Harvest Moon: One World Review

In a now travel-restricted world, games that provide an avenue for adventure and escape are more valuable than ever. When I sit down to a new game I love to be drawn in, to see familiar aspects that I love with new and shiny things thrown in. Harvest Moon 2 was the first farming sim I ever played, and I loved its option of a pink-haired female protagonist dearly. I fell away from the genre for a while, with Stardew Valley bringing me back into the fold, but the entries in the Harvest Moon series that were around that time didn’t intrigue me enough to pick them up. When Harvest Moon: One World was announced I let myself get excited. Here was a new Harvest Moon game for the Nintendo Switch, and with a title and setup that spoke to a bigger and better experience. Then the first trailer came and left me disappointingly underwhelmed, but I still wanted to give the game a chance and see what joy I would find with it in my hands.

Harvest Moon: One World is set in a world where ‘seeds’ are a mysterious thing only read about in books, where the only vegetables anywhere around are potatoes – and even they are scarce. The premise and opening moments give me slight Dragon Quest Builders 2 vibes, albeit in a farming setting, and it’s a fairly interesting idea to be sure. The world has forgotten their agricultural ways because the Harvest Goddess is gone and the Bountiful Soil, fertile land where people lived long ago, has been lost from the world. In order to bring back prosperity it’s up to the player to revive the Harvest Goddess by finding six medallions entrusted to Harvest Sprites that only the player is able to locate.

Empty winding routes

Unfortunately, once it actually gets started One World leaves a lot to be desired. The character creator is super bare bones, with hardly any customisation options –gender, skin tone, hair and eye colour are the only things you can change, with minimal choices for each. A feast for the eyes this game is certainly not, with an incredibly sparse world that screams flat and lifeless at the top of its lungs, with limited to super-low quality textures, hardly any vegetation and just miles and miles of wiggly flat paths bound by terraced landscape. If you’ve ever wanted the thrill of visiting a totally flat and lifeless desert, look no further than the one in this game. When you find yourself getting excited just to see a rock in a giant field of flat sand, you might start to question the world design just as I did.

Even a volcano featured in the game manages not to feel like a volcano at all due to its flat, shallow design and it certainly isn’t anything like it’s portrayed on the map. You’d be forgiven for thinking think you’ve just found a rockier kind of area were it not for the little bit of lava at the top.  There are different kinds of ore available within the game’s mines, but the deposits all look exactly the same. Any buildings that are present look pasted on and are invariably either empty of characters, exist as inaccessible window dressing or are filled with generically-named NPCs that hardly scream “interact with me.”  One World feels more like something that should be on a mobile phone than on a console.

The barebones nature of the game doesn’t stop at the art style and world building, either. The game has essentially no settings at all, except for audio, with no gameplay options to speak of. In the case of the text speed, which crawls at a snail’s pace across the screen unless you skip to the full set of dialogue by spamming A as I constantly did, that’s a glaring issue. One thing returning players may appreciate is that tool usage has been automated. You can only use the tool if you own it of course, but all you have to do is interact with the appropriate tile or object and the tools will cycle with each interaction, which works well. For example if you interact with a tile of farmable earth you will use your hoe, plant seeds and water with each successive input.

The mines are simple to a fault

While I don’t mind this at all, the game has completely removed any metering or gauges and replaced them with disruptive pop-ups. For instance you can’t see how empty your watering can is until it’s actually empty and an annoying pop up appears – anywhere you’d usually expect to see a progress bar or meter there are none. Instead of watching and flowing through gameplay I was constantly jarred by the missing information and the alternative pop-ups.

You’d think that with such minimal assets that the game should purr from a technical standpoint (like the wild cats you can find and pet). At first I thought I was seeing things, but unfortunately I was not. I was surprised to find that the game gets quite choppy quite often, has random recurring blackouts of terrain, objects that suddenly appear when transitioning between areas and NPCs that pop in and out of view at random like it’s Cyberpunk 2077. All of these things indicate deep-seated optimisation issues that really shouldn’t be there based on what’s being presented. As much as I loved the fact that you could interact with all animals, wild or otherwise, this was marred too by the fact that they could start moving around and pushing the player character before the animation even had a chance to finish. Nothing like a tiny baby chick pushing you around the barn to ruin the moment.

One World implements the classic two-stage stamina system that has graced past titles, but has combined it with some other decisions that take it an annoying step too far. You have your classic stamina hearts, and as long as your constitution is good (i.e. you’re not hungry or didn’t go to bed too late) you’ll lose hearts only through actions. However, if your constitution is reduced you’ll start losing stamina just from walking. This, combined with the game’s comparatively low level of forageable goods (which also do little to replenish your stamina before you can cook), means that traversing areas in the early game on foot sucks massively. Add to that the fact that you need to explore and walk around a fair bit to collect seeds from Harvest Wisps just so you can make money enough for a horse (which trust me, you need), and you’ve got recipe for frustrating tedium. I didn’t call my equine buddy Godsend for nothing, and while a horse does help it still didn’t make up for the lacklustre world design.

These kind of bugs shouldn’t occur many times an in-game day

Cooking is now an absolute necessity so you’re less likely to be taking a risk and potentially passing out on your way home after trying to make the most of your stamina. Cooking is also essential when you traverse to certain areas with hot or cold weather, which will start killing you unless you have eaten particular cooked foods regardless of the time of day. I found it puzzling, with the increased need for cooking, that it’s impossible to cook from the items that you can store within your fridge. Instead they must be in your inventory, which again adds unwanted clunkiness to the whole affair and highlights the poor quality-of-life design choices.

Another bizarre design decision in One World is that there are absolutely no character skills in this game. Other than making money, getting materials for story/side quests (which are bland to say the least) or cooking there’s no feeling of progression or development of your character as you farm your life away. The game has a ton of different kinds of crops, to be fair, but there is no nuance to those either, it’s simply a matter of whether or not you look after them and ensure they don’t die.

One slightly interesting feature is the Squishy Farm developed by Doc Jr. (whose character design weirds me out for some reason). As long as you can keep a robot topped up, you can move your Expandable farm to different predetermined areas to reduce your travel and focus on farming closer to where you’re doing the story quest. This would have been extra great if the story quests were more fleshed out and rewarding, and the named NPCs were more interesting and higher in number.

I feel sorry for the cows having to live with these textures

Final Thoughts

One World certainly isn’t unplayable, and while I’m sure some may enjoy it, compared to the many other farming sims I’ve tried and reviewed in the past couple of years it feels like this is something from the distant past. At best it’s vastly underwhelming, unpolished and almost like an early build rather than a finished product. When you take into account that this isn’t a game being sold at a bargain price but a full AUD $69.95 title, I would highly recommending waiting it out for a price drop before shelling out your hard-earned cash for this title. I’m usually very quick to sink good time into farming sims without noticing, but not this time. Any enjoyment was quickly washed away by a core design that seemed tailor to suck the fun out of things. I’m sad that this title doesn’t move the series forward in any of the ways that it should, and with the game out at the time of this review and devoid of any updates or patches I feel as though that’s how it’ll stay.

Reviewed on Nintendo Switch // Review code supplied by publisher

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