Harvest Moon Friends of Mineral Town Remake Details, Release Date

An exciting surprise is coming for classic Harvest Moon fans. Publisher Marvelous has announced Story of Seasons: Reunion with Mineral Town, a Nintendo Switch remake of the classic Harvest Moon GBA game. They even have a release date.

Well, when I say "they," I mean the Japanese. The full remake is releasing on Nintendo's portable home console in Japan on October 17, 2019, according to an article detailing the announcement in Famitsu.

Harvest Moon: Friends of Mineral Town, developed for the Game Boy Advance in 2003, is one of the most popular Harvest Moon games of all time. The game offered much of the same level of content as the original SNES game, while still being on a handheld console.

Story of Seasons: Reunion with Mineral Town is a full remake of this game, with new graphics, sounds, story, and quality. It will be more closely related to More Friends of Mineral Town, a spin-off title that offered more features and a female character option to the standard game. The remake article also teases new characters, hidden by a silhouette.



As some may know. Marvelous no longer holds the international rights to the name "Harvest Moon," they haven't since 2012. While the franchise is and was always called "Bokujou Monogatari" in Japan, Marvelous had to call the games "Story of Seasons" internationally. So while this is still being made by the same developers as the original Friends of Mineral Town, it won't have the same name.

The only concern for this is that the article was lacking an international release date. While bringing the game to the West seems like an obvious idea, it is not confirmed at this time.

The art style looks a bit childish for my taste, to be honest. But it's still better than Natsume's more recent takes on Harvest Moon, I suppose. As long as the gameplay is satisfying, I'll be more than happy to buy the game when it releases.