and if you can collect milk from it, which is only every few days, it will also perform that action for you automatically.
Home Sweet Home also features an auto-walking system, where at any time you’re outside, you can just tap any building or person on the map, and then have your character automatically walk over to them. This is practical, but given you know each person’s location at all times through the map, I only really used it whenever I didn’t want to walk all the way over to a given location myself, or if I was stuck.
It amazes me on how the controller update was only added very recently. The game feels like it was made to be played using a controller grip like a Backbone or similar device, or a case to prop it up for you to play using the buttons. It certainly beats using a finger or a stylus.
Graphical Performance
For the majority of the time, I played Home Sweet Home on my S23 Ultra, and I also tested the cloud saves feature through Google Play Games. I can confirm that is works as advertised, with my Tab S7 FE, seamlessly being able to access the save file, and allow me to continue from there.
In both devices, the game was having some small hiccups, and there was also some noticeable texture popping every time you leave a building, but it was especially bad on my tablet, where it could barely maintain a consistent 30 FPS, and there were some times where I even thought the game was going to crash. There is no way to customize your graphics, so you’re largely left to the whims of whether your phone or tablet can run this game or not.
A Basic Farming Game
There are two ways to think about Harvest Moon: Home Sweet Home. As a mobile game, it’s pretty good, especially when you compare it to the other games that Natsume had to offer at the time, and it’s a game that certainly provides a rather complete farming experience, despite its limitations. And with the controller and cloud saves update, it removed one of the game’s bigger issues that fans had complained about during its initial release in August.
While it’s clear that Natsume is moving in the right direction of what makes the farming game formula so beloved by many people across the world, they’re moving very slowly, and as a result, Home Sweet Home doesn’t provide anything that will make the player engaged for more than a few minutes, and locks off most of its features behind a very long story quest that is not deeply engaging. There are certainly…better valleys you can explore for a much cheaper price, if you get what I mean.
Disclaimer: Natsume provided an Android (Google Play) key of Harvest Moon: Home Sweet Home to Final Weapon for review purposes.
