It's always the way, isn't it. You wait ages for a good social sim with a farming bent, and then several come along at once. While we've only just been able to get properly stuck into Harvest Moon: A New Beginning in the wake of its release a few weeks ago, it seems Japan are already gearing up for the next game in the long-running farming/friendship sim series. Roughly translated from Japanese as being dubbed 'Harvest Moon: Connect To A New Land', the folks at Marvelous are promising a more connected game than ever before, when it hits Japanese 3DS' next February.
Looks like the giant crops are back too.
In this case, 'connect' seemingly means giving the game more extensive StreetPass features - when you stroll past someone who's also been playing the new Harvest Moon game, your consoles will automatically exchange data, granting you a special gift for your trouble, along with the ability to view various stats about the stranger's farm. They also suggest that you may be able to visit your friends' farms over the internet, much like you can hop over to someone's village in Animal Crossing: New Leaf.
Perhaps the biggest 'connected' feature, though, is something known as the 'Trade Station', although it's as yet unclear as to quite how this will work. Although it could potentially be the beginning of a worldwide commodities market, that does seem a step too far for Harvest moon, making this much more likely to be a new feature that lets you ship your goods around a virtual world, rather than actually being able to send some digital turnips over to Erich Von Klinkerhoffen's root-vegetable-starved town in Germany. The more crops you post out, the more potential trade routes you'll gain access to - and different countries will have different preferences, perhaps even kick-starting a worldwide trend for your potatoes, netting you a load of cash in the process.
The other big addition, and perhaps the one we're most excited about, is the addition of the Safari. From the sounds of it, the Safari will be a new area you can visit that lets you care for and befriend more animals than ever before - in fact, they say the game should have twice as many animals as in previous games, with more and more finding their way to the Safari as the game goes on. Perhaps they'll tie into the story somehow, like with the lost circus animals in the Wii's Animal Parade game, which asked you to track them down and lure them out with their favourite foods? So far they've confirmed we'll have a festive reindeer, a very brightly coloured "owl" and a super fluffy Angora rabbit that just looks like a rather shocked ball of pink fluff:
Perhaps 'owl' is a bit of a mistranslation?
Of course, all the Harvest Moon staples are still there - you'll still spend your time watering your crops and tending to your sheep, and you'll still have a choice of eligible villagers to woo. But besides the usual mix of shop owners, blacksmiths and carpenters, you'll also find you're not the only farmer in town, with several others living in Oaktree too, keen to show you the ropes in the tutorial. Fishing is also making a comeback, as well as a promise of some new features that involve 'playing in rivers' - perhaps harking back to Grand Bazaar, where leaping in a river sometimes netted you an item or two.
Given that the games usually launch in the February in Japan, the following October in America and THEN the September/October after in the UK, we probably won't see the game until the end of 2015 at the earliest - which is a really, really long way away. Although, with the original Harvest Moon man Yasuhiro Wada's new game Hometown Story on the way next year, and Harvest Moon: A New Beginning currently eating up our spare time, fans of the social sim at least have something to be going on with...
