YMMV / Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life

• Accidental Innuendo:
  • Muffy's line "I always get romantic ideas on hot summer nights." is likely supposed to be chaste.
  • One of Rock's infamous summer lines is, in the Japanese version of AWL, a slightly crude remark roughly going "in this summer heat, finding some girls in swimsuits on the beach and trying to pick 'em up sounds— uh, that is, going surfing sounds tempting." Natsume took this line (which was already apparently bad enough to warrant toning down in the Japanese remake) and injected some additional implications in the English version through Dub Text.
    Rock: When it's this hot lots of girls like to go to the beach in their very sexy swimsuits? Suddenly I feel like surfing.
• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • Many fans view Muffy as promiscuous, while others^note usually the ones that married her refer to her simply being unlucky in love and thus dating multiple men in a relatively short period. As fans got older, many of them ended up switching their opinion of her and see her in a more sympathetic light, even if they didn't marry her.
  • Players who pursued Celia as Mark think differently of Marlin than those who pursued him as Pony.
• Awesome Music: Most of the soundtrack, as is standard for the series. The game lacks seasonal tracks, or really music at all besides on your farm and during scenes, but makes up for it with records (especially Quiet Winter).
• Base-Breaking Character:
  • Is Rock a lazy moron or does he have Hidden Depths? Him being Lumina's love interest, and the way he treats her in their Heart Events, only adds the debate.
  • The designs of Forget-Me-Not Valley bachelors in general are very polarizing. Some find them to be ugly compared to the ones in other games—it doesn't help the English manual for ANWL says that if you don't like them to "lower your standards"—while others appreciate there's more diversity and not just a bunch of pretty boys like the other games.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: A really really weird moment. One night Van might visit Romana's house and an event comes up where he tries to purchase a painting on her wall; she refuses and it is revealed that Lumina painted it. Lumina then asks her butler Sebastian in privacy to do her a favor. Suddenly it cuts to Sebastian out in the forest charging up and attacking the local yeti Mukumuku, apparently trying to steal the little lock of hair it has on its head to be made into a paintbrush. The situation is never delved further and you are left alone in the forest afterwards. Maybe it was a bad trip from eating the mushrooms by the tree.
• Character Perception Evolution: Over time, Muffy became this to the fans. While she was demonized for her sultry mannerisms and starting with the most hearts even though she just met you, it took some time for the fans to realize that she is a nice girl. It didn’t help that Natsume’s descriptions of her in the English manuals were consistently unflattering compared to the other girls, calling her a “flashy flirt,” a “pretty face without a clue about farms” and assuring you that you don’t have to waste money on her since she isn’t picky. The audience growing up helped as well, due to needing a more mature mindset to understand her.
• Common Knowledge:
  • It's often assumed for Special Edition that you can only get a daughter if you married Lumina. In actuality, you can have a son or daughter with any wife. Even the Wiki made that mistake before giving separate entries for Lumina's son and your daughter. The mistake is due to how similar Lumina's son looks to the daughter as a toddler. You also don't need to do the Harvest Sprites' trick to get a daughter. You can get a daughter randomly, though it's more likely you will get a son.
  • In regards to Lumina's age, she's not eleven or twelve years old as many fans would think. She's was initially fourteen, then retconned to being sixteen (eighteen outside of Japan) in Another Wonderful Life and Special Edition after being Promoted to Love Interest. Harvest Moon DS corrected this by using Lumina's adult design from the start.
  • Several players assumed that Marlin and Celia (or Vesta and Celia) were uncle and niece in due to Celia calling Vesta "Aunt". While Vesta is referred to as Celia's "relative"^note 親戚 (shinseki) in the official Japanese guidebooks for A Wonderful Life and Another Wonderful Life and called her "relative" and "distant relative" (in the Japanese and English versions respectively) of the biographies you get from connecting AWL and Fo MT, exactly how blood-related they are is ambiguous— the Japanese word just means "relatives" generally, so they could simply be in-laws or something to that effect. "Aunt" is often used to be a catch-all title for an older female relative, so it doesn't specify the exact relationship. (This can be confusing with the players guide for DS Cute, which has them related in the past—but is also set 100 years in the future.)
  • Lumina is not wearing a sailor top over her jeans as a child. She's got a shawl around her shoulders. (This is much clearer in the remake, where it's clearly two separate pieces and the shawl is closed with a brooch.)
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Flora. Some players were disappointed that you were not able to marry her, even in Special Edition.
  • Your child, moreover the mechanics surrounding them. Unlike previous and some later titles, your child can grow up past a toddler and finish as an adult. Not to mention that they can have their own personality depending on who you married and how you raised them.
• Funny Moments: Sometimes your child in A Wonderful Life may say something humourous. The funnniest one of them all has to be this little gem.
  Your Child: "Dad, have you ever took a bath with Mom?"
• Game-Breaker:
  • The high price of tree seeds is supposed to be justified by the fact that they continually regrow fruit. Eventually you get the ability to turn crops into seeds, which becomes the easiest way to get money in the game by selling hybrid tree seeds instead of the fruit.
  • The selling value of tree seeds was nerfed in ANWL and Special Edition for the most part, but the cooking skill is quite exploitable. In Chapter 1 increasing your skill until you can make Sashimi lets you make any fish at least somewhat valuable, and by Chapter 2 you can hybridize Strawberries and Turnips into Dhibe, cook with milk and an egg to make Dhibe Cakes— being able to sell these to Van means you’ll never run out of money again.
• Good Bad Bugs: If you befriend Ruby (one of the innkeepers and Rock's mother), she will give her her special spice. It turns out that if you try to cook something with only Ruby's Spice, it allows you to duplicate the spice. And since you can sell it to Van for 100G a pop, it's a good way to get some quick money.
• Guide Dang It!: The PS2 version had a secret to allow you to have a female child, however to do so you had to speak to the jar inside the sprite's home one-hundred times. Given all of the text boxes after the first five-or-so conversations are the same, it would be reasonable to assume most people wouldn't know this feature existed unless they read about it first.
• It Was His Sled: Your player dying at the end of the game.
• Les Yay:
  • In Another Wonderful Life, the player's friendship with Muffy can have some of this. In one cutscene she gets really happy when you visit the bar and she knows your favorite drinks. Griffin mentions that she may not make the best wife, but she's a fun person to be around when drinking.
  • One of your child's lines about Muffy's "secrets", in the original Japanese, says that Muffy is always trying to be more polished and feminine. Natsume translated the original figure of speech a bit too literally, resulting in this exceptional remark:
    Your Child: Muffy is always polishing girls. I wonder what that means?
  • Another "secret" your child can repeat is that Nami "gets nervous when she's talking with other women."
  • Rock's heartbroken reaction to being shown the Blue Feather by Mark in the original boy version can certainly make one wonder if his vested interest in bothering women may be covering for something.
    Rock: It's for me? ...(distraught expression) It's not? What do you mean that's for someone else? Geez...
• LGBT Fanbase:
  • Muffy's close friendship with the female protagonist has led to her having a fanbase who think she should date Pony instead. (Which is finally possible in the remake, Story of Seasons: A Wonderful Life.)
  • Nami—with her Tomboy appearance complete with short hair and lack of skirts where the other bachelorettes wear them—has been interpreted as nonbinary, genderqueer, or genderfluid. Some players may choose to marry her just to imply the relationship is same sex—and like Muffy, she can now be courted by girls too in the remake.
• Nightmare Fuel: That stupid freaking Teddy Bear. In Chapter 3 of the game when your son has grown into a child, you can buy him a toy bear from Van's shop. And of course, it seems innocent enough at first. But after you buy it and the cutscene where Van delivers it and explains what it's for is almost finished, your character will watch Van leave which is when the bear freaking stands up, looks around at his new surroundings and quickly sits back down when your character turns back around! And whenever you enter your son's room and look closely at it, you can see it breathing and blinking! And sometimes, you can trigger a cutscene when you enter your teenage son's room and the bear is walking around while your son is lying nearby. And then he gets up, tells you not to come into his room without you asking first and actually kicks you out! And what's worse is that this bear never actually does anything! But then again, this is an E-rated game...
• Player Punch:
  • Nina's death, but at least unlike Harvest Moon 64 it was an offscreen death.
  • Even more so, the Player Character dying. The characters reminiscing afterwards really sells it.
• Porting Disaster: The PS2 version is considerably more laggy, slower, and more dull than the GameCube version; probably due to the GameCube being more powerful. Not helped by the fact that this was supposedly an Updated Re-release of the boy's version. Fortunately this can be remedied for those in the emulator scene. With the right settings, the game can run very smoothly. The re-release for the Playstation 4 had also taken the liberty of improving the framerate, although the loading screens remain with the occasional hiccup. Several other small details were altered as well, including characters no longer walking properly but instead just moving their feet and gliding across the ground, sections of the map being removed, and the biggest field on the farm being outright disabled and covered in trees.
• Ron the Death Eater: Muffy's far from promiscuous, but fans were once fond of berating her due to her flirty nature, girly style, and backstory of multiple boyfriends. It extended to shaming her for how she dresses, but this is no longer as common as fans have grown up.
• The Scrappy:
  • Rock. At least among some people, for being a lazy individual and his playboy personality rubbing off the wrong way. The choice between him, Gustafa, and Marlin is not too hard in the girls' version.
  • The goat. The novelty of owning one goes away quickly. She only gives milk for a year and, unlike cows, she can't be bred to make milk again—and can't be sold either. She just ends up taking space, so many players intentionally kill off their goat. Later versions allows you to sell her once she runs dry.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • In an attempt at being realistic, the game changed how cows work. They don't give milk constantly anymore. Instead, they stop giving a milk after a few seasons and need to be bred in order to give more milk. This is a long process of waiting for the calf to be born and then waiting for the calf to grow out of the hutch. Young cows also can't be bred right away, which means more waiting. There are only so many animals that can fit in your barn, so in order to have a new calf, you might need to sell another animal.
  • As reiterated several times on these pages, the goat that stops giving milk after a year while not being able to be sell it in the original version, thus forcing you to intentionally kill it to not have a useless animal permanently taking up one of your barn's spots—or avoid buying it altogether if you can't stomach intentionally killing a virtual animal.
  • The lack of a Playable Epilogue in the original version, thus putting a hard time limit on how long you can play each file before you're forced to start anew from scratch. Other Harvest Moon games both before and after let you play your files indefinitely beyond their endings (if they have an ending at all). Thankfully Another Wonderful Life and the updated PS2 Special Edition add one in its "Heaven" chapter in case you do you want to keep playing the same file.
  • Tartan. The way you must talk to him many times to get the hybrid option (not to unlock it, every day you want to do it) pales in comparison to only being able to make one hybrid at a time, the unskippable animation for it being tortuously long and oh yeah, it isn't even guaranteed to work.
  • The seasons being only ten days long means very short growing seasons—most of the time, only one cycle of a crop's growth can be done per season, and some crops need to be in the ground day one or they won't be done by the end of the season. This also means there's no character birthdays for anyone; no one gets a birthday at all, not even the player.
• Strangled by the Red String:
  • If you've not established a relationship with any of the potential spouses, whoever has the highest affection (Celia and Rock if they're all equal) will approach you for a chance to marry them. If you don't offer the feather there, the game will end.
  • This is averted with Nami and only her. If she's the highest, one of the two possible scenes has her marry you because she wants to stay in Forget Me Not Valley, but is out of money to stay at Tim and Ruby’s inn. Marrying you lets her do that and avoids implications of an unmarried woman staying at an unmarried man’s home.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: This game was a departure in some ways, such as having characters age over time, forcing marriage, shortening the seasons, and changing the way crops and animals are raised—and the character doesn't get to pick a birthday or celebrate it either.
• Values Dissonance:
  • In Another and Special Edition, Lumina is sixteen years old according to the official Japanese guidebook, but can be courted by Rock, who is twenty-five or even married by Mark, who is also twenty-five. The English manuals upped her age to eighteen, the age of majority in many places. Rock’s age is listed as 22 in every English manual, while Mark isn’t given a different age in English.
  • Similarly, Celia is only nineteen according to the official Japanese guidebook, which also specifies that she’s related to Marlin and Vesta and has been living with them for two years, explaining why her parents tried to prevent her from leaving home and why Marlin says he’s noticed she’s become more mature and feminine since coming to live with them. Marlin isn’t given an age in the guidebook (only kids and NPC in their 20s are) but dialogue in Chapter 2 remarking he’s old enough to be company president if he stayed at his company implies he’s well over 30 in Chapter 1. The English manuals up Celia’s age to twenty-six, while listing Marlin as 32, and the bios you get from connecting to the GBA game soften their blood ties to “distant relatives”. The blood relation was finally changed to “family friends” for the Switch remake.
  • Flora is listed as 26 in the official Japanese guidebook, but as 34 in the English manuals. While she isn’t in a relationship with her middle-aged professor Carter, the nature of their living arrangements and the power dynamic make their age difference a bit more taboo in the West.
  • A scene in Another Wonderful Life has you in an argument with your teenage son. One option is to comfort him, the other is to swat him so hard he falls to the ground and sees stars. Either an unintentionally funny scene or hits too close to home.
  • In some instances, you can take a bath with your child, once as a toddler, then again as adult. While this is a breach of personal privacy in the West and might be seen as gross, it's not taboo for families to bathe together in Japan.
  • The English manual that comes with Another Wonderful Life says that—since the character Pony has to get married—that if they don't like any of the bachelors they should either lower their standards or ignore their husband after being wed. Not exactly the recipe for a happy marriage.
• The Woobie:
  • All of the girls you can potentially marry can become this. If you don't marry Nami, then she runs out of money and has to move back in with her deadbeat dad far away (even though she comes back). If you don't marry Celia, then she ends up a jaded bitter man-hater who is always riding on Marlin's ass. If you don't marry Muffy, then she will become incredibly depressed over growing old and alone, and can sometimes be found on the beach crying over how happy your family looks.
  • Several other characters, to varying degrees. Lumina feels overburdened by her grandmother, lost her parents at an early age, and cries when you get married due to having a Precocious Crush on you. Hugh is often seen crying early in the morning when he's a kid, possibly due to his father's pressures. Grant has two Jerkass girls to take care of, and apparently has a horrid life as a Salary Man. Murray is a homeless man who has nothing, not even a home. Galen becomes this after Nina passes away before the second chapter.
• Woolseyism: Fans prefer the Dub Name Changes over the original names.

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