Ushi No Tane | Harvest Moon, Story of Seasons, and Legend of the River King Video Games

The Ushi No Tane websites specialize in information, FAQs, and guides about the Nintendo console versions of the Harvest Moon, Story of Seasons, and Legend of the River King video games. These game genres are created and published in Japan by Marvelous (JP). In other regions, you'll find Natsume, XSeed Games/Marvelous (USA), Marvelous (EU), and Rising Star involved in the series' release.

The latest version of the mainstream farming series that have been released in various regions of the world are:

Japan: Story of Seasons: A Wonderful Life (January 2023)
North America: Harvest Moon: Home Sweet Home (August 2024) and Story of Seasons: A Wonderful Life (June 2023)
Europe: Harvest Moon: Home Sweet Home (August 2024) and Story of Seasons: A Wonderful Life (June 2023)

The latest version of River King, in all regions of the world, is River King: Mystic Valley (JP 2007, NA 2008, EU 2009).

Since 2000, Ushi no Tane has been run by a grouchy old lady who happens to be fond of video game agriculture along with two feline helpers: Intern Captain Bootu and Intern Hondo Mewnaka. The website is not officially affiliated, sponsored, endorsed, or employed by the developers of Harvest Moon, Story of Seasons, or River King. This is simply a fan site.

Latest Farming Video Game News

Harvest Moon: Home Sweet Home Gameplay Information and old BokuMono GMode Game Port For Steam/Switch | Posted at 04:19 PM 23 August 2024

Happy Farm'n Friday! I started my use-or-lose-it vacation time today, restricted from office work until September. However, I just realized that September 1 is Labor Day, a day the office is closed, so I get an unexpected extra vacation day! Sweet! That's what happens when every day blurs together as one gets older.

Don't forget that Fields of Mistria is out in Early Access on Steam! This highly-anticipated farming game from NPC Studio, with a cute neighbor farmer rocking awesome mid-arm tan lines and greying hair, already has a lot of content to check out for still being in active development:

Fields of Mistria | Steam Store

GMode Archive BokuMono

Another game coming to Steam is a port of the 2007 Japan-only GMode mobile phone game, Bokujou Monogatari: Life & Love, which will also be available digitally on Nintendo Switch in Japan for 1000 円. The game is scheduled to be released on September 5 (in two weeks!)

This old game, based on graphics from the Gameboy Advanced Friends of Mineral Town series, lets you play as either the girl or the boy protagonist, tending to a farm, caring for animals, and talking with villagers from the nearby town. The player's mom is there too, keeping track of the player's relationship status with the marriage candidates.

Ah, classic farm'n! You can wishlist the Steam version today:

Hey, wait a second.... GMode ported the Legend of the River King GMode game too, though it is only available on the Nintendo Switch in Japan and not on Steam. How did I miss a River King game released in July!? I must be losing my touch...

HM: Home Sweet Home Review

I've been playing the newest Harvest Moon game for about a week, thanks to Nastume sending me an advanced copy, so below are my thoughts on the game. In this playthrough, I have been writing everything down (prices, events, etc.), so my playtime of 140 hours so far might be a little inflated

Harvest Moon: Home Sweet Home is the new mobile game from Nastume for Android and iOS devices, priced at about $18 USD. In this game, you take on the role of a small-town villager who moved away to the city but decided to return home after receiving a request from a childhood friend. The game takes the graphics from Winds of Anthos and builds a new story with a few new functionality for farmers who want to play on the go.

Movement in the game is by touch screen; there doesn't appear to be any support for external controllers. Both pressing in the direction you want to go or tapping in the spot you want to go will move the protagonist. There is no stamina loss while traveling.

Tap to interact with people, go into buildings, break up rocks and chop trees, and open the main menu, which is NOT called a Doc Pad this time. It's just the "main menu." The main menu also contains the encyclopedia, villager list, seasonal calendar, game settings, and more. You can save at any time in the Settings menu. You can pinch on the device screen to zoom the camera in and out.

Besides tapping and dragging, another movement option is the Auto-Move Button on the world map. Open the main menu to get to the map, select where you want to go, and click the auto-move button. The protagonist will begin traveling to that location. That way, you don't have to keep tapping or pressing to force the hero to move.

Much of the game has standard farming game functionality. Unlike Anthos, there are no different seasonal areas to collect items and grow crops. It's simply one area with four 28-day seasons. There are wild items and fish that change with the seasons, though the items might be found across multiple seasons. For example, you can find Goldfish (one of Jacque's favorites carried over from Anthos) during summer and winter. The details of an item will be filled in the encyclopedia after you collect it for the first time, telling you where and in what season(s) it can be found.

Fieldwork is made a little easier by the Repeated Actions ability, which unlocks a little bit into the game. This allows you to drag the action cursor across multiple field squares to repeat the same action, such as highlighting 8 spaces to harvest 8 squares, rather than tapping each spot one at a time. The Repeated Actions for sowing, applying fertilizer, and harvesting expand as you go through the story, while the Repeated Actions for the hoe and watering can expand as you remodel the tools.

You start with one field and unlock more as the story progresses, and there are mutations like in prior Harvest Moon games. There are a total of 120 crops and 60 flowers to unlock. Like the fish and wild items, the mutations trigger based on your current season. For example, you have to wait for the right season to mutate a Cabbage into a Pointy Cabbage (spring) or a Red Cabbage (autumn). The plants have star quality and health indicators like in Anthos, whereby filled-in stars that appear above the growing plant determine the star rank of the harvested crops, and the box-like health icon hints at the chance of the vegetable or flower to mutate when growing in the season when a mutation can trigger.

The size of Alba is comfortable. I would say it is equivalent to Friends of Mineral Town in size. Just big enough to have substance but not too big that it's a struggle to get around. The farm and festival grounds are on the west side of the map (they didn't fit on the image above, sorry), the main town area is in the middle, and then there is a mountain on the east side of the map. It does take over an in-game hour to run from one side to the other. For example, if you decide to leave the mountain mine at 11:00 pm, don't bother trying to run home before midnight when the protagonist is forced to bed; you won't make it home in time.

Speaking of bedtime, there is a 12:00 am curfew. The later you go to bed, the later you wake up and the less stamina you will recover.

The villagers of Alba are actually interesting and an improvement from Winds of Anthos. The conversations seemed a little dry and short in the previous game, but they're far more elaborate and interesting in Home Sweet Home. They have a sense of flow that wasn't in Anthos. That's the best way I can think of to describe the difference; the chosen words make more sense, and the dialog is much more colorful. At least in the English version. I can't say for sure if that's similar with other languages (e.g., German).

The villagers walk and move their arms around as though they are conversing with each other. Few villagers live in Alba at the beginning of the game, but more appear as the town is revived. You'll find major villagers (with friendship notes), regular villagers (without friendship notes), and generic tourists visiting Alba for the day. They also change their dialog based on the chapter of the story and the current Happiness level. At the beginning of the game, they are quite icy to your city-slicker ways. About half of them basically tell you to buzz off when you first move into Alba! But as you increase Happiness and go through the chapters, they'll warm up to your presence and be less aloof in their conversations, rallying and supporting you as you work together to restore the town.

Earning Happiness is essential for moving the game's story. At the end of every day, the amount of happy dust you earned for that day will be collected in a happy bottle. Filling this bottle will move the story forward. You can earn Happiness by talking with people and shipping crops, but the biggest boosts come from completing villager fetch requests and village improvement tasks. As you complete chapters, filled bottles of Happiness dust will appear on the wall behind your current bottle.

Shipping goods through the shipping bin earns Happiness and money but can also award you a financial bonus. Shipping enough 3-star items continuously can earn a Specialty Product rank for those items. When that happens, you'll read about it in the Alba Times newspaper in the morning, the encyclopedia entry will have a prize medal on the item icon, and you'll earn a one-time windfall. Earning Specialty Product ranks with milk and eggs is easiest, as you'll typically get those 3-star goods daily from your farm animals.

Keep in mind that extra happy dust does NOT fill over to the next empty bottle. You'll get a new bottle at the start of the chapter, and once it is filled, any extra dust earned during that chapter will go to waste until the chapter is complete and a new bottle is issued. Since the village improvement tasks reward the most happy dust (restoring a festival, upgrading the fertilizer machine, etc.), it may be best to hold off turning over the materials to complete those tasks until you have a bottle to hold the awarded happy dust. Optionally, the extra can go to waste since you can collect more happy dust. Just giving you a heads-up.

Another new interesting feature, which longtime readers know I struggle with in real life, is the soil quality of the fields. As you work through Chapter 5, a Soil Conditioner machine will be attached to the field space. This contraption lets you see the quality of your crop fields' nutrients. Every time a crop matures, the nutrient level of the soil decreases. If you repeatedly plant in the same field, the crops grown in that field will not have any star rank. You can use the machine to spread conditioner on the fields to improve star rank or just don't grow anything in that field until the soil rejuvenates naturally. Basically, in-game field rotations.

Ideally, when viewing their status through the Soil Conditioner machine, you want full-pink happy-face icons on the fields. Planting all the crops so they mature all on the same day is a good way of taking advantage of the higher star-rank crops those happy fields produce. The conditioning powder for the Soil Conditioner can be made in the Fertilizer Machine or bought from the General Store, and it will only apply to empty fields (i.e., no weeds, crops, or rocks).

Another feature is the Unmanned Store, a small booth in town that holds space for three items to sell. The folks at the Village Hall will post what items will sell for a higher price (such as "A square vegetable found in Spring"), and you can add up to three stacks of items to the little booth. If an item sells, you'll get money for it overnight. But, if an item does not sell, then its cost is deducted from the funds you did earn. There have been times that I've sold one item (120 G) only to have the second item not sell (-115 G), earning me a net profit of 5G. It's a challenge! Sometimes you can see Olivia at the booth as you pass by.

There are farm animals and pets, but no large wild animals to tame like in Anthos. There are cows, jersey cows, sheep, blacknose sheep, horses, chickens, and araucana chickens (so far). The same Anthos barn division exists whereby you can have half a barn with poultry and half with livestock. Dogs and cats will live inside the farmhouse and automatically are fed each morning. For the livestock, you can use the automatic feeder machine after it is repaired by Andy. Until then, it just holds animal feed, and you must manually add feed to each feeder box. Animal names are limited to 10 characters long. A bell outside the barn will bring them out to spend time in the pasture on sunny days.

For some reason, the horse can only be ridden while inside the pasture area. You can't ride it to get around town; at least, my horse refuses to leave the pasture.

Animal friendship with livestock impacts the star rank of their produced goods. For cows and chickens, you'll get one product per day. With sheep, raising friendship will increase the quantity of wool you receive, as wool does not have star rank. It takes 4 wool to create 1 fabric. The fabric is used to craft farmhouse decor styles (bed, table set, carpet, etc.) and clothing outfits.

There are festivals, but they must first be restored as you go through the story chapters. Some are competitive, and some are romantic. The Alba Times newspaper will remind you in the morning when it is a festival day. So far, I've unlocked the Equestrian Challenge (Sum/Win 23), the Fish Face Off (Sum/Win 6), the Flower Festival (Spr 15), the Fireworks Festival (Sum 15), and the Snow Festival (Win 15). I'm working on unlocking the Expo, which I'm assuming is a reoccurring contest festival like it was in Anthos and One World.

Speaking of romance, the unannounced marriage candidate is Malika, the desert rose from Harvest Moon: One World. She moves into town in later chapters of the game. Each candidate has a personal problem, and working through the romance events helps them overcome it. The events I've seen so far are well done, some with a bit of humor, and trigger as you raise each music note friendship level.

I am guessing the story needs to be completed before I can jump into the marriage system.

Mining is up the mountain by Peter's house, a gruff villager sporting a mustache and beard who is in charge of the Savita Mine. The mining system is similar to Anthos, where you can tap the dousing map to locate hidden ores in the ground or find the ladder down to the next floor. There are pitfalls, but you do not automatically crash through the floor when the floor cracks are discovered. You'll be alerted that you found a pitfall, but it's your choice to walk across and fall through the floor or simply turn and go another direction. There are falling rocks from the ceiling when you break something, and I have not figured out how to avoid them. A very short warning timer appears before the rocks fall, but my lack of reflexes means I usually get hit by falling debris, as I can't move fast enough away from the shadows that appear on the ground before the rocks fall.

The Repeated Actions work on the floor in the mine, depending on the tool level of your hammer. There is no separate pickaxe in this game.

The mine has fish ponds every 5 floors. I haven't seen any Gold Carp there, but it may be a matter of reaching the lower floors. When you enter the mine, a quick-jump menu will appear for each fish-pond floor you've reached. This means you now have a 5-floor jump starting on floor 6, and then every 5 floors you've reached after that.

The mine is 30 floors deep at first. Once you go that far, talk to Peter to see about expanding the depth of the mine. I'm at that step now, so I don't know yet how deep the mine actually goes! All raw materials you find while mining can be processed by Andy, the carpenter, who is also Braden's father.

As for fishing, there are a lot of fishing spots around Alba. Each spot is noted on the world map in the main menu. Casting a line is by tapping the school of fish shadows and selecting the bait to use. The fish will then bite the hook. Press and hold on the device screen to reel in the fish, then release when the snagged fish is swimming away. The fish shadows will reappear in the spot after a short period (i.e., you don't have to physically move to another spot when all the shadows are gone).

Cutie-patootie Doc Jr. is around in Alba, but I can't tell quite yet what his purpose is. He doesn't live in town and pops up here and there for conversation purposes. Doc isn't inventing anything, building anything, or processing ores - he's just there as a longtime childhood friend that the protagonist forgot existed.

That Doc... He's up to something, I'm sure of it...

I believe I'm nearing the end of the story, but I won't know until I reach that point. Hopefully, everyone will get a chance to play the game soon!

Until next time!

-Cher
(Looking down at my iPad and then looking up to type notes for the past week has made for a really sore neck...lol...)

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