Why are there two Harvest Moon games?

For most of its life, Bokujo Monogatari reached the West through Natsume, which localised and published the Japanese games under the name Harvest Moon. The arrangement held from the SNES original through the Nintendo 3DS era. Behind the scenes the games were developed in Japan, at Pack-In-Video and its successor companies, eventually Marvelous, while Natsume owned the Harvest Moon name in the markets where it published.

In 2014 Marvelous set up its own Western arm, Xseed Games, to publish its titles directly. The games could come home, but the name could not: Harvest Moon remained a Natsume trademark. So the 3DS Bokujo Monogatari sequel launched in English in 2015 as Story of Seasons, a new Western name for the original Japanese series, while Natsume began developing and publishing separate farming games under Harvest Moon, starting with Harvest Moon: The Lost Valley.

From that point there are genuinely two farming lines sharing one heritage. Story of Seasons games are Bokujo Monogatari, made by Marvelous in Japan, the direct continuation of the 1996 series. Post split Harvest Moon games are Natsume productions, made by different teams, inspired by the series Natsume once published. Both are legal, both sit on the same store shelves, and only the fine print tells them apart.

For collectors the split is a reading exercise. Check the developer and publisher credits: Marvelous and Xseed mark the original line, Natsume as developer marks the new one. Japanese collecting avoids the trap entirely, since only the true series carries the Bokujo Monogatari name at home. Any Western farm shelf built after 2014 needs the split understood, or half of it is a different series wearing a familiar logo.