After over 10 years of virtual farming, it looks like Natsume is struggling to find a way to innovate the Harvest Moon series in order to keep it alive. The traditionally rustic setting has been abandoned lately in favor of different environments in the hopes of giving the whole farming business a new flavor. While DS owners are waiting for the imminent Rune Factory: A Fantasy Harvest Moon, PSP gamers are finally getting the first installment of the series on their handheld. Strangely enough, Innocent Life is an oversimplified version of what one would expect from a respected, decade-old series: One can't help but wonder whether Natsume looked at PSP owners as a bunch of casual gamers unable to focus on complex simulation games.
As the title itself suggests, Innocent Life is set in the near future, where the humans inhabiting Heartflame Island have built robots capable of accomplishing every farming task in their place. As a result, the Spirit of Fire is now angered and is threatening to make the big volcano on the island erupt. In order to prevent the disaster, the scientist Dr. Hope decides to build a robot boy, named Innocent Life, who will manually perform every task in his farm, thus calming down the Spirit of Fire and saving the whole island. Seriously. The simple and somewhat reassuring storyline featured in other Harvest Moon installments has being replaced by a twisted tale with more plot holes than a colander.
The main plot spans over four seasons, at the end of which Life needs to be able to save the island and its inhabitants. This is a big difference compared to the previous installments in the series, where players could go as far as thirty years with total freedom of action. Innocent Life, instead, is heavily story-driven and requires players to accomplish some tasks and sub-missions at specific times in order to beat the game. It might sound as a welcome improvement, but the sad truth is that the plot is only developed on Sundays, when Life has his weekly check-up with Dr. Hope. Nothing happens on other days, apart from normal farming tasks and some exploration of unlocked areas, so that players will often perform their simple activities and go to bed at noon, mainly to speed the pace up. Even talking to the many villagers will result in listening to the same answers over and over, regardless of the season and the events unlocked so far.
As for farming itself, Innocent Life is far easier than the previous games. Every task, apart from planting seeds and harvesting the crops, can be left to Forte, the robot helper that Dr. Hope gives Life after a few weeks. Forte can water plants, collect resources from the fields such as wood and stone, and even clean up dog poop. Even without its help, things are extremely easy thanks to the fast and totally free upgrading of tools. As early as the end of spring, it will already be possible to find better watering cans and sickles in the new unlocked caves, without having to pay or collect resources for them.