"Hometown Story is about human relations"

The creator of Harvest Moon Yasuhiro Wada is working on a new game Hometown Story with his new company Toybox that should appeal to fans of Harvest Moon and Animal Crossing. Martin Eiser caught up with him at Gamescom to find out more and he found that Wada doesn't agree with the comparisons that have been drawn between his game and Animal Crossing.

"First I can understand why it reminds you of Animal Crossing. But let me point out that I think the two games are very different. What I think is the best point of Animal Crossing is it's a game where you can have a huge variety of things to do in the game, so that leads also to the fact that players communicate outside the game about the game. So it strengthens communication between players but outside the game. So in this way I think Animal Crossing is really a wonderful game. My game, Hometown Story is different, because in this game we concentrate on the communication within the game and the player learns about the story of other characters in the game. And his heart gets moved by all the emotions expressed by the characters."

The first Harvest Moon title was released in 1996 and Yasuhiro Wada kept working on the series for a very long time before leaving Marvelous Entertainment and via Grasshopper Manufacture eventually setting up his own shop with Toybox.

"Harvest Moon originally had the three concepts of growing crops, of taking care of animals and also human relations. But as you know the game has been continuing for almost 20 years already so it was getting bigger and bigger. It was getting very comlpex and also sometimes a bit complicated maybe and the original concepts were a little bit buried under what came new after the years. So I thought I wanted to do something new. I wanted to start again and I wanted to make a very simple and compact game and concentrate on one concept. And what I thought is most important among the concepts of Harvest Moon is human relations. So I decided to develop a game around the topic of human relations."