Overview
Harvest Moon is a franchise that is known for its deep, rewarding, and repetitive gameplay. The series began on the SNES, and gamers around the world instantly fell in love with the charming art style and amazing gameplay. The formula has not changed very much over the years, the developers have just been adding to it piece by piece.
Story of Seasons and Cabot Inc.'s Harvest Moon: The Lost Valley
The original developers of the Harvest Moon series - Marvelous Interactive (formerly Victor Interactive, and before then Victor Entertainment) - had a falling out with Natsume: the publishers of the Harvest Moon games outside of Japan, who also own the "Harvest Moon" brand. Marvelous had decided to use their official American publishing division, XSEED Games, to publish the Harvest Moon games in the US, but Natsume demurred and prevented them from using the Harvest Moon brand.
In response, any XSEED Games US localizations of the Bokujou Monogatari games (what the series is known as in Japan) will use the "Story of Seasons" name, starting with the 2014 same-titled game onwards. Natsume, meanwhile, brought on Cabot Inc. to produce more games in the US named Harvest Moon: these Harvest Moon games are only such in name only, having a different development team and no links to the original Bokujou Monogatari games. Harvest Moon: The Lost Valley was the first of these "non-canon" US Harvest Moon games.
Presently, the US has both the Story of Seasons franchise (the "true" Harvest Moon games, which are released in Japan as Bokujō Monogatari like every previous Harvest Moon game) and the new Harvest Moon franchise, which is US-only. This has caused some amount of confusion with fans of the farm simulation series.
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