Info about Harvest Moon: The Winds of Anthos:

Official game description:
Explore the Amazing World of Anthos!  
The land of Anthos was a peaceful and harmonious land watched over by the Harvest Goddess and the Harvest Sprites, who protected the inhabitants of Anthos from natural disasters such as storms, earthquakes, and the like.  
However, one day many years ago, Anthos experienced a severe volcanic eruption that threatened life on Anthos itself, and the Harvest Goddess and Harvest Sprites had to use all of their remaining power to keep the people and animals of Anthos safe. This left the different villages across the land blocked off from each other. Some unfortunate souls even got trapped outside their villages, and were unable to return...  
Believing that the separated villages and people would one day be reconnected, the Harvest Goddess sent out a bottle with a letter and a magic key, then fell into a deep sleep...  
Now, 10 years later, you have found the SOS the Harvest Goddess sent to the world in the form of a message in a bottle! With the help of your wacky inventor friend Doc Jr. and many others, it’ll be up to you to revive the Harvest Goddess and the Harvest Sprites, as well as reconnect all of the villages of Anthos with each other!  
• Farm all around Anthos using Doc’s new and improved Expando-Farm! Easily move from place to place and farm everywhere from snowy mountains to beautiful beaches!  
• Keep and raise different kinds of cows, chickens, and sheep in your barn! Find even more exotic animals to keep out in the wild of Anthos!  
• Participate in a variety of contests and festivals!  
• Woo 5 different bachelors and 5 different bachelorettes! Mary whoever your heart desires!  
• Keep unique pets like wolves and exotic animals such as Bengal tigers!  
• Collect seeds from Harvest Wisps hidden all over Anthos! Some of the rare ones only come out at certain times, so keep an eye out for them!  
• Explore the wide world of Anthos on foot or on mount! Unique and unusual mounts are available as well!  
• Mine deep for ore and other materials in several different mines! Watch out for falling rocks!  
• Fast travel around the world using the Harvest Goddess’s Warp Statues!  
• Take pictures, selfies, and more!

Release date: 27 Sep, 2023

Categories: Life Simulation, Open-World Exploration, Resource Management, Animal Simulation, Single-player Story, Dating Simulation, Base Building


- Hardware Profile: No data
Feature extractions:
- Community Price: No data
- Playtime Metrics: No data
- Time-to-fun: No data
- Player Archetypes: No data


Below are summaries of things people say about the game per category.
Each point is assigned a weight that represents how often it is mentioned across all reviews.
What players like:
- True to classic Harvest Moon (weight 0.99): The game is praised for successfully capturing the essence of classic Harvest Moon titles while introducing modern mechanics. It's considered a significant improvement over previous Natsume Harvest Moon games, offering a richer and more satisfying farming and life simulation experience.
- Highly enjoyable and fun game (weight 0.86): Players overwhelmingly enjoy the game, finding it fun, relaxing, and engaging with plenty of activities. Many appreciate its positive atmosphere and overall enjoyable experience.
- Vast open world exploration (weight 0.67): The expansive open world is a major highlight, offering vast areas to explore, numerous points of interest, and a wealth of content that keeps players engaged for many hours. This open-world design is a fresh and welcome change for the genre.
- Beautiful and charming graphics (weight 0.56): The game's graphics and art style are consistently praised for being beautiful, cute, and charming. Characters and animals are well-designed, contributing to an aesthetically pleasing and immersive experience.
- Diverse crops and mutations (weight 0.37): The game offers a wide variety of crops, fish, and animals, with a particular emphasis on the innovative and enjoyable crop mutation mechanic. This adds depth and replayability to the farming system.
- Engaging wild animal taming (weight 0.34): The ability to tame and befriend wild animals is a popular and well-implemented feature. Players enjoy the variety of animals, the ease of taming, and the benefits these animal companions provide.
- Effective fast travel system (weight 0.29): The fast travel system is highly appreciated, especially given the large map. It significantly improves quality of life by reducing travel time and stamina consumption, making exploration more convenient.
- Engaging and clear storyline (weight 0.25): The storyline is generally well-received, described as interesting, engaging, and not overwhelming. It provides a good narrative drive for the gameplay and helps players invest in the world.
- Town and relationship progression (weight 0.18): The system of rebuilding and leveling up multiple towns, along with befriending characters, adds a significant layer of progression and community building to the game, providing plenty of objectives.
- Wisps provide useful seeds (weight 0.16): The mechanic of finding seeds from wisps is a cool and convenient way to acquire resources, making the early game smoother and encouraging exploration.
- Addictive and profitable mining (weight 0.14): Mining is highlighted as an excellent and enjoyable activity, often described as addictive and profitable. The dowsing mechanic in mines is also found to be very useful.
- Simple core mechanics (weight 0.12): Both farming and fishing mechanics are praised for being simple, straightforward, and solid, making them accessible and enjoyable core activities.
- Fun fishing mini-game (weight 0.11): The fishing mini-game is specifically called out as well-done and fun, requiring active effort rather than passive waiting, which is a positive change for players.
- Easy stamina replenishment (weight 0.11): Players appreciate the abundance of food and forageable items that easily restore stamina, making exploration and daily tasks less restrictive and more enjoyable.

Common complaints:
- Overpriced and Buggy (weight 0.9): Many players feel the game is significantly overpriced for the content and quality it offers, citing frequent crashes, poor optimization, and a general lack of depth. The game's technical issues, particularly constant crashes, severely detract from the player experience.
- Dull NPCs and Story (weight 0.73): A significant number of players found the NPCs and character interactions to be bland, repetitive, and lacking personality. Quests often involve tedious fetch tasks, and the overall narrative and character development fail to engage players, making the world feel less alive.
- Frustrating Stamina and Movement (weight 0.69): The stamina system is a major point of frustration, as it depletes too quickly, even for basic actions like walking, severely limiting exploration and gameplay. The inability to jump or climb small ledges further exacerbates navigation issues, making movement feel cumbersome and unnatural.
- Limited Customization and Settings (weight 0.55): Players are disappointed by the extremely limited character and farm customization options. Furthermore, the complete absence of essential graphics and display settings on PC is a significant drawback, hindering optimization and visual adjustments.
- Unrewarding Farming Mechanics (weight 0.53): Despite being a farming simulator, the farming mechanics are criticized for being unrewarding, unprofitable, and lacking expected features. Many players found farming to be less profitable than other activities like fishing, which undermines the core gameplay loop.
- Repetitive and Unrewarding Quests (weight 0.38): The quest system is perceived as overwhelming and unrewarding, with many quests being repetitive fetch tasks that offer little incentive or freedom. This constant stream of mandatory quests makes the game feel like a chore rather than an enjoyable experience.
- Empty Open World (weight 0.28): The large open world map is frequently described as empty, bland, and underutilized, lacking engaging content or incentives for exploration. Its vastness, combined with movement limitations, makes navigation a tedious chore.
- Annoying Mining Mechanics (weight 0.23): Mining is a particularly frustrating activity due to the constant barrage of falling rocks that deplete stamina and interrupt gameplay. This mechanic is widely considered annoying and poorly implemented.
- Tedious Seed Acquisition (weight 0.22): The method of acquiring seeds is a significant point of contention, as players cannot simply purchase them and must instead find them scattered across the map. This mechanic is seen as tedious and unrewarding, hindering farming progress.
- Disappointing Harvest Moon Experience (weight 0.16): Many long-time fans feel this installment deviates too much from the core Harvest Moon experience, lacking the charm, social interaction, and quality of life features found in previous titles, leading to disappointment.
- Poor Render Distance (weight 0.14): The game suffers from poor render distance, causing objects like trees and fences to pop in and out abruptly. This visual issue detracts from the immersion and overall graphical quality.

Gameplay feedback:
- Quest-driven story progression (weight 0.23): The game is heavily quest-driven, with the main story requiring players to complete numerous quests to unlock new locations, festivals, and even core social features like marriage. The primary narrative involves saving cities and reconnecting scattered populations after a volcano eruption.
- Slow early game progression (weight 0.16): The initial hours of gameplay are slow and restrictive, with many core features and areas locked behind story progression. Players report that the game only truly opens up and becomes enjoyable after completing early story objectives, such as building the barn.
- Stamina management mechanics (weight 0.15): Stamina is consumed by basic actions like walking and running, and players can pass out if it runs out, though there are no significant consequences for doing so. The game also imposes a 'tired' effect at 4 AM, regardless of stamina.
- Unlimited tutorial stamina (weight 0.13): During the tutorial and initial days (first 4 days), players experience unlimited stamina, allowing for extensive resource collection like chopping trees without penalty. This contrasts with later gameplay where stamina management becomes crucial.
- Movable farm plots (weight 0.12): A unique feature allows players to move their entire farm, including the house and barn, to different fields across the map. These fields vary in size and layout, offering strategic choices for farm placement.
- Missing map marking features (weight 0.09): The game lacks essential quality-of-life features such as the ability to mark specific locations (e.g., cherry trees, fishing spots) on the map. There's also no clear in-game guide for ore locations or specific fish species.
- Fishing for early money (weight 0.09): Fishing, especially with the master rod to resell tuna, is highlighted as the most lucrative early-game money-making method. Basic crops are less profitable than mutated ones.
- Power Wisps and Berries (weight 0.09): Power Wisps, similar to Koroks, provide Power Berries that can expand stamina or bag capacity. These wisps can be found in the open, rocks, or trees, but Power Berries are only collectible during specific seasons.
- Demanding child-rearing (weight 0.07): The game includes children, but raising them requires constant attention and a significant amount of milk until they are fully grown, adding a demanding element to family life.
- Anime style 3D open world (weight 0.06): The game features 3D graphics with an anime art style and is set in an open-world environment, providing a specific visual and structural experience.
- Harvest Goddess/Sprites lore (weight 0.06): The game's narrative involves the Harvest Goddess and Harvest Sprites, who protect villages. The player's journey begins with finding a letter from the Harvest Goddess, initiating a quest to awaken the sprites.
- Diverse core gameplay loop (weight 0.04): The core gameplay loop involves a variety of activities including collecting resources, growing crops, raising animals, traveling, purchasing items, and progressing through the main story.
- Fast in-game clock (weight 0.04): The in-game clock progresses quickly, with each day lasting approximately 8 minutes of real-world time, impacting time management for daily activities.
- Grazing doesn't feed animals (weight 0.04): Grazing farm animals only improves their mood and does not fulfill their feeding requirements, meaning players still need to provide food.
- No combat system (weight 0.04): The game does not feature any combat mechanics, focusing instead on farming, exploration, and social simulation.
- Time pauses in menus (weight 0.04): Time pauses when players are navigating menus or engaging in conversations with non-player characters, allowing for unhurried decision-making.
- Adventuring in Anthos (weight 0.04): The primary focus of gameplay is adventuring and exploration within the world of Anthos, emphasizing discovery and interaction with the environment.
- Consistent farming mechanics (weight 0.04): Despite new features, the fundamental mechanics of farming and raising animals remain consistent with genre expectations, providing a familiar experience for players.
- Adjust camera settings (weight 0.04): Players recommend adjusting the camera rotation settings to improve navigation and overall ease of movement within the game world.
- Horse purchase available (weight 0.03): A horse can be purchased for 3,000 in-game coins, providing a means of faster transportation.
- Console-first PC support (weight 0.03): While primarily designed for console platforms, the game is fully playable on PC, with a controller being the recommended input method for an optimal experience.
- Non-essential DLC (weight 0.03): The available downloadable content (DLC) is not essential for the core game experience and does not introduce game-breaking elements, suggesting it's optional content.
- Player born in village (weight 0.02): The player character's backstory establishes them as being born in the village, providing a personal connection to the game world.

Performance notes:
- Excellent overall performance (weight 0.43): Many players report excellent and stable performance across various platforms, including Steam Deck, ROG Ally, and different PC configurations. The game maintains high frame rates, has no significant lag, and offers good battery life on portable devices.
- Frame rate drops and stuttering (weight 0.09): Some users report frame rate drops and significant stuttering, especially during repeated actions. Capping frame rates has been suggested as a potential workaround.
- Occasional game crashes (weight 0.07): Some players experience random game crashes, with a few reporting crashes every 2-4 hours. This indicates an intermittent stability issue for a subset of users.
- Launch and texture freezes (weight 0.06): Players occasionally encounter issues with the game failing to launch or freezing on certain textures. This suggests minor startup and rendering stability problems.
- Glitchy controls reported (weight 0.04): Some players have experienced glitchy controls, which can negatively impact gameplay and user experience.
- Character rendering issues (weight 0.03): A specific graphical bug causes characters to not render fully. This is a visual glitch that impacts immersion.

Recommendations:
- Not recommended at full price (weight 0.64): Many players do not recommend the game at its current price, suggesting it's not worth the full cost. They advise waiting for a significant sale or investing in other, more satisfying farming simulation games.
- Generally recommended with caveats (weight 0.26): Despite some reservations, a segment of players found the game enjoyable and worth recommending, particularly for its relaxing atmosphere and low-stakes gameplay.
- Good for Harvest Moon fans (weight 0.22): The game is primarily recommended for fans of the Harvest Moon series, especially those familiar with older titles. New players to the farming simulation genre or those seeking fast-paced gameplay may find it less appealing.
- Many players returned game (weight 0.09): A notable number of players opted to return the game, indicating dissatisfaction with their purchase.
- Take your time, adjust clock (weight 0.05): Players recommend taking one's time and adjusting the in-game clock in relaxed mode to make days longer, enhancing the experience.
- Tame horse for better life (weight 0.03): One specific tip from a player suggests taming a horse early in the game to improve the overall experience.
- Good for new open-world players (weight 0.03): The game is suggested as a suitable entry point for children new to open-world games.
- Not for challenge seekers (weight 0.03): Players seeking a more challenging experience are advised to consider other titles like My Time At Portia/Sandrock.
- Prefer Story of Seasons (weight 0.03): Some players expressed a preference for sticking with the Story of Seasons series over this game.
- Willing to push through issues (weight 0.02): Despite encountering issues, one player expressed a desire to continue playing and overcome them.
- Support studio improvement (weight 0.02): A player expressed a sentiment against wishing for the failure of the game studio, suggesting a desire for improvement.

Other player notes:
- Expand gameplay mechanics (weight 0.09): Players desire more interactive movement options like swimming and jumping, which would enhance exploration. Additionally, there's a wish for multiplayer functionality and shared character assets between players and NPCs for greater customization.
- Improve graphics settings (weight 0.07): Players are requesting more robust graphics settings, including resolution options, 16:10 aspect ratio support, and antialiasing. This would significantly improve the visual experience and allow for better optimization on various systems.
- Address IP confusion (weight 0.05): There is a sentiment among some players that the game is leveraging the 'Harvest Moon' IP to attract sales, potentially misleading players who are unaware of the franchise split. This suggests a concern about brand identity and marketing.
- Refine wisp collection (weight 0.04): The mechanic of collecting farm wisps has been identified as potentially tedious or annoying for some players. This suggests a need to review the design or frequency of this particular activity.
- Add language localization (weight 0.03): A specific request has been made for the game to be translated into Brazilian Portuguese. This would broaden the game's accessibility and appeal to a larger international audience.

Emotions:
- Satisfaction (weight 0.22): Players expressed satisfaction due to the game's overall quality, engaging content, and significant improvements over previous titles. The addictive main game loop, relaxing gameplay, and charming art style also contributed to a positive experience, often exceeding expectations.
- Frustration (weight 0.21): Frustration primarily stemmed from technical issues like frequent bugs, crashes, and poor PC port quality. Additionally, restrictive gameplay mechanics such as the stamina system, tedious mining, repetitive quests, and slow progression were major sources of player annoyance.
- Disappointment (weight 0.21): Disappointment arose from the game not meeting expectations, often due to a perceived lack of depth in NPCs, unrewarding quests, and limited customization. Players also felt let down by the open-world implementation, lack of quality-of-life features, and the game's deviation from traditional farming sim appeal.
- Joy (weight 0.06): Joy was experienced through the game's overall quality, engaging open-world exploration, and addictive gameplay. The variety of activities and the ability to raise different pets also contributed to a fun and fulfilling adventure.
- Excitement (weight 0.04): Excitement was generated by the game's extensive content, innovative features, and the vastness of its world. Players also expressed excitement for the potential of future growth and improvements within the series.
- Enjoyment (weight 0.03): Players found enjoyment in the game's overall engagement, the variety of content, and the pleasure of exploring the map and diverse environments. The core gameplay loop and activities provided a fun experience.
- Hope (weight 0.03): Hope was tied to the potential for future improvements, new features like multiplayer, and the game's ability to establish a new, positive identity for the series. Players expressed optimism for the developer's continued efforts.
- Boredom (weight 0.02): Boredom was caused by the slow and repetitive nature of the story and quests, as well as a perceived lack of depth in the farming mechanics. Players found the dialogue and progression unengaging.
- Appreciation (weight 0.02): Appreciation was shown for specific quality-of-life features, the overall game quality and design, and the perceived improvement in the developer's efforts. The game's scale and accessibility were also valued.
- Anger (weight 0.02): Anger stemmed from the perception of the game as a 'money-grab' due to its high price relative to its quality, persistent technical issues even after updates, and specific frustrating UI elements. This emotion shows signs of review bombing.
- Nostalgia (weight 0.01): Nostalgia was evoked by the game's resemblance to older Harvest Moon titles and 90s games, particularly Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life. This connection to past favorites created a sense of longing and familiarity.
- Regret (weight 0.01): Regret was directly linked to the purchase of the game, indicating that players felt the game did not provide sufficient value or enjoyment to justify the cost.
- Annoyance (weight 0.01): Annoyance was caused by repetitive tasks, endless requests from NPCs, and specific frustrating game mechanics and level design. These elements led to a feeling of irritation during gameplay.
- Anticipation (weight 0.01): Anticipation was driven by the exciting prospect of exploration within the game and the potential for many hours of engaging gameplay. Players looked forward to discovering what the game had to offer.
- Mild frustration (weight 0.01): Mild frustration was experienced during the game's introduction phase and due to occasional glitches. These issues were minor but still caused some irritation for players.
- Affection (weight 0.01): Affection was felt for the game despite its flaws, particularly due to its ability to evoke the classic Harvest Moon feel. Players developed a fondness for the game's core essence.
- Amusement (weight 0.01): Amusement was derived from the game's overall entertainment value, indicating that players found the game enjoyable and fun to play. The game successfully provided a source of lighthearted enjoyment.
- Desire (weight 0.01): Desire was expressed for missing graphics options and specific areas where the game could be improved. Players wished for additional features and refinements to enhance their experience.
- Concern (weight 0.01): Concern arose from the lack of PC video settings and the potential for the game to cause damage to PC hardware. Players worried about the technical implications of playing the game.
- Interest (weight 0.01): Interest was sparked by the game's storyline and its overall design. Players were drawn in by the narrative and the way the game was constructed.}