An unofficial guide covering information on Harvest Moon: Island of Happiness for Nintendo DS

Harvest Moon: Island of Happiness begins as you set off by boat to a new land. While on the sea voyage, your ship encounters a bad storm and is destroyed. You awaken on a nearby, uninhabited island with a few of the other ship wreak survivors. Instead of traveling on, you all decide to build a new life on the island and hope that more people will join you in time.

This DS version of the Harvest Moon series relies entirely on the touch screen for interactivity. You must use the stylus pencil to move your character's direction, pick up items, and interact with the other people on the island. The buttons and directional pad are only used for equipped tools.

The difficulty level of the game has increased. Your crop profits depend heavily on the unpredictable weather, relationships are harder to build, and new building construction can be incredibly expensive. The old way of upgrading farm tools has also been redone, as increasing your tool's strength comes from attaching Wonderful Stones to it.

Instead of collecting 101 Harvest Sprites like in Harvest Moon DS (and DS Cute), Island of Happiness encourages you to develop the island in order to lure various people to move in. There are over 90 people to "collect", with 70 of those being faceless characters that require you complete tasks to unlock.

Island of Happiness also lets you choose the gender of protagonist you wish to play as. The game has 2 save slots so you can play as either one, but you can not freely move your save slot. If you have started your game on slot 1 then your only save option is slot 1. Each gender has six different marriage choices, each with a variety of heart events available. After marriage you can have only 1 child and the gender is randomly selected.

The game sold about 154,500 copies in Japan for the year 2008, according to Famitsu. During 2007, MediaCreate data lists the game sold about 282,000 copies in Japan.

Harvest Moon: Island of Happiness is © Marvelous Interactive and © Natsume. Harvest Moon character design is © Marucome. This is a fan-site and is not officially sponsored or employed by MMV/Natsume. Web site design © 2008 fogu.com

Special thanks go out to Katherine, King Rhyono, Susa-Ann, Christopher, and Lily for assistance with the English version of the game.