Magical Melody > Ushi No Tane - Fogu

Harvest Moon: Magical Melody

Console: Nintendo Gamecube Japan Release: November 2005 N.America Release: March 2006 European Release: No GC version - Wii version instead

Introduction: Magical Melody is the first big-console game to allow for players to select their gender at the beginning of the game. Previous to MM the only other games that did so were the second and third Gameboy color titles.

The story of the game is about the Harvest Goddess, who has sealed herself away because she believes nobody has love. Your character enters the scene because of a newspaper advertisement sent by Mayor Theodore, glorifying Flower Bud Village as a great place to start a farm. Once you discover the stone-form Goddess you are asked to find 101 Musical Notes that will become a melody to free her.

Magical Melody brings back characters from the Super Nintendo and Save The Homeland games, as well as a few new people. Each gender has up to 10 possible marriage candidates, plus the ambiguous-gender character Jamie, who will be the opposite gender of the character you play as.

The original Shiawaze no Uta, released in March 2005, included (among other issues) a hard-lock bug relating to the Wild Note (#77), whereby the wild animal that appeared at the front door in the morning to hand over the note would never leave, preventing the game from progressing past the event. At the time of the game's release in Japan, the solution to restore progress was to have players send their Gamecube Memory Cards to MMV. Those outside of Japan were out of luck and had to restart their game from the beginning unless they had a save file far enough back to decrease hearts with the buggy animal by smacking them with tools, thus preventing the event from triggering in the morning.

A corrected version of the GC disc was eventually released, meaning there are two copies of the JP game out in the wild. The original glitchy game is "GS-DOL-G4AJ-JPN" and the bug-corrected game is "GS-DOL-G4AJ-JPN-1". This code is printed in the lower-left corner of the game box and on the Gamecube disc. Rumor has it that MMV did not issue a recall of the buggy game, as it was only certain animals (e.g., the rabbit) that would cause the hard lock when handing over the Wild Note.

The English version is based on the second incarnation of the game, called Shiawaze no Uta For World in Japan, released in November 2005. The For World version was marketed as "made by the fans, for the fans" version of the game. Changes includes Jamie as a potential spouse, new emotion voices, much needed bug fixes, and a cheaper price. The game also increased in difficulty, as many items you could ship had their profits cut in half.

The Gamecube version of the game was not released in Europe. Instead, Rising Star Games opted to convert it to a Wii game, changing the controls to support the Wii remote and removing the girl-gender playable character. Other than that, the European Wii version plays the same as the North American Gamecube version.