What happened to Harvest Moon after the split?
When Marvelous took its Western publishing in house in 2014, Natsume kept the Harvest Moon trademark it owned and faced a choice: retire a famous name or make the games itself. It chose to build. Harvest Moon: The Lost Valley for the 3DS, developed by Natsume with Tabot, opened the new era with a bold experiment, a voxel landscape you terraformed block by block, though its single season valley and thin town divided the long time audience.
The follow ups searched for footing. Skytree Village refined the terraforming idea, Light of Hope in 2018 moved to consoles and PC with a lighthouse restoration story and a brighter, simpler style, and One World in 2021 sent the farm travelling between regions, deserts, snowfields, and beaches, in one game. Harvest Moon: The Winds of Anthos in 2023 went larger again, an open landscape with multiple towns, and is generally treated as the strongest of the Natsume developed line.
The honest comparison is structural. The Marvelous line carries thirty years of Japanese development continuity, the same design bloodline from 1996. The Natsume line is a younger series learning in public, with real experiments and uneven results, sold under a name with more history than its own games yet have. Both are legitimately Harvest Moon by trademark or by lineage, which is exactly the confusion the split created.
Collecting the Natsume line is collecting a what if: the road the name travelled without its original makers. Its boxes sit beside Story of Seasons on modern shelves, and a complete telling of the farm story in the West needs both lines, each clearly labelled, so the next collector who inherits the shelf can read the split at a glance.
