Harvest Moon Tree of Tranquility Review

After a lengthy run on portable systems, traditional Harvest Moon gameplay finally returns to home consoles. One would think that Marvelous would take this opportunity to bring in some new mechanics and shake things up. Unfortunately, the formula hasn't changed much. Stop me if this sounds familiar: arrive as the new person in town, plant some crops, raise livestock, mack on some ladies (or dudes), help out with some new-age plot to replant the Mother Tree and bring back the Harvest Goddess, blah, blah, blah.

After a mind numbingly long intro in which you're forced to walk around town and meet every person, you eventually buy some land and seeds and get to work. For some reason, the camera is locked in extremely close to the action. Combined with a surprisingly unhelpful map, this makes for a disorienting start. After running back and forth along the same routes day after day, however, you will eventually memorize the layout of the entire island.

Controls are flexible, allowing for both remote and nunchuk and classic controller use. While you can swing your arms to till earth or water crops, simply pressing ''A'' is still the way to go. Since the motion control can't be switched off, however, it's easy to accidentally cut down your tomato plant while scratching your nose.

An Animal Crossing-style online mode where you visit and help out on a friend's farm would have been great, especially since you can't hire any employees to give you a hand. Instead, multiplayer is limited to a handful of awful minigames, even by Wii ­standards.

Despite these hang-ups, I still found myself playing late into the night to earn enough cash to buy that coop upgrade or put in another few days until my cow is fully grown. Even though it takes a crazy long time to get there, the ability to start a new game as your kid is a nice touch. Bottom line: if you expect nothing out of Tree of Tranquility except the same old same old, then this will do the trick.