So why don’t the villagers all bring the Sun Stones they have to Meadow Island and raise all the islands they can?! This is almost as bad as Super Mario Sunshine where the Tanukis and Piantas have Sun Stones. Every time you get a Sun Stone from someone, the villager shows awareness that your character’s been looking for them. This immediately creates the immersion-breaking plot hole of the fact that the villagers are hoarding Sun Stones to themselves for no reason.

One of them is received long after the first one. I ended up finding out I could get two Sun Stones from befriending a bachelorette long enough on my own. This game copies the Note “ achievement system “ with a better reward for getting them because you don’t have to get half of them to get anything, but you still end up feeling like you need a guide to find out how to get a lot of them.

I haven’t been able to find anything of the sort here. Remember how in Magical Melody, you had a similar concept with collecting Notes, and there was a Note screen in the main menu? You could highlight the various grayed out Notes and even if you didn’t have a Note yet, the title of it gave you at least a hint about how to get it. A lot of the islands are good money-makers for your character, so there’s a genuine incentive to raise them. The premise of the game is that the Sun Stones are missing and finding them raises the various islands which were magically sunk. I was just longing for the days of the earlier games where that wasn’t the case. The intro cutscene at the start of the game is boring as usual, wasting your time with villagers greeting you at your new farm. With slow text, the game would be more boring. Occasionally I feel like it pops up too fast and I press A so early that I end up missing what the villager was trying to say. Another immediate improvement over Harvest Moon DS is that the text scrolls much faster, like it SHOULD. At least the game lets you use the buttons and Control Pad to name things if you so choose.

This game reminds me of Magical Melody a little with the character designs and 3D graphics, but it’s got two major problems that are a constant annoyance the tool upgrade system, and the new weather system.

Harvest moon sunshine islands mining