The True Virtual Farmers Are Gaming it Up

I thought I was a true virtual farmgirl until I read this piece in RP Gamer about Natsume’s latest fantasy video games: Rune Factory: A Fantasy Harvest Moon and Innocent Life: A Futuristic Harvest Moon. For the past decade, the games have featured a city boy who heads to rural lands to try his hand at country living and “bring life back to the dilapidated family farm.” RP Gamer gives positive reviews to the new games. In Rune Factory, in addition to tilling, the boy has to fight monsters and set them to work on the farm. Innocent Life is set in the distant future on an island where players farm while they discover mysteries about the past. Quoted here about an earlier version of Harvest Moon, creator Yoshifumi Hashimoto says the game is meant to allow players to perform acts that would be annoying in real life. Yoshifumi says: “It’s not like the actual farm work — the actual farm work would be tiring.” Both games are for Super Nintendo and are supposed to be released in 2007.