If there’s an abiding mystery in video games, it’s “Harvest Moon.”
Playing “Harvest Moon” consists of tilling squares of soil, planting seeds, watering them, fertilizing them, going to sleep and repeating. This shouldn’t be fun. It’s a chore simulator. But it’s also a timesuck second only to the “Civilization” series. Harvest “Harvest Moon” from the store, and it will harvest your life.
Of course, there’s a lot more to “Harvest Moon” than farming. As the years have passed, the developers have added fishing, mining, insect collecting, cooking, horseracing and raising livestock into the mix of things you can do to fill the time — constantly ticking by — in one of the game’s “days.” Heck, you can even fall in love, get married and have a child.
The appeal lies not so much in the activities themselves — there’s nothing particularly fun about watering a square of soil and moving on to the next one — as it lies in the cycles into which the activities fit. It’s a sort of capitalist dream, where every dollar you make from those crops/eggs/bass you toiled over can be reinvested in your operation, to buy better-quality seeds, more farmland, improvements to your house, etc.
“Harvest Moon DS: Grand Bazaar,” with its titular feature, enhances this tableau. Whereas in previous “Harvest Moon” games, you threw products into a box to be shipped to some hidden market somewhere, this time you get to go to a market every week and attract the masses to the fine wares on display at your booth.
Lots of times, new “Harvest Moon” games make you feel like a guinea pig as the developers try new twists — like the disastrous stylus-only controls in “Island of Happiness” — but “Grand Bazaar’s” weekly punctuation gives the “Harvest Moon” formula some much-needed structure. This is the series’ best yet on the DS.
