The best Harvest Moon to date, with greatly improved production values, and an all-around great "Sim."
Harvest Moon: AWL is not for everyone. I'll say that right now. It is a lot of repetitive tasks. It requires a great deal of patience. It has no action, not even the strategic battles of other RPGs. This game is getting high marks from me as a fan of RPGs, action-adventures, and sims who makes no secret of the fact that I hated Halo and can't stand Madden. For most of you, I am telling you to put Metroid Prime, RE4, or Zelda (all excellent games) into your GameCube and enjoy the hard-hitting action of those games.
In Harvest Moon, you are a young man with no direction who comes to a remote enclave called Forget-Me-Not valley and take over your father's farm in the name of capitalism and love. Your father's farm is run-down at first, but with hard work you can expand it into a thriving, profitable, ranch. Your farm is not the vast wheat fields of Iowa or the cattle ranches of Oklahoma, but a diverse California-style operation - you'll grow vegetables and fruit trees, and yes, raise livestock. The time and effort you put into your crops and animals determines the quality, and therefore the profit you'll make. Farming is hard work in real life and is hard work in Harvest Moon. You'll spend your days meticulously watering and fertilizing your crops, and moving your cows out to pasture and taking care of them. You've got a lot to do, and a limited time each day to do it - you can work late into the night, but you'll collapse from exhaustion if you do. Each day lasts 24 minutes (1 minute = 1 hour) and each of the four seasons is 10 game-days long, so it takes a great deal of patience and effort.
But there's more to life than hoeing and brushing cows. You're also here to find the love of your life, and there's three eligible ladies, each with their own personality - quiet, shy farm girl Celia, elegant city-girl Muffy, and tomboyish itinerant college student Nami. You'll woo them by spending time with them and bringing gifts associated with each woman's tastes, and at the end of the year, if you don't propose marriage, the woman who likes you the best will seek YOU out - so much for bachelorhood. You'll then have the additional task of raising a son - who inherits the personality traits of his mother - to be a productive, well-adjusted man. Here the social element comes into play, because your son's eventual standing in adulthood is effected by the company you keep. Also, if you cultivate friendships (again with gifts and interpersonal interaction) you will receive gifts and better prices on crops.
If all this sounds like a lot of work, it is. Farming in real life is a lot of repetition, and Harvest Moon, although simplified, is no less so. You won't be going out and crushing Moblins with your Master Sword, and you won't be bombarding Behemoths and Malboros with Firaga spells. That said, it's oddly addictive. It's genuinely rewarding when your hard work pays off in the form of top-quality, gold-earning crops and rich, creamy, pricey milk. It's entertaining to hear one of your son's off-the-wall remarks (I married Nami), and there's plenty of secrets and cut-scenes to be had.
Harvest Moon: AWL makes great use of the GCN's hardware. The characters are fully 3-D superdeformed anime-style characters with expressive faces, and the environments are beautifully rendered, although not as detailed as those in the Wind Waker. The game is colorful and the environmental effects are quite good. Admittedly, the music is a bit annoying, but the ambient nature effects (rustling trees, rushing water, and livestock noises) are well-done. The control scheme allows you to map your various tools and crops to each of the action buttons.
No, Harvest Moon isn't for everyone. But if you liked watching your buildings grow in Sim-City or telling your Sims to go sit on the toilet before they wet their pants, then you'll like Harvest Moon. It's the kind of sim we need more of in the US.