I want to start by saying I don't care about the Story of Seasons / Harvest Moon drama. The actual differences between them - if you don't have an axe to grind / horse in the race - are so small that I highly doubt if you put any two of the games next to each other that casual players could even tell the difference between them. They're all the same to me.
That brings us to Harvest Moon: Home Sweet Home which, as I said at the top, is the one I'd honestly recommend over all of the rest. At least on Xbox. There are probably better Story of Seasons games out there on other platforms, but on Xbox all we have are they very ugly looking Friends of Mineral Town, which I hated, and A Wonderful Life, which is the best looking of all of these games and plays fine, but is kind of weirdly shallow and short.
The competition isn't much better from the Harvest Moon games on Xbox, really. Light of Hope is solid, but super duper incredibly ugly. One World is too huge and lost the point of the genre. And Winds of Anthos looks good and plays fine, but is also gigantic and sprawling like One World and that isn't really what I personally want from these games. We don't need a giant open world. Just let us settle in a dinky village and farm. The games are already tedious busywork, but when you have a whole open world with multiple villages it really, really feels like work instead of fun. The charm of getting to know all of the villagers is also greatly diminished when there are a hundred characters to meet, too.
Now, if you DO want a big open world to Harvest Moon around in for 100 hours, The Winds of Anthos is definitely the one I'd recommend. I prefer the smaller more focused entries.
Home Sweet Home was originally a mobile game, and those roots definitely kind of show through in the console release. It doesn't look as good as Winds of Anthos or A Wonderful Life and it has a fixed camera instead of a fully 3D view. But, you know what, I genuinely think I prefer the fixed camera. It's a lot easier to see what you're doing and, thus, a lot easier to play. Other recent entries in the series undoubtedly look better, but this is so much nicer to actually play. You can zoom the camera way out or all the way down to almost ground level, too, so you always have a good view. I also like that it's scaled back down to just a single village instead of a huge open world, which I really, really, really prefer.
Another thing I really like is that everything is context based. So instead of fumbling through all of your tools to find the one you need, everything just sort of happens automatically. An untilled field will always only give you the option to till it. A tilled field will always only give you the option to plant seeds. Planted seeds will only give you the option to water them. And watered seeds will always only give you the option to fertilize them. It's simplified and dumbed down, but way more accessible and fun. Yeah, it's not like choosing the right tool was ever something difficult, but that's all the more reason why simplifying it was smart. It's always just been pointless tedium that never added much. I know this isn't the first game in either Harvest Moon or Story of Seasons to streamline things this way. I'm just saying it's a feature I appreciate.
The way you do the work is slightly different here as well. In past games you got better tools that allowed you to till a bunch of spaces, or water a bunch of plants, or do whatever like 16 spaces all at once. In Home Sweet Home you instead queue up repeated actions and then your character runs around and does them all in a row. You start off only being able to do a couple and then by the end can plow half a field with no effort. The result is the same - a bunch of work gets done with one button press - but instead of it all being done at the same time now your character runs around and waters 16 plants one after the other or whatever you want them to do. It's the same, but different.
I also gotta shout out the fact seasons don't really matter for crops anymore in this game. You can just grow anything you want any time of year. Not realistic in the slightest, but oh boy it makes the game easier and more enjoyable to play.
Fishing, mining, and raising animals are all pretty standard for the genre here. Not much to say about them, really.
That's kind of the thing with all of these games. Most of what you do is all the same as the dozens of other slow life farming games. It's all the same. What sets them apart from each other, though, is the other villagers you interact with and the overall story of the little town you settle into to start your farm. This is where some people argue Story of Seasons is "obviously" quote unquote better than modern Harvest Moon. They say Story of Seasons is more charming and lovable with better characters and whatever.
I say, again, they're all exactly the same to me. It's always the same story of your dumb ass character coming to the village for whatever reason, starting out as a newbie farmer that doesn't know how to do anything, and eventually becoming the hero of the village by running around and doing chores for everyone else. Along the way you win some competitions, host some festivals, expand your house and barn, and maybe get married and poop out a kid. All of the games are the same just in a different location with a different cast of villagers. It's the-same.
I will say I rather enjoyed my time in the world of Harvest Moon: Home Sweet Home overall. I like the layout of the village as it is easy to navigate and mostly made sense. The villagers are also quite charming and likeable and pretty great. I'll add that I picked Harriet as the girl I wanted to romance because she is a classic tsundere and was kind of perfect. Some of the characters were kind of iffy, though. There were some young men the same age as your character whose parents really, really push to be your romantic partner and it's so obvious that their not subtle winking and nudging got tiresome after a while.
There is also a character who is your character's childhood friend - who is the opposite gender of your character so in my case it was a guy because I always play as girls - that is really, really just sad and kind of creepy. He always plays up the childhood friend angle and every conversation ends with "We're such good bestest friends. Aren't we friendy friend friend-o?". And you have a LOT of conversations with him because he's who all of the main story goes through. He even goes to your farm - literally every single day - and stands in front of your house, waiting for you to acknowledge him. I took great pleasure in totally ignoring his way too obvious advances and then rubbing his face in my wonderful lesbian romance with the tsundere. I don't use this term - ever - but Justin is the textbook definition of a cuck.
There are a couple of other slight rough edges in Home Sweet Home, too. I don't love that all of the achievements on Xbox are 12 or 24 points, which screws up your Gamerscore. Yes, people care about that. I - Care about that. I actually planned my endgame so that I would end up on an even number and then stopped playing even though there are a couple easy achievements left to get. Not a deal breaker, obviously, but annoying.
Also, NPCs just repeat the last thing they said to you over and over when they run out of dialogue options. I know this isn't a unique issue here, but can't we do something about it? Just don't give the option to talk to them if they have nothing new to say.
The animal raising is slightly annoying here as well. The A.I. for the animals is awful and they get stuck on the structure inside the barn and just stand around starving. I had to call them outside and then immediately put them back inside just to reset their positions so some of the dumb asses could actually eat something. That made the animals consistently annoying enough that I didn't bother with them much, even though one of my favorite things about these games is naming all of my sheep and cows after sumo wrestlers. And I named my chickens after the K-On girls, just by the way.
In spite of those hiccups, however, I still had a lot of fun with Harvest Moon: Home Sweet Home. The village is well designed, the NPCs are mostly charming and lovable, the farming gameplay is streamlined and accessible and fun, and the presentation is well done. It's just really solid all around. It really is the one that I would recommend to new players that want to play one of these games for the first time. It's smartly designed and accessible and never gets too overwhelming. But it's still a ton of fun so even genre vets will have a great time with it as well. I really did like it a lot.
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