After the first Harvest Moon for Game Boy was more or less a heavily pared down version of the SNES original, I wasn't expecting much from this follow-up, especially considering it too lacks the series' iconic marriage feature. But y'know, credit where it's due, Harvest Moon 2 actually has some cool ideas. For one, you can buy a bug net and a fishing rod to catch dozens of seasonal insects and fish. There isn't really a purpose to doing so, you can't sell them and there's no reward for catching them all, but I think if you're playing a farm sim to begin with you're okay with partaking in virtual hobbies for their own sake. I suppose one reward is, well the developers went hog wild with the Game Boy Printer compatibility so not only can you print anything from your album of commemorative Event Photos, but also images of any bugs or fish you've caught or herbs you've grown in the greenhouse. And while marriage might not be on the table, Harvest Moon 2 still has friendship mechanics. Most of the upgraded tools are acquired by befriending their owners, and even your bare hands get an upgrade of sorts. Once you are good enough friends with Mary, the librarian, she will give you a treasure map. The map is unfortunately a sliding 16 tile puzzle, my bane of banes when it comes to stock video game puzzles, and to add insult to injury when you do solve it you are given a riddle rather than a, well, map. Solve the riddle, and you get... a taunt!! "Did you think it would be that easy?" Gah! What you need to do then is find another player with their own copy of HM2 who has also solved the treasure map, and trade with them. This will allow you to overlay your maps and find the true location of the treasure. Once you do this final step, the Miracle Glove is yours! And what a miracle it is. Any item of value you pick up with the Miracle Glove is magically teleported straight to the shipping bin when you throw it, drastically cutting down on the time needed to harvest a vast field of crops. I was honestly shocked the developers would give you such a busted item but it is a worthy reward for all the hoops you have to jump through.
I do think, given the number of things to do in a day, a season, and a year, that three years is too long a play period for the ending evaluation. After Year One I actually ended up selling all of my chickens and only taking care of one cow for Year Two while I focused on crops to increase my savings, then spent most of Year Three raising three more cows until the final winter. Since the Good Ending (supposedly) requires having at least three each of cows, chickens, and sheep, my plan was to wait until the last season to buy more of the latter two, because to be perfectly honest taking care of chickens is tedious in this game. Their hit boxes are too big! Getting boxed into a corner by your chickens is not a trivial occurrence! So because there are too many days to work through I thought I'd minimize the amount of daily work I had to do until the last minute. But I played myself. See, each type of animal has its own grass pen, and Chet, the livestock vendor, won't sell an animal to you for the first time until you've planted an adequate amount of grass in that animal's pen. No big deal, I had more than enough money to fill every pen to the brim with grass. But in winter, your grass hibernates. And Chet apparently only considers grass to be grass if it can be harvested. So I walked into his shop on the first day of winter only for him to refuse to sell me any sheep! At this point I was like, fine okay whatever, and played through the rest of winter to see the Normal Ending. And it was rather sweet. Daisy, the seed vendor and closest I had to a romantic interest, came to my farm and talked about the memories we'd made and we walked off to the credits together. I assume the scene features whoever has the highest affection for you. But the next day I kept thinking, what if I hadn't beefed it. So I reloaded the closest save state I had to the end of the third autumn, buy my damn sheep from Chet, and played through the final winter again. And it worked out! I got the Good Ending this time, where the mayor congratulates and thanks you for revitalizing the whole village and you take a commemorative picture, completing my photo album. At last, Farmer Buck could rest.
Incidentally, I said "supposedly" about the ending requirements earlier because after finishing the game I learned the commonly cited criteria online are actually inaccurate. According to Fogu, an excellent resource don't get me wrong, you must ship 10,000 things in your shipping bin to qualify for the Good Ending. That's an extraordinarily large number! For reference, you have three years before evaluation. Each year is four seasons, and each season is thirty days. That's 360 days of gameplay. That means you need to ship an average of 28 items, per day! That's crazy!! And I know for a cold hard fact that I did not accomplish this feat because after your evaluation, if you didn't fuck up, you're given a little trophy for your living room table. Interacting with this trophy tells you your happiness score (mine was 100, the max), how many Power Berries you dug up (I found all 10), and how many items you've shipped. Can you guess what my shipping total was? It was 3,604! A valiant effort that still earned me the Good Ending! So I don't know what the true threshold is but it's much more forgiving than you might think.
Game Number: 18
Year Played: 2025
Platform: Game Boy Color