E3 2009 Preview
In relation to last
year’s Harvest Moon: Island of Happiness on the Nintendo DS, Natsume is
releasing Harvest Moon: Frantic Farming, their second attempt with a
puzzler within the franchise.
Providing players with 12
different characters to select from, Frantic Farming dishes out
backstories for all their characters. Each character has their own unique ending
that spans the length of 10 chapters. So if you’ve played last year’s DS title,
you should feel familiar with the story and characters.
Speaking about the story,
the Harvest God and Witch Princess are in a conflict and use their magic against
one another. This only causes havoc as everything on the island goes haywire and
the crops begin to overrun the land. It’s up to the player to fix the problem
and restore order.
As for the gameplay, each
character comes equipped with unique skills such as the Witch Princess using
magic and Shea having rain dance. The goals of the game are to lineup items and
make chains of combos to score points. In one instance, the Natsume
representative had to score 9,300 points in under 3 minutes. When you are ready
to start scoring points after lining up crops in order for a combo, the Harvest
Sprites will walk over to them and eliminate them off the puzzle map.
In terms of multiplayer,
players will be able to use single-card play or multi-card play. This should be
a large asset in attracting newcomers to the franchise as not everyone will have
to own a copy to play. Outside of that, there are logic puzzles (three to five
moves or less type play), instant puzzles and a tutorial mode to play through.
With a target release of
July, Harvest Moon: Frantic Farming is exclusive on the Nintendo DS.
