If you've been playing video games for quite some time now, you probably encountered a phase in your gaming career when assuming the role of a bad-ass hero, a professional athlete, or a martial arts champion seemed to be getting old. Sometimes, being normal is best, even in gaming.

Enter the Harvest Moon franchise: a game series dating back from the SNES days that lets you experience the peaceful lifestyle in rural areas. It isn't quite real life, but it certainly makes living in a farm look like fun. Never has milking cows, planting crops, and talking to vegetables in the middle of a field been so cool!

The franchise is continuing that proud tradition into the next generation of gaming with Harvest Moon: Tree of Peace. It contains a lot of the same elements that made the series, but drastic improvements in the visuals and innovations in terms of controls seem to breathe life into a line of games that has been around for more than a decade. We've got a gameplay video of the upcoming game's Troublesome Town and it's looking fun at this point.

Check out the main character as he interacts with the various townsfolk in the game - in the shop, in the lighthouse, and in the docks...

 

IGN has another batch of screenshots hot and fresh from Natsume's and Marvelous Interactive's oven. These new pictures now give us some idea on how the multiplayer feature works on Harvest Moon: Tree of Peace. We can see that there are many characters to choose from, but we can't tell for now if customized characters can be used for the multiplayer mode - we'll find out soon enough. The minigame shown in the two screenshots above looks like a contest of who catches the mole - or whatever it is that burrows under the soil.

We're excited knowing that this Harvest Moon Wii installment is to be shown in E3; you can count on us to give you a lowdown on whatever Harvest Moon: Tree of Peace information we can get in that much-awaited event. Until then, stay tuned.

  

More screenshots after the jump!

A couple of days ago, we shared with you a partial list of developers, publishers, and video game titles that will be making an appearance at this year's Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3). In relation to that, development studio Natsume has just confirmed its presence at the said show and promised to bring loads and loads of Harvest Moon titles among others.

Currently, there are three known video games from the franchise: Tree of Peace for Wii, Innocent Life for PSP, and DS' Rune Factory. The whole franchise is all about farming simulation coupled with RPG elements. If you're very much into these kind of games then you will be delighted with the company's E3 showing:

• Harvest Moon 2 (DS)
  
• Harvest Moon DS Cute (DS)
• Harvest Moon Wii (Wii)
• Harvest Moon: Boy and Girl (PSP)
• Innocent Life: A Futuristic Harvest Moon Special Edition (PS2)
• Math Play (DS)
• Metropolismania 2 (PS2)
• Puzzle de Harvest Moon (DS)
• River King: Wonderland (DS)
• Rune Factory: A Fantasy Harvest Moon (DS)

It's good to see that aside from Harvest Moon, Natsume is also offering other titles. If we are not mistaken, River King is actually a fishing simulation which also features RPG elements.

  

Anyone who's played any of the previous iterations of Harvest Moon knows how addicting it can be. Marvelous Interactive and Natsume's Harvest Moon: Tree of Peace is looking prettier than its previous iterations, but the question remains: Will its gameplay be as good as the PlayStation One version of the game?

This game looks to follow the mold of its forefathers as a farming simulator as there are multiple paths one can take from raising livestock to growing crops. Fans of previous iterations will also be glad to know that cooking will still be in the game (I'm hoping for a Cooking Mama like mini-game while preparing recipes). Other things of note include the family aspect of the game where you can woo any of the lovely young ladies in town, marry, and eventually raise a family.

No release date is slated for the Wii-exclusive as of yet, so be sure to keep checking back here for more updates on Harvest Moon: Tree of Peace.

  

More screens await after the jump!

Today, we have a Harvest Moon: Tree of Peace video for you guys. This one is the Japanese trailer for o upcoming farming sim for the Nintendo Wii.

The vid shows game footage of typical farm life familiar to fans of the series: clearing away weeds, planting stuff and the like. It also shows some of the characters and animals in the game as well as some of the various mini games. Harvest Moon: Tree of Peace's dating aspect also gets a bit of focus, and the vid also shows that kids can now help out in the farm.

Anyway, check out the vid below for yourself. Harvest Moon: Tree of Peace is currently slated for a Japanese release this month. A North American version will also reportedly be released later this year.

 

Build relationships, farm the land, and tend to the livestock when the Koropokkuru come to you for help in reviving the great tree and the goddess of the island. This is essentially what you'll do when you play Marvelous Interactive and Natsume's Harvest Moon video game made exclusively for the Wii. But of course there will also be side quests for the players in the game.

"Nintendo Dream" recently featured Harvest Moon Wii, and we've got a lot of those scans from the game for you to look at. The scans show off the different characters, the environments, and how the characters will be mingling with each other as they progress in the game. Let's move on to those pretty pictures so you'll finally get a better idea of how the game's turning out.

   

More scans at the Full Article!

It's been a while since we last heard from the highly-anticipated rural life simulator, Harvest Moon for the Nintendo Wii. Not to worry, though - if anything, the franchise is still going strong, with quite a basketful of screenshots and character art to appease fans itching to take up the rake and watering can again. There's even a bunch of snapshots of the Harvest Moon commercial, with a cute farmer girl posing with the game's iconic farm animals. Isn't she just adorable?

The character art's looking warm and friendly as usual, as expected of Natsume. We're not quite sure how the Panda fits into things, though, but we'll just have to wait for the game's release to see just what a Panda's doing in a rural town. In any case, enjoy the eye candy!

More pretty pictures after the jump!

Gpara has a little preview of Harvest Moon: Tree of Peace (or Tree of Serenity, which is the literal translation from the Japanese of the subtitle, whatever they stick with, but it certainly isn't Heroes) that demonstrates how the Wiimote is green and a farmer's best friend. Now if only web translations weren't as hard as actually raising a profitable family farm without subsidies in the West in this day and age...

But the idea remains the same here as it does across a lot of similar Wii games. If you've sliced and sutured in Trauma Center, sautéd and shishkabobbed in Cooking Mama: Cookoff, then you should readily figure your way around a hoe in Tree of Peace. A lot of the descriptions in Gpara's preview revolve around shaking the Wiimote, though.

The preview also covers those minigames like fishing, for example, and also reveals that the fruit of your loins in the game will also have in-game roles. Children born to your character will also be able to help out in the field. Though when Google Translates it as "makes field work your own child help who grew also the system are added" the creepy subject-verb-object arrangement kind of evokes "Children of the Corn."

Fields work your own child? This farm is cursed, we tell you, cursed!!!

Whoever would have thought a game about farming - the entire process of it, from clearing out trash and debris from a plot of land you'll be planting most of your crops on to actually wringing your cows' udders dry of fresh milk - could actually have its own harvest (pun not exactly intended) of fans, much less be named as one of the most endearing and memorable titles to date?

It's not exactly the MOST exciting thing to do, compared to games that strap you into the driver's seat of a hot rod or give you points for indiscriminate destruction involving sharp pointy things and gadgets that go BOOM. But for some reason, many players fell in love with Harvest Moon the moment our cap-and-overalls hero took up hoe, rake, and watering can to get down to business. Yes, there was farming to be done on that inherited plot of land, and by god we farmed the heck out of it.

So what was so special about Harvest Moon? What gave it that extra "oomph" to be considered as a gaming classic? The man behind the phenomenon answered that himself, in a grilling session with Eurogamer a few days before the European release of Harvest Moon: Innocent Life for the PlayStation Portable (PSP).

When asked about what gives Harvest Moon its 10-year lasting appeal, Yasuhiro Wada responded that the game's core system "hasn't changed; it's something that it easily understood by the audience." He also cited paying close attention to the fans: "I have been listening to the voices of the audience, to what the audience wants, responding to their requests. That's key to the philosophy of Harvest Moon."

Eurogamer asked about the game's origins, and Yasuhiro Wada was more than willing to reveal it. "I wanted to convey the goodness of rural life - not urban life, but rural life." He adds, "Farming was the easiest instrument to realize that feeling in a game. That's why I chose to make a farming game."

Finally, for the question of what people love about Harvest Moon, Wada had this to say:

I think it's very gentle and friendly. These days there are other games such other games such as Animal Crossing that bear similarities, but before there wasn't such a game at all. Perhaps that's why people identified so much with Harvest Moon, originally.

Harvest Moon DS is already out while both the PSP game Harvest Moon: Innocent Life and the Nintendo Wii version of Harvest Moon are still to be released.

Marvelous Interactive's Harvest Moon for the Wii (Harvest Moon Heroes, Harvest Moon: Tree of Peace, Ranch Story: Tree of Serenity, whatever it's called now, especially after the E3 2006 confusion) has it all: cows, sheep, goats, unrequited love, disappearing gods, fish ponds, rakes, vegetable carts, hoes (yes, hoes) and more. It's got everything you can think of - including the kitchen sink. Literally.

Yep, if you check out today's batch of screenshots, you'd notice how Harvest Moon will have you pulling a Cooking Mama, farm-sim-style. Not so much a "cooking mama," but more of "cooking farmer" instead. Click the pics below to enlarge the thumbs.