Harvest Moon: Hero of Leaf Valley is a farm simulation game for the PSP. It follows the same protagonist as Save the Homeland and has several returning characters as well, essentially an expanded remake of that game. You can name the protagonist to whatever you want, and he travels to Leaf Valley to take over his grandfather’s farm. It is there that you learn that you have two years to save up enough money to buy the deed to the whole village. If you fail, the village will be demolished and a theme park will be built in its place. The game doesn’t have a great tutorial. It kind of just throws you in and leaves you there with limited guidance. You’ll spend the first day exploring the village, which is of a reasonable size. Annoyingly, the village is split into various smaller areas, each of which requires a short loading screen. That said, the graphics are decent for a PSP game, thanks to the bright and colorful aesthetic, it still looks great to this day. Then you’ll explore the part time jobs to get extra money such that you can buy some seeds to grow, and eventually buy some animals to raise. The crops that you grow can be sold for money and they are your main source of income at the beginning of the game. Shops will have specific requests that pays more than selling it piecemeal but of course, are tougher to gather up.
The core of the game is to spend each day growing crops, taking care of your animals, and then going through the village to build up affection points with each of the characters. You can affection points by talking to the characters every day as well as giving them gifts. Characters will move around throughout the day, so it takes a few days before you start to remember where they are at a particular time. The somewhat constantly moving nature makes the village feel a bit more alive and inhabited. The game has calming and relaxing music. However, each day runs in real time. The clock is constantly ticking in the upper right corner. One second of real time equals to one in-game minute and it can be stressful at first when you’re worrying about wasting time and wasting the day if you just aimlessly run around. As you go through the week, you’ll realize that shops are closed on certain days, as well as only being open at certain times of the day. You’ll need to pay attention if you want to buy or deliver something.
It takes a few in-game days before you get a feel for the gameplay loop and start to set up a routine. Soon you’ll get sucked into the trap of playing one more day and figure out ways to maximize what you can achieve each day. However, the pacing is very slow, given that you’re playing the game one day at a time. Waiting for new events which last a few seconds can make the game extremely repetitive. Once you get past the first month and the story events start to become more frequent (provided you fulfill the criteria), it’s a lot more interesting. Towards the second half of the game, you’ll start to cut stuff from your routine. Given that it is really easy to get enough money for the normal ending as well as being able to buy everything before the end of the first year, you can tell that the game focuses on the various events and associated character affection building instead of the farming component. There are multiple “endings”, or ways to save the village. Unfortunately these endings are tied to specific events which are tied to specific days. Miss the requirement to trigger an event and you can kiss that ending goodbye. These “missable” endings are a pain if you wanted to see as much as you can in a playthrough, especially if you don’t want to follow a guide.
Despite the chilled atmosphere, the game can be harsh in several ways. If you accidentally miss a day in feeding your animals, they will get sick the next day which will drop their affection as well. If your character gets sick from over exerting himself, then you will lose a day, potentially causing you to permanently miss events. When it rains, it restricts a lot on what you can do since all the characters stay inside and you cannot do a lot of the minigames. The limited amount of items you can carry early on is annoying as you’ll constantly run out of space. Thankfully, you can upgrade this along with your tools which benefit you since you’ll use less of your stamina bar. The controls can feel archaic at times. Having the same button mapped to selecting an item, gifting an item, and throwing the item, with the only difference being that it depends on how far away from a character you are, means you’ll be accidentally throwing away stuff all too often. The same goes for when you’re confirming a textbox only to throw a valuable item away or you want to speed up the text only for a selection box to pop up and the default answer is now the one to move the route forward. Therefore, saving in multiple slots is a must in case you need to reload a previous save and redo the day.
After the two years are up and the credit rolls, provided you had enough money, you can continue playing the game for as long as you’d want. However, there aren’t too many new things left to do. You can expand your house a bit more, buy some more tools and get married. These are definitely nowhere near enough for you to keep playing for that much longer unless you really love the routine of farming, watering, harvesting and taking care of your animals. It already takes a fair amount of time to get to the ending, anywhere from twenty hours to fifty hours. If instead after you finish the game the first time you wish to start up a new one, there is a new game plus option. This mode allows you to carry over items such as money, house extensions and keeps a track of the endings you have already achieved. However, you will have to redo any routes you want, which includes building up all the affection points again, which is very time consuming and boring. Overall, Harvest Moon: Hero of Leaf Valley is a solid game. It’s not quite the addictive cycle that one would expect of a farming simulation game. The game focuses a lot on achieving the story events in order to get the various endings. Unfortunately, its fixation on the strict timing of all those story events means you’re likely to miss out on a lot which can be disappointing and frustrating, particularly since it takes so long to go through a full playthrough.
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