You Load 16 Tons, What Do You Get? Ideally, Harvest Moon: Magical Melody would play out as a non-stop series of interesting events and decisions as you manage your homestead and build up relationships with the townspeople. Nothing says love like a big honkin' slice o' cheesecake. Some (but not all) of the holidays have associated mini-games. There are horse races in both the spring and the fall, and chicken competitions in the summer and winter - roughly a holiday each week in-game. In the fall the town celebrates a harvest festival, requiring you to bring some crops.

Livening up the daily grind are various seasonal holidays. Gameplay is completely open-ended it may not be edge-of-your seat exciting, but it's fun and fulfilling to manage your estate and stock up tons of cash and food. After your chores are done, you're free to run around town trying to woo the ladies, fish, or mine for minerals. So the gameplay itself is a balance of trying to run a profitable farm that you can actually maintain without falling down from exhaustion. Every morning you wake up and rush to do your chores (water crops, feed the chickens, etc.) You have a limited stamina that runs out quickly if you don't eat some food, and you have to get to bed at a decent hour in order to have energy the next day. But after about an hour of getting the feel for it, you begin to settle into a comforting rhythm. The control scheme also takes a little getting used to at first it seems too easy to mistakenly pull out produce and then eat it when you meant to put it in the collection bin. Your low stamina and first-level tools mean you can't work a very large plot of land, and you don't have any barns or chicken coops yet. Once the game kicks off, early progress is slow.

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