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Innocent Life: A Futuristic Harvest Moon Review
Written by Elmer Concepcion on Wednesday, July 4, 2007
Remarkable ambiance and setting; Involving world to explore and investigate.
Doggedly slow pace; Many hallmarks of previous Harvest Moons are missing.
There's something beautiful and serene about this Innocent Life which can lead you on to play the game for days and days. It's the very same thing which could leave it gathering dust on your shelf. There's no denying it, I'm a player in the former. Yet being able to acknowledge its grievous faults made it that much harder to score. If it were just another Harvest Moon made portable, that might have been easier. What you have here is a real testament to loving design in a stiflingly slow paced world. It's the first Harvest Moon game to be put to a story and it's a tale that's long in the telling. Gamers be warned, same goes to the Harvest Moon fans, this is a hard game to love but it asks for it all.
The story itself is a real hard one to grade, for all it's grand implications and delicate yearnings for the hard things long past in a future so effortlessly happy, the writing (or rather it's localization) is woefully plain. But that seems to be part of the point, for you are cast in the role of the eponymous Innocent Life. That is, you are a humanoid robot created by Dr. Hope and you have the not so easy task of saving everyone from impending doom. And unlike the works of a certain Dr. Light, you've been made with farming in mind. The future is an easy life for the inhabitants of Volcano Town on Heartflame Island, but the land is an ancient place and the spirits dwelling there are unhappy to have been forgotten. With technology the humans subsist on auto-farming never knowing the feel of soft tilled earth or the joy from things that grow. They no longer respect the land itself, and the island is angry. The volcano threatens to destroy it all unless you, a robot, can somehow learn and in learning teach what it is to be alive.
The trouble comes in the story's pacing, and no where is it worse than it's opening hours. The game comes with all the enjoyable farming you'd expect from a Harvest Moon. Unfortunately, this seems secondary and restricted with the dogmatic regimen that the story imposes. Every week is set up in the same linear fashion, for six days you have the farm to yourself but on Sundays you must return to Dr. Hope for your weekly exam. Some more of the story is revealed, and potentially some more of the island is available to explore. This happens seemingly no matter how your farm is doing in the same manner throughout the entirety of the game. And it makes for an extremely constricted beginning, without anywhere to explore and little available land to tend to it is riddled with boredom without satisfaction. I could deal with the waiting game if the rewards were more tangible, but the fact of the matter is that you don't need food and your relationships with the townsfolk never really change. Being a robot, you don't have to eat and unfortunately teaching women how to love is out of the question. Yes, there's no more marriage or wooing involved.
The farming itself, ironically enough considering the storyline, encourages you to buy the kinds of equipment that makes farming mostly automated. Even the humble task of watering finds itself delegated to a helper robot. It's all a little too easy with many days heading to bed with all the work done by 8 AM. This is especially in the early parts of the game where you find yourself wandering around talking to the same people day after day just for the sake of using up your remaining hours. This is of course to make time for you to explore, which is the big change to the nature of Harvest Moon. Exploration and discovery are the key advances you look forward to every Sunday, and unlocking the next bit of land is always enjoyable after its own fashion. And the game's rather beautiful graphics and setting do wonders to ease the heart. But still, I can't help but feel hard pressed to describe what the tangible worth of all your farming actually is. In a way, it's like farming just for farming's sake. And strangely, I found myself feeling rewarded by it.
Your plot of land is a strange one, it's the roof of an old and nearly forgotten ruin hiding deep secrets just beneath your feet. On top of this quiet and mysterious place you find yourself picking up potatoes and cabbages from your spring harvest or dutifully clearing the debris of a thunderstorm. It is a lonely place and the placating music wonderfully orchestrated accompanies every serene yet melancholy step. It's incomprehensible the feeling that the whole experience encourages. That even if all this farming I'm doing as efficiently and carefully as I can is providing nothing really gained, I willingly and gladly persevere. When you're growing virtual watermelons or turnips just to see them grow, it's almost a peaceful way of thumbing your nose at everything else you should or could be doing. For no reason at all, I always look forward to waking up and making that virtual cup of coffee. Then I check on the crops with no small amount of pride, have a virtual meal or watch some virtual TV, try a new recipe then check the weather for the next morning. When virtual me goes to sleep, it tells me his humanity increases just a little. The regimen is its own pleasure, it's very meditative. It's very zen, and for that very reason it could be and often is very boring.
Finding out the mysteries of the island seems to be the reward for your perseverance. Imagine an RPG world without monsters to pop up at you every corner, allowing for every newly opened section of land to be just filled with potential treasures and discoveries no longer constricted by the fear of there being a deathtrap with every step. In this way it's like very few games which came before it. A lot of ways its very little like the previous Harvest Moons. Artepiazza has developed a rather special game, and for that I wish I could reward them with a better score. But it would be a disservice to gamers if I ignore the fact that wading through the uneventful days can feel like trudging up a long hill leading nowhere.
