Product Description:
Create and care for your farm the way you want it to be with the 15th anniversary of this favorite!
Product Details:
- Customization is King! For the first time in the Harvest Moon series history, you can completely customize your character's appearance! Choose your character's gender, skin color, facial expression, hairstyle, and much, much more!
- Don't like where your crops and barn are on your farm? Just pick them up and move them! It's really that easy to customize your farm in Harvest Moon - A New Beginning
- Create tons of new additions for your farm, house, and Echo Village! Build park benches and topiary for the local citizens, a pet house for your farm, and exotic wallpaper and furniture for your house!
Customer Reviews:
Nearly Perfect By Lauren R. Tharp
This game was officially released today, but I was fortunate enough to get my pre-order copy 4 days early and I've been playing it pretty much non-stop since then. I cannot say enough good things about it.
It's not as "pretty" visually as Tale of Two Towns (that game had a lot of texture!), and the 3D is terrible (when is it not?), but A New Beginning makes up for any lack of "prettiness" with its awesome gameplay. (And, don't get me wrong, it isn't a BAD looking game by any means!)
Everything I thought "Gee, I wish I could ________" from the last game was added into this game. For example, instead of pushing A to pick up an item while foraging and then pressing Y to put it in your bag, you simply press A and your character puts the item into their bag automatically--completely streamlining the process! They've also added the option to buy recipes to cook from, rather than trial-and-error experimentation (which, I don't know about you, but that led to countless "fail" dishes on my end!).
But even with all the little things to make the gameplay easier, Natsume's added just enough new challenges to keep things interesting. In addition to your stamina bar, you now have a "health" bar. And the stamina bar decreases much more quickly than in Tale of Two Towns. In ToTT I saved my cooking for the monthly cook-offs, but in A New Beginning I've found that I actually have to EAT food at some point during the day if I'm going to get all of my chores done! :O Eating the food actually MEANS something in this game!
Sleep also has more significance in A New Beginning. You can no longer keep your character awake all hours of the night and still wake up refreshed at 6am the next morning. If you stay up late and/or work your character too hard, you'll find yourself sleeping in the next morning. It puts new meaning to the old adage, "Early to bed, early to rise."
And, of course, the new customization feature is awesome. It's a bit limited (don't be expecting Saints Row or Skyrim levels of character creation here!), but the fact that you can choose your own look at all is pretty amazing for a Harvest moon game. There's 3 face types, 4 skin colors, about 8(?) hairstyles, and 2 starting outfits to choose from.
You're given a lot more freedom when it comes to customizing your farm (and later the town itself). This allows you to prioritize your activities more efficiently and play the game how you want. That level of freedom helps to really suck you in.
As Dunhill (one of the NPCs) says, "This is your life. Find something you want to do with it and do it."
I'm going to be playing this one for a long time to come.Slow start, but definitely "A New Beginning" for the Harvest Moon series By Jessica
I have to be frank--I don't think the Harvest Moon developers have given us a truly good, solid portable iteration in the series for a while. I quite enjoyed (and still do!) Harvest Moon DS (the first entry in the series for the Nintendo DS) and its sister, DS Cute. I wasn't hugely fond of Island of Happiness. Grand Bazaar and Tale of Two Towns were both absolute flops, in my opinion. So I had my doubts about this game, and I went into it with a pessimistic attitude. I even bought one for a friend as a birthday present so we could compare opinions.
The game has a slow start, for sure. Especially if you're a seasoned Harvest Moon veteran, you'll find that the tutorial at the start is long, drawn-out, dry, and utterly pointless. Yes, it's a new game on a new system, but Harvest Moon is such an easy game to figure out I found the tutorial a headache more than anything. I skipped the entire thing by pressing the A button and was able to figure out all the controls and the menu within about forty-five seconds. On the other hand, it's good for true beginners and especially those who have never picked up a game console before in their life. The REAL slow start, however, is not the tutorial. (I wish!) Instead, it's the fact that Echo Village is almost completely deserted when you move in. There is an explanation--the town is falling apart and most people have packed up and left--but still, for the first season there is virtually nothing to do but plant some seeds, forage, and chat with the few villagers who do remain there with you. One of my favorite parts of Harvest Moon is breeding animals and raising them, so it might not be a bad idea for you to give it a try.
Where the game does shine initially though is with the customization system. For the first time in Harvest Moon history, you can customize your player character to your heart's content. Hair color, skin color, eye color, eye shape, even two different outfits to pick from at the beginning. My understanding is that a hairdresser moves into town eventually and you can change your hairstyles later in the game and get new clothes. I also believe that one can cross dress of sorts--males can dress and look exactly like females and vice versa. This is a new step for Harvest Moon, as one could theoretically play as a boy, wear feminine clothes and hairstyles, and still marry one of the local girls. Vice versa, of course. Very interesting, I'm experimenting with this by playing as a boy with a girlier name, pink hair, and big pink eyes. We'll see how it works!
The controls in this game are nothing to hit home about, but good enough. You move with the circle pad, open the menu with 'X', jump with 'B', interact with things with 'A', and zoom in and change camera angle with the directional pad. Not being able to move your character with the directional pad, only the circle pad, may be a learning curve for some but it's really easy to get used to. The inventory isn't great this time, slightly cumbersome but it's all about getting used to it. I adjusted quickly. For those who enjoy moving their character around the map with a stylus (think Island of Happiness and Sunshine Islands), sorry to disappoint. The touch screen contains a map, the time, the season, and a place for the menu to pop up. I find being able to change the camera angle very helpful. The circle pad works extremely well. Everything else is pretty average.
The graphics are nice! As is typical with Harvest Moon, they won't blow you out of the water and they don't really take full advantage of the 3DS's capabilities. I love the people's designs in the game, absolutely adorable and lifelike. They blink in their portraits! The animal's sprites are precious and the trees/flowers/rocks/wild animals/water/etc. all complement each other nicely. The only thing I don't really like about the graphics is the grass. All solid green, no texture that I can see. It's not enough to make me really dislike the graphics, however.
Characters, though I admittedly have not seen much of them yet, are excellent this time around. Hana in particular, from the initial cast, is downright adorable. Be wary, though, the first bachelors that stroll into town are moody! Don't let that soil your view of them from the beginning, they will open up to you with time. And once Rod moves in, you'll have a bachelor that's nice right off the bat. The bachelors are all fairly good-looking with well-rounded and varied personalities. You may love them all, hate them all, or be able to pick and choose. That's no different. I love the bachelorettes--Witch Princess is back and she's got a whole new look! Michelle is my favorite by far, I'm a sucker for pink.
Animals get huge praise this time around. A ton of variety and they all look amazing! I absolutely love the cows. They're almost comical. The other animals, some new (don't want to spoil everything!) don't leave me wanting for much, either. Pets are back and better than ever--I won't spoil much, but they do have some hilarious consequences if you feed them too much or don't take good care of them! The crops, unless you are very into that aspect of the game, are same as always with some new ones thrown into the mix. No real surprises there.
The town, as I said, is absolutely dead in the beginning. A couple of buildings, some of which aren't even occupied, and your farm. But unlike previous Harvest Moon games, when you just waited for someone to move in, you take an active role in bringing people to your village. Blueprints make an introduction here, and you can purchase them, gather the materials required for them, and build new things for your village! Some plans are required to bring some characters into town. But follow that formula and your town will soon be bursting. Eventually, I believe you even get to change your town's name if you complete all the Blueprints. There is also the introduction of the Travel Agency, and you guessed it, vacations! There are several places to choose from and they're a great idea for honeymoons, birthdays, or just because.
Overall...
PROS
+ Good controls
+ Nice graphics
+ Great cast of characters
+ Customization
+ Animals/Pets
+ New Crops
+ Longevity (I can see myself being hooked on this until I go blind!)
+ Town building system
+ Travel Agency
+ Multiplayer (haven't experimented with this yet, if you try it and have feedback, leave a comment!)
+ An enormous amount of new little bells and whistles and features that you have to discover for yourself!
CONS
- Ugly grass
- Horribly slow start
- Inventory may bother some
- Characters repeat themselves often when you talk to them
That's really it. In my opinion, it's easily the best Harvest Moon so far and there's so much to see and do that even after you've done and seen it all you'll want to keep going forever. It's not perfect, but as you can see, the Pros greatly outnumber my superficial little Cons. It's an amazing game with few flaws and it's just waiting for you to pick up and play. So get out there and happy farming!19 of 20 Extremely Slow Intro, but Excellent Afterwards By Justin Maxson
Been looking forward to this game for months, pretty much preordered it the second I had the chance to. When I first started it I was a little annoyed because the Intro/Tutorial takes forever to get through and there is no skipping any of it. It was pretty awesome designing your own character though. Sure the number of choices wasn't huge, but it is more than any Harvest Moon game has had in the past and I'll take it. Once you get through the first day or two the game does kind of start slow, mostly because there is nearly no one left in the town and you only really have foraging to do to pass the time. As you get more people though, it begins to pick up and soon you have tons of things to do each day and you find yourself foraging only for the things you need or that sell for a high price when cooked. It is fun to see the town grow and change through your efforts, kind of like playing Dark Cloud really. I do wish there was some more stone around though because that stuff is extremely difficult to find and you need a ton of it to do any building. Sure you can buy it from the blueprint shop, but I prefer not wasting the money. Overall, there is a ton to do in this game and I feel like I haven't even scratched the surface yet.
Basically if you are an HM fan, why haven't you bought this game yet? It is completely worth it.
Harvest Moon 3D: A New Beginning,Harvest Moon 3D: A New Beginning Review, Harvest Moon 3D: A New Beginning Comparison Price, Harvest Moon 3D: A New Beginning Best Offer, Harvest Moon 3D: A New Beginning Best Price