What is Harvest Moon: Magical Melody?

Harvest Moon: Magical Melody launched in Japan on March 10, 2005 as Bokujo Monogatari: Shiawase no Uta, Song of Happiness, and in North America on March 28, 2006 for the GameCube. The Harvest Goddess has turned herself to stone, the Harvest Sprites need musical notes to revive her, and notes are earned by living: shipping first crops, befriending villagers, winning festivals, enduring storms. Around that structure the game builds a full Mineral Town style village and a feature no other entry has, a rival farmer, Jamie, who farms against you and can even be courted.

The design is the core era at its most generous. There are a hundred notes to find, a choice of starting land plots with different soil personalities, a long list of marriage candidates for either protagonist in the Japanese version, and systems layered from the earlier games, mining, ranching, cooking and festivals, all feeding the note hunt. Where A Wonderful Life narrowed the series into a life story, Magical Melody widened it into a scrapbook, and players who love completion percentages tend to rank it at the top of the GameCube pair.

Its Western journey was tangled. The North American GameCube release removed the option to play as a female protagonist that the Japanese version included, a cut that still stings in the record. A Wii version followed in Europe and Australia in 2008 and reached North America in 2009, restoring a version of the game to a new audience on different hardware. The result is a small family of regional releases that collectors must sort carefully, because platform, region and protagonist options all vary.

For the core era shelf, Magical Melody is the GameCube companion piece: A Wonderful Life for the story, Magical Melody for the systems. Complete copies follow the GameCube checklist from this section, case, disc, manual and inserts, and the Japanese original, Shiawase no Uta, is the version with the full feature set, which makes it the rare case where the import is not just cheaper but more complete.