Writing
Harvest Moon: Magical Melody - Published by N-Philes, Aug 2, 2006
Holy crop! After the manly A Wonderful Life and the estrogen-packed Another Wonderful Life, Natsume brings GameCube owners a new entry in the Harvest Moon series. Dubbed Magical Melody, this new title remixes festivals, characters, crops, and cows to give us a fun, if perhaps repetitive game.
In true Harvest Moon style, your character comes to Flower Bud Village with 500G (for comparison purposes, a tomato sandwich costs 350G) and the high hopes of running a successful farm. Meanwhile, the Harvest Goddess is upset that nobody pays attention to her, and in quintessential emo fashion, she turns herself to stone. Since you're one of only two people who can see them, the Harvest Sprites petition you to collect 100 music notes to turn the Goddess back to her old non-igneous self.
At this point, you're probably asking how a bunch of music notes can turn the Goddess back to normal. In fact, Magical Melody brings up all kinds of questions: Why do you pick up and cuddle wild monkeys? How can an old Ty Pennington wannabe remodel your house overnight? How can your entire village be wiped out by bird flu even after torching hundreds of chickens? (Ok, that doesn't happen.) While the game does have a few fantastical plotholes, it does a very fine job of quenching any Harvest Moon gameplay you may be thirsting for.
For starters, you can choose to be either a male or a female protagonist, and where in town your farm is located. Once you begin, you choose from a decent list of which crops to grow for the season, or even if crops will be a primary source of income. If digging in potato fields all day isn't your idea of a good time, you can focus on earning riches from dairy and poultry farming, fishing, or by mining precious ores and minerals. With enough resources, you can buy more land, upgrade tools, build and expand barns, and eventually upgrade your bachelor shack to a comfortable mansion (a tactic proven to attract women-folk by the tractor-load in reality).
In many ways, Magical Melody resembles Animal Crossing. There of course is the open-ended gameplay as well as its wide array of quirky townsfolk, none of whom seem to be products of inbreeding, a trait real farm-folk often times possess. The difference is that this game builds in many role-playing elements and goal-oriented gameplay that you can elect to pursue.
Firstly, there's the music notes to collect. Some are difficult to obtain and require specific events to occur, while others surface just by doing day-to-day activities. For example, you will receive magical notes when you befriend wild animals, catch a fish or even by getting your new wife pregnant, an occasion usually marked not by musical notes but by screams of "OH MY GOD YOU'RE WHAT?!" or "But we were so careful!".
Secondly, the little town you live in has lost the hustle and bustle it once had. It's up to you to befriend everyone and to turn Flower Bud back into a thriving community, but how quickly this happens is entirely up to the player. It could take years to befriend some neighbors by simply talking to them everyday, so to speed things up, you can capitalize on their materialistic personalities and give them items that they like. With the massive number of items the game offers, GameFaqs trial and error is the only way to test the townsfolk's likes and dislikes. Some enjoy specific dishes that you can create using the game's rich cooking system, while others prefer crops from your farm, or even refined goods like yarn or perfume. Each of the game's 30-plus characters has a little story that is told through dialogue and small cut scene-style events. While it seems repetitive from one day to the next, everyone has all kinds of things to say, depending on how much they like you. [Editor's Note: Glad to see bribing people to be your friends is still cool to do.]
If that wasn't enough, Magical Melody has a rival system built right into it. The competitive types can strive to best Jamie, the mysterious farmer who not only begins the game with a bigger farm than you, but is also trying to revive the Harvest Goddess on her own. Every day, a chart comparing your shipping amounts to Jamie's is updated to let you know exactly how inadequate you are compared to her (or him, depending on your gender). Furthermore, you're competing with nine other bachelors or bachelorettes to find a wife or husband, so it's up to you to clean the pig-dung out of every pore in your body and get yourself to a hoedown because getting hitched is the way to success.
It's important to note that in order to balance the game's goal system, the designers have offered players an open-ended timescale with which to play. If you aren't in a rush to make millions on the farm, you can take time to build relationships with the townspeople. Unlike the previous games for the GameCube, you can take as little or as much time as you need to find a mate. Of course, you'll need to eventually advance your farm and relationships to earn all of the music notes, and of course make sure to find your soul mate before you turn old and crotchety.
On the graphical side of things, Magical Melody's art style looks like the unholy child of Animal Crossing and Zelda Wind Waker; bright palettes, simplified textures, and stylized art give the game a vibrant environment to explore. Regardless of the cartoonish look, many details can be appreciated: fireworks explode colorfully, the summer heat creates an impressive blur effect, the trees are rich with leaves, and the tall grass sways in the grazing field. Unfortunately, the heat blur and grazing grasses slow the game's frame rate down considerably when there are more than a couple of animals or characters in your immediate vicinity. Magical Melody also fixes the camera to a classic 3/4 angle, unlike the full free-roaming camera found in the Wonderful Life series. While this camera does the job, fully 3D environments with an adjustable camera would have been welcome.
For a game revolving around music notes, the game's audio comes off as unimpressive. Magical Melody contains a handful of main music themes with only one playing for each respective season. While each overworld season theme is decent on its own, hearing only one song over and over for 30 days (each in-game "day" can take between 20 to 30 minutes to play) gets old real fast. The music doesn't play after nightfall, and is replaced by sounds of insects, owls, and other nightly sounds. The townspeople don't speak with voices, but they all have their own unique laughs and grunts as they react to the main character's actions.
Steady Beat - Like Listerine after that stinky onion that was Another Wonderful Life.
While lacking an array of music, Magical Melody offers a lot of variety with its interesting and quirky townsfolk, gameplay elements, and objectives. The goal-oriented gameplay keeps will keep your interest, while the open-ended side of things really fleshes out the experience, letting you play with as fast or as slow a pace as is comfortable. The game's graphics are clean and add to the simple, fantastical plot of the game; some superfluous effects are pretty, but unfortunately they tend to bog down the game's performance. Much like Kirby 64, Magical Melody includes a few multiplayer minigames that have no bearing on the main game whatsoever. Despite a few flaws, Magical Melody is a lot of fun while the magic lasts.