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The game puts you into the town of Flowerbud Village, where you are able to take over a little house and plant crops outside it, therefore leading to that wonderful thing: a harvest. Getting from planting to harvest could easily be the most boring thing in videogames ever. That’s why Magical Melody has a bucket-load of other things for you to do. Apparently, a game that was just about work didn’t seem too fun, so once the work day is done, there are lots of ways to play in Flowerbud Village.

If you’re into interior decorating, you get to purchase furnishings and place them inside of your house. If, instead, you are something of a gemologist, there are plenty of mines to be explored, and dug through if that’s what fits your need. If, instead, you’re looking to go fishing, you can do that there too. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy, and there’s lots of things to play at in your off time.

What you do has an impact, too, as new businesses will come to the town, or leave based on your success. There’s also quests that you can undertake if you’d like, in order to garner items beyond the norm that is required to play, but that usually have juicy bonuses associated with them. You can also socialize with the many people in the village, leading to situations where you can date, and even marry an AI villager.

This is one of the things that happened to get the axe in the transition from the GameCube version to the Wii version. In this version, you don’t have the option to be a girl character, which is unfortunate considering how much of this game will appeal to female gamers out there. Fortunately, the gameplay which is so addictive and compelling should be enough to win female Wii gamers over.

The way that the designers chose to make use of the Wii Remote to have characters do actions is by actually having you perform the action with the remote. This is not a requirement, though, and button pushes still work for these tasks. The inclusion of the options is somewhat unnecessary, because this is a game about work, so you’ll probably not want to wear out your arm too much doing the actions when you can just button press, but at least they tried to add features to make up for the lack of a girl player.

In Harvest Moon: Magical Melody players get the opportunity to play as a farmer. The idyllic and relaxed lifestyle on the farm is one that shouldn’t be missed.