Nightmare Fuel / Story of Seasons

• Harvest Moon: Magical Melody:
  • This installment is really sweet which makes Creepy Child Meryl stand out all the more. Whatever is wrong with the girl is never stated but she's obviously terrified. She has lines like "Everyone's a liar. They say that growing up isn't scary.", "I planted...some flowers. While...planting, I forgot about many things.", "I don't want to die. It's scary. Why... do people die?", and "I think...about nothing but scary things when I sleep...I have nothing but bad dreams. But I don't have bad dreams when I sleep with Uncle Ronald." Some presume her parents died however how they did is another issue if she's so deeply traumatized, and the fact we never learn about her Dark and Troubled Past is all the more frightening. Eve and Dan's rival cutscene has Meryl expressing the belief that she won't go to Heaven, and that she'll become a "monster" after she dies, because she isn't well-behaved or loved. Again, we never learn anything about this.
  • The nightmare you receive when your first animal gets sick is intimidating. It has Hank angrily telling you your animal is dying.
• When your animals die in Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life they just... Fall over. It's creepy, dark, and a Tear Jerker mixed into one. It doesn't help that the Harvest Sprites just say that that's what happens when you don't keep a close eye on them.
• Harvest Moon DS has a few eerie moments:
  • If you donate a Level 100 poison mushroom to the Harvest Festival, you collapse and the game ends. Either your farmer essentially just took their own life, or they did so whilst taking the entire town down with them (you don't actually see the other townspeople start to eat, though, so there's a chance they saw you get sick and decided not to eat themselves).
  • Animal deaths are unsettling in this game. The usual peppy music stops and you'll be greeted by Takakura coming to see you in your abruptly silent house in the early hours of the morning. He then lectures and/or consoles you (depending on how your animal died) over some tragic music before leaving you. If your animal died of 'accident', it's extra dismal: every animal in the collapsed building in question will die, and when you leave your farmhouse in the morning you'll have to clear up the material wreckage.
  • Another infamous Non-Standard Game Over is the one that occurs in this game if you don't stop your dog from attacking Thomas. He screams, the screen fades to red and the credits roll. You just let your dog kill him.
  • If you pass out in this game, depending on where you are at the time, your rescuer might steal up to half of all of your money. Not only is this frustrating from a gameplay standpoint, it also bears disturbing story implications for your farmer character, who has been taken advantage of whilst unconscious by a fellow townsperson they may well have even been friends with, and said townsperson will face no repercussions for robbing you.
• Ann from Harvest Moon 64 is a very sweet and cheerful girl, which makes her abuse towards Cliff when they get married very jarring. She does not display any traits associated with this problem anywhere else in the game. Though, a seemingly nice person displaying abusive traits to their spouse behind closed doors is very much Truth in Television.
• The GBA installments feature a very unsettling Easter Egg. If you interact with your TV at exactly 4:44 PM, creepy stuff happens. If you're playing Friends of Mineral Town, you will be trapped in a loop as a dialogue box opens and closes infinitely, forcing you to reset. If you're playing More Friends of Mineral Town, the TV will spam the words "4 時 4 4 分" (4 hours and 44 minutes) for a long while. It's unexplained and quite startling, to the point where it has been mistaken for a glitch.