Harvest Moon: The Lost Valley

Release Dates

If Harvest Moon: Light of Hope is your first experience with the franchise, then this is where you should begin to notice the most similarities. Harvest Moon: The Lost Valley paved the way for some of the design choices to be made in the coming years, particularly the use of context-sensitive tools. Rather than managing a tool inventory, the game automatically placed the right tool in the character’s hand at the right time: an Axe to chop a tree, a Hammer to break a rock, a Watering Can to water dry crops…

This was also the first game in the series to embrace the idea of terraforming. For the first time ever, players could shape the land their farm was built upon. They could erect hillsides and carve out valleys, divert rivers and streams, build bridges, and shape the canvas as they saw fit. Working hand-in-hand with this ability to sculpt the land was a crop-mutation system that took elevation and terrain type into account, much like in the most current game.

Harvest Moon: The Lost Valley also experimented with other series firsts. For example, gifts were no longer used to increase friendship, Harvest Sprites could be assigned tasks, and, for the first time in franchise history, Harvest Moon: The Lost Valley received downloadable content designed to extend the story through marriage and beyond.

Fun Facts

• Players could use a Harvest Sprite Whistle to teleport back to their farm from anywhere on the map.
• Many of the characters and each of the six Harvest Sprites that feature so heavily in Harvest Moon: Light of Hope made their first appearance in The LostValley.
• The goal of the game was to restore spring, summer, and fall to a land where winter reigned eternal. This was the first time that crops could be feasibly planted in any season.
• The townsfolk made requests of the player that, in turn, often unlocked new recipes, items, and seeds. This was a key way to access crop-specific Fertilizer needed for mutations.
• Crops had both “great” variants and mutated forms. Players could sell these mutations to Sam in order to unlock the mutated seeds.