The title of Innocent Life: A Futuristic Harvest Moon gives it away, this is part of the Harvest Moon series, just with a different setting. You play as a robot, given the task of growing and building your farm on Heartflame Island. The beginning of the game has you focusing on your farm, so all the staples are there. You need to till the soil, plant seeds and then water them every day. You keep your farm clean by weeding and once your crops are fully grown, you can harvest them to sell for money. You can buy new seeds for different types of crops. All of this takes time and it can feel repetitive and boring if you’re not into these kinds of games.
There is a small town for you to explore. This is where the residents live, as well as the supermarket where you get to spend your money on. The game progresses day by day, in real time. One second in real life equals to one minute in-game, so the days can pass by quickly. Unlike Harvest Moon, there are no marriages or relationships, and there is also no need to worry about missable events that only occur on certain days with certain prerequisites. Unfortunately, there is no fast travel. You’ll need to travel on foot, but later on you’ll get something to help you to get to places a bit faster. This is mostly a pain when you need to go into town as there’s a long stretch of pointless nothingness that you have to run through each way, each time.
The game has some light RPG elements, such as stats for your character. In addition to the farming, the other main objective is to explore the island and eventually find a way to quell the Fire Spirit from erupting the volcano and destroying the town. The game can be quite chilled as you can mostly progress through the story at your own pace, although you’re given two in-game years to complete it. The most boring part is the first season as there isn’t much to do except to grow food. Once the next season comes around and you unlock a few more activities, it’s more interesting. Each new area you unlock are fairly big, with their own treasures and new items to collect, as well as paths to other areas.
As you’ll end up spending a lot of your time in exploration, you get a sweet robot helper that will automatically do a few of the things you need to do in your farm, like watering crops. This, along with the thing you get for quicker movement, are great quality-of-life improvements compared to the Harvest Moon games. In addition, the more you use your tools, the more they’ll level up, which will allow you to use the better tools that completes those actions easier and faster. While tedious, it is in your interest to suck it up and bear through the earlier repetitive parts. There are some RNG elements that are incredibly annoying, in particular, the storms. They appear at random and will wipe out most of your plants so that you need to plant them from seeds again. While this is realistic, it’s a terrible mechanic especially when you get a string of bad luck and have them appear every week, or in back to back days.
Unfortunately, the pacing of the new stuff being unlocked is way too slow. You’ll easily explore all available areas before the next ones open up. This means you won’t have much to do apart from harvesting again and again. The number of areas you can explore is small and there’s usually little reason to go visit them again once you have done enough to progress the story. The second half of the game is worse in that money means nothing. It becomes so easy to make money and there is a severe lack of things to buy. You’ll easily buy the equipment and tools that you need, which are the most expensive items in the game. All that’s left to buy are seeds, which are relatively cheap. You get several huge plots of land but it’s tedious to do more than the bare minimum, and you’ll end up relying on your robotic helper for several things anyway. This means you’ll be spending weeks of in-game time doing nothing but harvesting and then going to sleep for the next day.
If you know what you need to do, the game can be finished in under 20 hours, and a lot of that time is just waiting or farming. The actual real content of the story is minimal, and so the ending is quite disappointing. The exploration aspect could have been done a lot better, but given the lack of fast traveling, the areas couldn’t be too big or confusing as it still needed to allow you enough time to go home. There are some odd story developments towards the end, and the whole saga felt like it was over too easily and too quickly. There was one sad moment but that was it. Once you’ve finished the game, you can keep playing for as long as you like, but there’s really only the farming aspect left. There are no new exploration areas, nor are there relationships that you can pursue. The biggest piece of content is a farming challenge, where you are required to harvest 1000 crops within two years and lose all the quality-of-life improvements that cut down on the tediousness. It’s the old-fashioned way.
Overall, Innocent Life: A Futuristic Harvest Moon is an average game. It has some good ideas, like removing the missable time-based events that only current on certain days, and quality-of-life elements having a helper automatically do several of the more tediousness aspects of farming for you. The exploration focus is great, except for the fact that there’s not else to do besides running around in a new area and perhaps grabbing new fruit or mushrooms to sell. In this aspect, it felt too barebones and minimal in its content, which is exactly how the story feels.
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