YMMV / Harvest Moon DS

• Base-Breaking Character:
  • Skye is either the Ensemble Dark Horse fan-favorite or seen as a Franchise Original Sin who foreshadowed the increasingly Bishōnen males.
  • Some of the characters newer, flanderized personalities do this to fans.
• Contested Sequel: The game is this with the Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life and Harvest Moon: Back to Nature games. It's the point in the series where many fans began crying Sequelitis, or They Changed It, Now It Sucks!. It's generally seen as a good game with nice graphics, but it's too similar to the GBA games for some fans. Many fans also dislike the changed and watered-down personalities of the characters. However, it's also a very popular game with many features, so it has a large number of fans.
• Common Knowledge: It's assumed the characters are the same as those from the prior games (Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life and Harvest Moon: Back to Nature), since they look identical in most ways. The game is actually set 100 years in the future, and all the characters presented are the descendants of the previous characters. This is clear in the Japanese games where everyone has different names (e.g. Marlin's descendant is named Ash) but Natsume chose to use the exact same names for everyone in the English release, creating confusion on this point.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Skye was created primarily so that there'd be a "special" marriage candidate for the girl versions, and he's extremely hard to find and talk to. Oh, he's also a bad boy bishie. Is it any surprise, then, that he's become one of the most popular boys in the series?
  • Witch Princess was first introduced here and became a series staple and a common foil to the Harvest Goddess.
  • DS Cute has an Easter Egg Non-Standard Game Over where, if you repeatedly call the Tailor's Shop located in Mineral Town, the shopkeeper, Mason, will become enamored with you and, if you're unmarried, ask to marry you. As this Easter Egg has become more well-known on the Internet, Mason has developed a remarkably large fanbase for a character with no portrait or even personality. with fans creating portraits and liked/disliked lists for him to flesh him out to match the other bachelors.
• Funny Moments: In Harvest Moon DS Cute, if you propose to Rock, Ruby is a bit taken aback by the news that you've decided to marry her lazy son.
• Game-Breaker: The mines. With enough Save Scumming, you can collect dozens of items in the excavation site which all sell for upwards of 3000G apiece at Van's. With this money you can then buy plenty of restorative items, which you can then use to go through the entire second mine by the second day. With even more Save Scumming you can collect dozens of Alexandrites and Rose Diamonds which all sell for over 15k G. You can have millions when Van returns during the second week.
• Game-Breaking Bug:
  • The game likes to randomly corrupt your save file for seemingly no reason. There's almost no way to avoid it either (though it seems to happen more often in winter).
  • Early versions of the US release had a bug where a requirement to marry the Harvest Goddess and Witch Princess wasn't tracked, meaning you could never marry them. It was fixed in later releases, and both the Japanese and PAL versions lacked this bug, but it makes marrying either of them in the NTSC version a crapshot. This is especially frustrating if you were to try to marry the Witch Princess, due to the massive, massive, massive grind for all her requirements.
  • If you marry Leia the mermaid, she lives in your pond, which makes sense. Unfortunately, the pond is a building that can be destroyed by hurricanes, which also permanently removes her from the game even if you build a new one. At that point, your options are to either reload your last save or continue without your wife without the game ever acknowledging this. Fortunately, this is fairly rare.
• Goddamn Bats: The Demon Chickens and Ducks in the mines. Fast, aggressive, and will chase you across the screen. The bugs are pretty annoying too, but at least they move in set paths that you can at least attempt to avoid...
• Good Bad Bugs: Out of the games in the series, DS is the most infamous for its glitches. However, some of these glitches can help you out. However these glitches were patched in DS Cute:
  • The infamous Billion-Gold Fish glitch, which can make you a billionare overnight. However, the glitch is risky to use. It can randomly make it so your file won't load, meaning you have to start the game over.
  • Lord Fa's cheat for unlimited wool.
  • Saving, turning off your DS and reloading the game clears out the entire mine floor of monsters (except, strangly, the moths).
• Hilarious in Hindsight: You can get a sword and fight monsters. A year or so later...
• Ho Yay: In Cute the Mineral Town girls will come over for play dates. Because they're adults, this lends itself to Accidental Innuendo and Les Yay more than what was intended.
• LGBT Fanbase: The "Special Girls" because they're in essence the first bisexual characters in the franchise thanks to the "Best Friend" system.
• The Scrappy:
  • Rock, while a Scrappy in A Wonderful Life is even more compounded here (even though he's not even the same character, just a descendant). He can ask you out even if you already have a husband. If Rock is married to Lumina, there's a scene in both versions where he hits on Muffy, which really upsets Lumina when she walks in on it. In fact, some fans have been known to marry Lumina themselves and claim to have done so purely to save her from an unhappy relationship with Rock.
  • The little girl Kate. She blames her father Grant for her mom leaving and is a total Jerkass. In the random event "Kate's Life Advice" she asks Lumina how to be as pretty as her. The reason why Kate didn't go to anyone else? Muffy wears too much makeup, Nami's unfriendly (a bit of a justified opinion there...), Flora wears glasses, Celia smells like fertilizer... and you? "You're a hick, you reek of fertilizer, and your clothes suck!" Yeah. She says that behind everyone's back. Lumina then notices your character behind her and Kate asks Lumina what should she do. She then apologizes. Yeah. Only after she notices that she has been caught and has been told to apologize.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • The animal minigames when you try to gather milk, wool or just raise their affection. Though gathering wool does have a benefit as mentioned in Good Bad Bugs.
  • The damn ball. Selling it has Thomas scold you and give you a new one. If you leave it out Thomas again will come by and tell you that you lost the ball. You'll have to keep it in your backpack, which is space-consuming, so he will stop bothering you about it. Fortunately, after you've bought the cabinet, you can put it there permanently so you won't have to carry it and Thomas won't bother you about it.
  • Finding the sprites. You're not allowed to get married until you rescue the Harvest Goddess. Many of the sprites are either difficult to find or incredibly tedious to find.
• That One Sidequest: The fourth mine. It has 65,535 floors, but you can only get to the mine with certain requirements. One of those requirements include clearing the third mine, which had 999 floors. It had to be unlocked by clearing the mine before it, which had 255 floors.
• The Woobie:
  • Galen, after Nina dies.
  • Grant, whose obviously struggling to raise his daughter alone after his wife left them and Kate isn't grateful for it at all, berating him constantly and blaming him for every little thing that goes wrong. Admittedly, she is somewhat of a Jerkass Woobie herself, but the fandom still tends to dislike her for her treatment of her father nonetheless.

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