Harvest Moon: Magical Melody (Wii)

I would definitely recommend this game! The controls are simple. You start off as a man and choose a place to live eg. River, Village or Ocean. You can do many things; fishing, farming and looking after the animals. Like most Harvest Moon games, talking to people will open up features later in the game, like falling in love which will lead on to having a child. You can marry your rival but this will the end the game, So I recommend marrying a town resident as this game is really fun! I love this game!

I recently bought this game for myself and have thoroughly enjoyed it. Firstly, you choose a place to live (I chose the ocean). If you run out of land, you can purchase more. This is the same with homes; you can build another home or barn or whatever you may desire.
There are hundreds of activities for instance, planting vegetables, fishing, cooking, mining, looking after animals and plenty more.
The object of the game is to collect music notes to turn The Harvest Goddess back to a human, you have a rival called Jamie who is also trying to do the same thing; hopefully you'll get there first! There are 50 different notes and you do tasks like, staying awake all of the night to get these notes. After collecting five notes the harvest sprites will use them to create a musical instrument, so there are 10 instruments in total.
There are 14 places to visit in the village. The Spring farm, The Blue Sky Ranch, The Blacksmith's, The Workshop, Jamie's Ranch, The Junk Shop, The Mayor's House, The Village Square, The Clinic, The Harvest Goddess Spring, The Sunny Lake, Mt. Moon, Moonlight Cave and last of all The Lake Cave.
There are 4 types of animals to look after-
Cows- Give you milk, cheese and butter to cook and eat or sell.
Chickens- Give you eggs to cook and eat or sell.
Sheep- Wool to sell. TIP- Brushing your sheep will improve the quality of the wool.
Horses- To ride and enter the horse race competition.
You can interact with the locals, which could progress to falling in love and having a child. There are 10 different girls you can marry. Nina, Gina, Ann, Dia, Ellen, Katie, Maria, Gwen, Eve and Lyla.
There are many festivals scattered all over the calendar, for example, Egg Festival. At the egg festival, you are required to place an egg into the donation box the day before, and then on the date of the festival, go to the Village square. If you don't donate an egg the festival will be cancelled, so be warned!
There are also unlock-able mini-games included, which are for up to 4 players. I have not had tried these yet but soon will as they look great.
Overall, I have really enjoyed this game and cannot wait for the next Harvest Moon game to be released.

I have never before in my life played a "Harvest Moon" game and so had no clue what to expect. I was sitting on my laptop one day, a little bored, browsing amazon for things to buy (to make me less bored), when I happened by "Harvest Moon: Magical Melody".

It's a game that, if you don't know what you're doing, like I didn't, is overwhelming, where the game-play rewards always seem to be just a little out of reach. A game that, had you not spent so long on, would just simply start over; knowing that this time you'll beat your rival, Jamie, to the punch.

As addictive as I have found it, there are many repetitive elements that I can see will soon start grating on my nerves.

I think also; that this may be an import from a previous version on an older console, maybe the gamecube or gameboy, there just seems to be something a little off about it's controls, I'm not sure what exactly, but as an experienced gamer, one can sometimes get an intuitive feel for game controls and this just feels a little cack-handed. Add to that that in some game play the "L" and "R" buttons are mentioned when the Wii doesn't have these, in this case I have found that it means the "+" and "-" buttons on the remote.

All in all a fun little farm-sim with RPG elements at a low price that you will either love to hate or hate to love.