For the tenth anniversary of Harvest Moon, Marvelous/Natsume attempted to create alternate universes for their beloved series. They wanted to change the formula up with two games; Rune Factory and Innocent Life. Out of both games, only Rune Factory provided a substantial alternative to the Harvest Moon series. Innocent Life provided some bright futures for the series, but failed to brighten up itself as a good game.

The story begins with a doctor creating an artificial child by the name of Life, or whatever you decide to name your character. Life must live in a ruin and develop human characteristics in order to solve the mysteries of the ruins he lives in and the whole island. It sounds ridiculous, but it sure adds a bit of depth to the whole Harvest Moon formula.

As you do daily chores you help level yourself up. How? By simply performing tasks such as interacting with characters, farming, and cooking, Life will be able to increase stats such as Love. By improving, Life will begin developing himself as a person.

Such leveling up provides future Harvest Moon titles with a fresh start in character development and possibly charming potential wives, because that's not what you get in this game. In fact, the charm of Harvest Moon and marrying does not exist in this game at all. What the heck? It should not matter right? Wrong.

It's not like a majority of Harvest Moon is based on the marriage aspect, but there's also the aspect of finding something TO do. It is simply boring to live on a Farm where you are limited to what you can do. This occurs most frequently during the beginning, where you are faced with almost nothing to do. In fact, to trigger one event in the beginning, you must plant crops, but must wait for them to grow a few days more before continuing the storyline. Not to mention, but in order to get more land, you must find gems to place around your farming land in order to increase capacity.

Life can also be a lazy bum too. He'll eventually get the aid of helper robots that help him around the farm. It often makes you wonder what Life is supposed to be useful for and eventually, all you'd want to do is slack off and sleep daily. For a Harvest Moon game, it's probably the easiest one to forget. However, if Marvelous decides to improve on the stat building of the game, it gives traditional Harvest Moon a kick.

Hopefully, the company will not make the same mistake they did with Innocent Life, but still use the bright sides of the game.