What are the Harvest Moon DS games?

Harvest Moon DS arrived in Japan in 2005, the series first dual screen entry, moving Mineral Town systems to the DS with touch controls, a mine of absurd depth, and a rescue plot involving the Harvest Goddess and the Witch Princess. It also linked with the GBA Friends of Mineral Town cartridge in the DS slot, importing characters and bonuses, a handshake between generations that collectors still enjoy demonstrating.

The follow ups experimented boldly. Island of Happiness and Sunshine Islands put the farm on an archipelago that developed as you raised sunken land and attracted residents, so town building joined crop growing. Grand Bazaar, covered in its own page in this hub, rebuilt the economy around a weekly bazaar where your stall, your presentation, and your windmill crafting set your prices. Each DS entry moved one system to the centre and let the others orbit it.

The DS era is also where the Western naming fog thickens: all of these are true Bokujo Monogatari games from Marvelous, published by Natsume as Harvest Moon before the split. Japanese DS boxes carry the Bokujo Monogatari name through the whole run, which keeps a Japanese DS shelf clean to read. Western DS copies are plentiful, but complete copies with manuals are the grade to chase, as DS cases were separated from cartridges constantly.

Japanese DS guidebooks kept pace with the experiments, including bazaar pricing tables and island development charts that Western coverage skipped. For a collector, the DS run is the series laboratory years in four cartridges, and it is currently the most affordable complete era of the farm to build in either language.