Harvest Moon goes all-in on iOS with fully-fledged mobile release

Publisher Natsume tackles the mobile market with this week’s launch of Harvest Moon: Seeds of Memories, a new and fully-featured entry in the long-running farming simulation series.

Notably, Seeds of Memories is the first mobile Harvest Moon game to offer a series-standard set of gameplay features, following up on the 2009 puzzler spin-off Harvest Moon: Frantic Farming.

In Harvest Moon: Seeds of Memories, players must restore an abandoned farm to its former glory by tilling land, growing crops, and tending livestock. Crops and animal products can be sold for in-game cash, which can then be used to purchase new items and upgrade farming tools.

This sort of gameplay is standard fare for the series, but Harvest Moon has thus far been conspicuous in its absence on mobile platforms. Despite establishing a foundation for the farming subgenre with Harvest Moon series entries for the Super NES, Nintendo 64, and original PlayStation, the only Harvest Moon game to premiere for mobile platforms previously was Frantic Farming, a puzzler that bore little resemblance to its predecessors.

In the years following Frantic Farming‘s release, the farming subgenre has rose to prominence on mobile platforms with games like Hay Day, a popular free-to-play farming sim from Clash of Clans creator Supercell. Seeds of Memories puts Natsume in close competition with dozens of similar games that have launched for mobile devices in recent years.

In addition to this week’s mobile launch, Harvest Moon: Seeds of Memories will also arrive for the Wii U and PC platforms via Steam by the end of the year. Seeds of Memories will be the first series entry ever ported to either platform. An Android port is also in the works.

Harvest Moon: Seeds of Memories is available for download from the iOS App Store, and is priced at $10.

from Planet GS via John Jason Fallows on Inoreader http://ift.tt/1PgAtsD
Danny Cowan