I tried playing Harvest Moon on the SNES today and having played Stardew Valley for hours, I thought I’d try and see how tolerable the original Harvest Moon was in comparison. I know and understand it is unfair because there’s a 20 year gap between Harvest Moon and Stardew Valley, while also discrediting Harvest Moon’s later entries since there’s more than one.
Harvest Moon to me is a bit hard to revisit. Having to get used to only carrying two tools at the same time, your farm doesn’t seem as big, you don’t have a way to know that you’re tired as readily, you just have to watch for the signs and the village you visit doesn’t seem as characteristic. It’s a basic farming sim, it has to start somewhere.
But Stardew Valley does so many things that it is easier to revisit.
Yeah it already had inferior controls at the time if you were familiar with FPS gaming on computers. But it was still a ton of fun and when I went back to it some years ago I fell back into the n64 controller muscle memory no problem
The key is to change the layout, then the only problem is really replacing a mouse with the joystick.
Yeah you can use two controllers to mimic the more modern twin stick ones that have become standard, but I don’t think too many people figured that out back then. Still though, controller will never be as good as mouse + keyboard for FPS games.