The rain is pouring down this Sunday night. Uninspired, I decide to look up a game to cover. A few clicks of “Next Page”, and there’s a familiar sight: Harvest Moon: Magical
Melody. I prepare to wax nostalgic that I played it so much, my Gamecube’s laser burnt a hole
through the disc, or melted it, or some other lie about it, but then I notice something. Everyone seems be up on how great this game is. Little guy Natsume’s effort to rise up on any console, regardless of its prospects, wielding nothing but faith in a good formula and never altering it for
image, popularizing it in the conventional ways, or even localizing it fully out of the original
language, is rewarded as it should be with glowing reviews in just about all cases.

JUST about. One of them has no reviews. It doesn’t even have an image! And that’s a real shame for Innocent Life: A Futuristic Harvest Moon, being shunned just because it’s a bit different. I’m going to give you fellow simulated farmers the benefit of the doubt, here, and say you just didn’t hear about it, or recognize it underneath the new banner and the hi-tech fantasy coating. Just look: I have to text link to it! I never have to do that. It’s boring. Not like Innocent Life, which is neat! Pretty! And portable!

I find this situation so dire, I’ve decided to embed the trailer that came out almost a year ago, just to convince any naysayers. It may be in Japanese, but if you know Harvest Moon, you know that’s just how puritanical and culturally-unadulterated it is
(note my efforts to distract from the bad translation, the only drawback of HM). Won’t you be the first to review Innocent Life?

Posted on February 17th, 2008 by katie