| Teriol said: I love the old ones, maybe they can capture the essence of the first titles. |
This is an entirely different franchise. The original Harvest Moon franchise (1997 to 2013) is now published under the title of Story of Seasons, and has a spinoff called Rune Factory.
It's a weird trademark thing. Marvelous/Victor Software/Amccus lost the trademark in a dispute with the company that localized the game to the US, Natsume.
To give a little more in depth history on the franchise.
In 1997, Amccus developed and released Bokujo Monogatari. They didn't have the resources to publish the game outside of Japan, so they delt with a third party for the US release, and Nintendo released it in Europe. The problem occurred here, they didn't have enough foresite to see that the little farming game at the end of the SNES's lifespan would become a wildly successful franchise, and so they allowed the localizers to acquire the trademark. So if things ever broke down between the two companies, Natsume could retain the trademark and slap "Harvest Moon" onto any game series they pleased.
From 1997 to 2013 this arrangement remained. Amccus was wrapped into Victor Software, and then rebranded as Marvelous in 2011 as the result of another merger. The game series continued to become published outside of Japan as "Harvest Moon"
Rising Star became the main publisher, but in the US it was still published by Natsume, or at lease licensed by Natsume.
In the end, Natsume just collected the royalty paycheque on the title "Harvest Moon" and had little to do with it as XSeed took over all localization efforts.
Things broke down, I am not sure the exact details, either Marvelous wanted to stop paying Natsume, or Natsume wanted to slap the "Harvest Moon" name onto a bunch of poorly developed garbage games, causing the rift.
Marvelous and XSeed had to rebrand their games as Story of Seasons and Rune Factory.
The Harvest Moon games that are released by Natsume now are NOT the same franchise as Harvest Moon from 1997 to 2013. It is like when Activision briefly owned the "Civilization" trademark, and released two Civilization games that had nothing to do with Sid Meier's Civilization.
I describe myself as a little dose of toxic masculinity.
