Dark Side of Harvest Moon

Hello Everyone, Juxapose Forever here. Starting this October, I will be posting a series of theories involving some of our older games of Harvest Moon. These theories I’ve come up over the years playing Harvest Moon since the early days of Super Nintendo has inspired many of my fanfics. Since the era of Harvest Moon SNES, I have noticed some strange and odd details or dialogue involving some characters that feel shocking or a bit creepy. While some of these details can be blamed by glitches or translation errors, many of them are quite deliberate and tells some darker stories that the game does not want to tell freely because children play Harvest Moon games.

As I play the innocent and cute games of the early Harvest Moon games, there has been many details that left me feeling odd for years. Why did this character say this? Why does this character go there? Is there more to this story than simply farming? Where are the parents or other family members? Why does the inclusion of this character feel so off? Why is there more people than beds in a single house? Why doesn’t this event make any sense. . . Unless? As a kid, we can simply play these games without thinking about the minute details. But a lot of these details can feel creepy or disturbing when you look at them again with an adult mind. Even when I was younger, I always felt a bit odd when certain things happen. It wasn’t until a few more games got released that these details start to take shape, and what I learned was shocking.

I will be sharing my theories, and posting brief stories to explain what I feel these things mean. Keep in mind that all of my theories are based on dialogue, events, and small design details in the games. Since these are theories and not facts, none of them are canon to the Harvest Moon Universe in any way. But even if I am wrong, you cannot deny the fact that these details are a bit off and possibly tell some sort of deeper story that the Harvest Moon developers would rather us forget. Welcome to the Dark Side of Harvest Moon.

  Conclusion

Thank you so much for taking this journey through the Harvest Moon series with me. I can only hope that these theories will inspire others to look a bit deeper into the Harvest Moon lore, and find small details that tells a different story than what we grew up with. I truly believe that the writers of the games had a greater story to tell, but many of those ideas were dropped to make room for a happier and kid friendly series. Many of the more modern games favor a more jolly story with no dark undertones, which made the series grow stale and boring. It is sad to watch the series go down this path, but we can still look back to a time when imagination made the Harvest Moon games feel special.

With that, I will have to say goodbye for now. Keep in mind that many of my fanfics are just longer and more detailed theories. Some of these theories will end up as fanfics in the future, you will have to wait and see which ones eventually will. Thank you all for reading, and happy Halloween!