Story of Seasons/YMMV

• And the Fandom Rejoiced: Notice that girl Alisa mentioned below? She's marriageable as of Two Towns.
• Broken Base: If you want to ask "Which is better: Tree of Tranquility or Animal Parade?", we suggest you take out a new life insurance policy first.
  • On a similar case: 64, the cult classic that is considered one of the N64's best games, or Back To Nature, the "transfer" which lead way to the current characterizations of the 64 characters?
  • The fandom has gotten a bunch of new fans due to the recent games, especially the Bishonen driven Tree of Tranquility and Animal Parade. This has caused conflict between older fans and modern fans. Are the newer games loosing their "Harvest Moon" feeling? Are fans too boy crazy?
• Contested Sequel: Several games. Harvest Moon 64 and Back to Nature, Tree of Tranquility and Animal Parade, Friends of Mineral Town and DS..
• Crowning Moment of Heartwarming: In A Wonderful Life, after raising your son into adulthood, you and your wife are now both old and grey, sitting alone in the kitchen, your wife quietly comments on how her looks have long since left. What do you say to her? "You're still beautiful."
• Crowning Music of Awesome: The series is made up of awesome music.
• Ensemble Darkhorse: Skye in DS Cute was created primarily so that there'd be a "special" marriage candidate for the girl versions, and he's extremely hard to find and talk to. Oh, he's also a bad boy bishie. Is it any surprise, then, that he's become one of the most popular boys in the series?
  • This FanFiction plays up and parodies this quite sufficiently.
  • Other games have them as well, but with the exception of Skye, most are NPCs you can't marry. Examples include Flora (AWL version), Pastor Carter (More Friends version), Alisa (Island of Happiness), Marian (Grand Bazaar) and Eileen (Two Towns). Sunshine Islands even trolls you by giving Alisa heart events like a marriageable girl, but having her turn you down. It looks like you can marry her in A Tale of Two Towns, though. But since she is a priestess, no child!(Something that Lara from Frontier does opposite.)
  • Wizard from Animal Parade certainly seems to be one of the most popular bachelors with the fandom along with Gill, Chase and Luke.
• Family-Unfriendly Aesop: A common thing in dating sims but... The best way to befriend somebody or have them fall in love with you is to shower them with gifts.
  • Sort of justified, though. Everyone lives in a community were most everyone specializes in one type of product. Stands to reason that the best thing you could do for a person is provide them with foods or materials they don't have.
    • Which still doesn't explain why Rick and Popuri, who own a chicken ranch, are most easily wooed with eggs.
• Fan-Preferred Couple: It has recently started to pop up often, when before fans tended to be spread evenly through the bachelors and bachelorettes. Pony x Marlin, Pony x Skye, Tina x Jamie, Chelsea x Vaughn, Angela x Gill, Molly x Chase, and female-Twin-Villages-protagonist x Kamil.
• Fridge Brilliance: In the first two DS games, Thomas mentions a Mineral Town farmer. Now who could that be? It's your psuedo gender character. Claire or Jill for Pete, and Pete for the girls.
  • In DS and Cute, "Karen" lacks her signature blond bangs. Why exactly? Well, Karen with her blond bangs is a direct decedent of the blond Eve from SNES. In DS-Cute it's that Karen's descendant, so the blond has probably been knocked out of her genes or isn't main like with the other.
• Fridge Logic: So very very much of it.
• Goddamn Bats: The weeds, in a way; it's impossible to get rid of them completely.
  • In HM3GBC, you can just turn your entire farm into a watery grave with the shovel.
    • In some games^[1], you could invest a ton of money into putting grass everywhere you're not planting other seeds. You can technically do it in IoH and SI , but since you have to water grass in those games, it's far more trouble than it's worth.
  • If they don't count, the Demon Chickens and Ducks in the DS mines do. Fast, aggressive, and will chase you across the screen. The bugs are pretty annoying too, but at least they move in set paths that you can at least attempt to avoid...
• Good Bad Bugs: The series is infamous for them, often times related to Natsume's translation.
  • DS. Dear god, Harvest Moon DS. Several pointless glitchs (tapping the bottom left corner of the title screen where the characters are lining up turns everyone into Leah), several annoying ones (going to the island during a festival results in the bottom screen blacked out) but lots of good bad ones. Examples:
    • The infamous billionaire cheat
    • Lord Fa's cheat for unlimited wool
    • Saving, turning off your DS and reloading the game clears out the entire mine floor of monsters (except, strangly, the moths)
• Ho Yay: Ash in Two Towns seems to talk about Cam a lot. Oddly, Cam never mentions Ash.
• It's Easy, So It Sucks: The Wonderful Life games gave smaller seasons, love interests with no rivals and are much quicker to woo, a much smaller town, and in general is very simplified compared to other HM games. Though it's less of a challenge, it is a good way for newcomers to the series to get the hang of the general playthrough before going to the harder games.
  • Also the days in Wonderful Life are soooooooo long, you can end up getting bored.
  • Grand Bazaar has been called "Harvest Moon For Dummies."
• Misblamed: A lot of people mistake Natsume as being the makers of the games, when in reality they are only translators for the America's. Thus errors and glitches in gameplay that aren't related to Natsume (such as the mailbox being locked in a lot of games) are often Misblamed at Natsume.
• Nightmare Fuel: When your animal dies in the Wonderful Life series.
• The Scrappy: In Tree of Tranquility/Animal Parade, Luna and Selena are not well liked by the fandom. Doesn't help that they can marry two of the most popular guys in the series but the former gets more flak mainly because Gil (who as shown above is part of the Fan-Preferred Couple with the female protagonist and somewhat of an Ensemble Darkhorse and his rivalry scenes with Luna have her act very immature to Gill's calm nature. Doesn't help that if the player tells Luna that she likes Gill, she'll act like a complete bitch to you by saying, "I'm prettier than you." Not something you say to the player that can decide your fate and make you single because of it.
  • However, almost ALL of the bachelorettes act pretty catty when the player discourages them from confessing. They're really just hated because they marry the most popular guys in the game, similar to Sabrina from Io H.
• Scrappy Mechanic: Seem to pop up with regularity in the DS games, including the cooking mechanics in [IoH/SI], the animal mini-games in DS/DS Cute, the storage system in Grand Bazaar and the farm expansion and tool upgrade systems in Two Towns.
• Shipping: The fandom is completely devoted to this aspect of the series, and we ain't talkin' about what you do with your crops. Makes a certainly amount of sense, since the games are practically half Dating Sim anyway.
• Strangled by the Red String: A[nother] Wonderful Life will simply throw you at the character with the highest affection when the time comes, and hit you with a Nonstandard Game Over if you balk. In other games, there's frequently little to nothing stopping you from marrying girls the moment you get their affection high enough, which means they'll agree to marry you even if that's really the first they've heard of your feelings for them.
  • The latter point is especially Egregious in Grand Bazaar, where the dialogue of the marriage candidates doesn't change at all until after you get married.
  • It's better in Animal Parade, though. As you build up hearts with a marriage candidate, they actually woo you back, giving you gifts, sending you love letters, and even going on dates with you!
  • In the Game Boy games you can only marry your farm hand.
• Tastes Like Diabetes: Maya. "Oooh, a birthday prezzie? Thanksies! <3"
• Tear Jerker: In A Wonderful Life, it's unavoidable. No matter what girl you pick to marry, the other two will have sad lives. Muffy remains a single waitress all her life and will occasionally be seen on the beach at night crying about losing her beauty and never getting a chance to have a child. Celia grows into an angry bitter man-hater who seems to give Marlin hell at the farm. And Nami runs out of money and tearfully has to leave town to live with her deadbeat dad, and years later when she returns she spends all her time drinking herself into a stupor.
• That One Sidequest: DS' Fourth Mine. So very much...
  • Also the Swimming Contest in Back To Nature. You will be reloading and replaying that one A LOT.
    • And the snowboard contest and horse race in Grand Bazaar. There's a reason you're allowed (and encouraged) to practice year-round.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks: Some fans view on the games after 64, and to a larger extent most fans views on BTN/FOMT/MFOMT compared to 64 and DS/Cute compared to AWL/ANWL/AWL:SE/FOMT/MFOMT.
  • Many HM fans seem to feel that way with IoH and it's many "innovations" (The all-stylus controls, the Fullness meter, the weather/crop growing mechanic, the gimped [compared to other games in the series] cooking system, etc.)
• Toy Ship: Stu and May (BTN and Mineral Town), Hugh and Katie (DS\DS Cute), Charlie and Eliza (Island of Happiness), Rahi and Ying (Tale of Two Towns)

1. ↑ Specifically, Back To Nature, the Mineral Town games and DS/DS Cute