When comparing Harvest Moon: Light of Hope Special Edition vs NieR: Automata, the Slant community recommends NieR: Automata for most people. In the question“What are the best JRPGs for PS4?” NieR: Automata is ranked 4th while Harvest Moon: Light of Hope Special Edition is ranked 22nd. The most important reason people chose NieR: Automata is:
The combat in NieR: Automata is fantastic. It has a hack-and-slash feel to it, with an emphasis on agility and showy acrobatics. With the fluid and responsive controls, you can switch seamlessly from using swift attacks with your weapon to devastatingly strong attacks as you combo them together. You also use customizable ranged missile attacks from your personal robot pod, such as powerful laser beams or a giant hammer attack. It can be difficult to win battles sometimes, especially on the harder gameplay settings, but it's worthwhile to keep at it and watch yourself progress and improve.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro You get to rebuild and manage a small town
As part of the main story, you find yourself in a storm-wrecked town that needs to be rebuilt. You take it upon yourself to get the farms, livestock, buildings, and economy back up and running again. Even though Harvest Moon is mainly a farming simulator, there's plenty more to do here. You have access to plots of land to farm, mines for quarrying, bodies of water for fishing, and you can prioritize which town buildings to restore, all in order to bring the residents back. Your priorities and choices make all the difference in how everything gets rebuilt.
Pro Tons of freedom to do what you want at your own pace
You can do whatever you feel like without worrying about too many restrictions. With the main story quest, you get to pick and choose your approach to rebuilding the town. This means that you can focus on fishing and mining over farming if you prefer, aside from instances where someone in the story requests a certain item that you can farm up yourself. There are no looming time restrictions or anything like that; you can go at your own speed and do whatever you choose from day to day.
Pro Farming simulator mechanics are simple to pick up and learn
Farming in Harvest Moon is easy to learn. You have a plot of land with squares of fertile soil, and then you just need seeds for whatever you'd like to plant. Caring for your your crops is only a matter of keeping up the habit of watering them, as well as making sure you pluck out any weeds that crop up from time to time. As long as you have the seeds you want and you remember to take care of your farm, you'll be successful in no time.
Pro Two-player co-op speeds up resource gathering for both players
Playing with a friend makes things go by much quicker. You and one other person can co-op to collect resources together, basically cutting your required time for quests by half. Aside from simply enjoying the game with someone else, if you have a goal you want to accomplish and you feel like it's taking a long time, co-op can help speed things along.
Pro Fast-paced, action-packed combat
The combat in NieR: Automata is fantastic. It has a hack-and-slash feel to it, with an emphasis on agility and showy acrobatics. With the fluid and responsive controls, you can switch seamlessly from using swift attacks with your weapon to devastatingly strong attacks as you combo them together. You also use customizable ranged missile attacks from your personal robot pod, such as powerful laser beams or a giant hammer attack. It can be difficult to win battles sometimes, especially on the harder gameplay settings, but it's worthwhile to keep at it and watch yourself progress and improve.
Pro Unique storytelling with a real emotional impact
NieR: Automata's outlook on storytelling is incredibly special. To get the full experience, you have to run multiple playthroughs of the game, each of which offers a new experience and perspective. Your world view of the story events and characters expands drastically as you complete each playthrough, playing on your expectations to help you develop a deeper emotional bond with the protagonists and become invested in their plight.
Things take a real turn on your third playthrough, putting you on an emotional roller coaster all the way to the true ending. The plot twists and knocks on the fourth wall elevate the story to a truly unique place. Getting all the way to the very end can be a religious experience from how much heart and meaning you discover in the symbolism.
Pro It's got a hauntingly beautiful environment
NieR: Automata is set in a post-apocalyptic landscape after Earth has been overrun by hostile machines, and the artists really nailed what that would feel like. Abandoned and overgrown cities litter the landscape along with old refineries, graveyards, and eerie forests. When you add the beautiful soundtrack to the experience, it fills you with a bittersweet mix of loneliness and hope.
Pro Varied genre-spanning gameplay elements
NieR: Automata has different types of gameplay to keep things interesting. From the very start, you're on an on-rails bullet hell section, and then you switch over to the more traditional action RPG style of fast-paced combat. Things change up again not long after with some side-scrolling platforming from a 2D view. Later on in the story, there's a hacking mini-game where you navigate a tiny ship through a short puzzle, with the music changing to a charming retro sound to fit the theme and mood. This is a game that doesn't stay boxed in a single genre.
Pro An incredible amount of content
Outside of the main story, there's plenty of optional content to dive into. The side quests are the best way to get to know the characters and lore of the world, with some of them giving clever and subtle foreshadowing of the game's most critical events. There are also weapons to collect and upgrade, each of which offer nice little tidbits of lore after you get them to max level. And after reaching a certain point in the story, you get access to Chapter Select that lets you go back and replay whatever you want. You can easily spend 60+ hours exploring the world and still have much more to do.
Pro Gorgeous, ethereal soundtrack with amazing vocals
NieR: Automata's music is out of this world. It's so stunning and elegant in a way that nothing else can really live up to. The soundtrack manages to emotionalize the game through music, from the action-packed tracks with hard-hitting wind instruments and percussion, to the softer, somber songs that encapsulate the hauntingly beautiful environments and story moments you encounter. Vocals in the lore's indescribable language makes the music even more memorable, adding to the ethereal quality of the sound. This soundtrack is definitely one that you can go back to again and again without getting sick of it.
Cons
Con Farming is almost pointless outside of story events
Even though Harvest Moon is a farming simulator at its core, the trade is surprisingly not that useful in this game. During your main quest to restore the town and earn money, you have the option of farming, fishing, and mining; by and large, farming is the least efficient of the three, taking more time and earning you less money in the long-run. It's much more productive to either go fishing or mining if you want to rake in more cash at a faster rate, as farming just isn't worth it for the long-haul.
Con Bugs and game crashes
There are some instances where you may run into bugs or the game will outright crash. Sometimes, quests don't progress they way they should, leading you down the wrong paths or refusing to accept items that you're actually supposed to hand in. Game crashes are also unpredictable, varying in how often they happen. So until a few more patches get released, you may want to be more careful about saving often, just in case you have to redo a quest or you lose out on progress from a sudden crash.
Con Bland visuals
The graphics and presentation are nothing to write home about. They look awkward, with the 3D character sprites moving around in a 2D environment, with odd details that don't look quite right. The sprites themselves are pretty low-effort as well, and they don't at all look like they're advanced enough for a home console. Everything just looks low-effort all around and not that great to look at.
Con Not enough new characters
Most of the townspeople here are recycled from previous games in the series. It's a bit lazy to have so many of the same NPCs around without introducing many new ones. Fans of the Harvest Moon games might be happy to see their old favorites again, though they may also get bored by the lack of new faces around. New players won't notice anything wrong, though.
Con Limited open world
Even though NieR: Automata is technically an open world game, it doesn't always feel like it. It's more that there's a big open space in the center of the ruined city you explore, with branches that lead off to vastly different environments, like a desert, a village, and a few other places. These locations aren't that spacious, either, and it's a bit of a stretch to even imagine all of these places being so close together in the first place. It's not too much of an issue as long as you find the story and combat engaging enough.
Con Second playthrough can get repetitive
Once you get to Route B, your second playthrough, you may find that too much is the same. There are some big differences, such as the new way you get to see things play out, but a lot of it rehashes Route A, your first playthrough. There's a ton of hacking you have to do as well, which gets pretty boring after repeating it over and over again. But if you stick with it, Route C and onward are absolutely worth the time spent getting to that point.
Con Some boring fetch quests
The pacing gets messed up when you're forced to run certain fetch quests near the start of the game. This is somewhat forgivable after the fun and action-packed introductory level, but the quests themselves are still a drag to play through. Some of the side quests can also boil down to the same thing. Even though these quests give a lot of useful information about the world, they're not all that fulfilling, and you may dread having to repeat them when playing through the game again.
Con Buggy on PC
Some players complain about the game crashing, freezing, their save files mysteriously disappearing, and more. As of June 2018, over a year after the game's initial release, there is still no patch to fix these problems. Not everyone on PC will have these bugs, but it's still quite prevalent. If you continually run into issues, your best bet is to find a mod or play the console versions instead of waiting on an official patch that may never happen.