Innocent Life
A Futuristic Harvest Moon


Heartflame Island

Long ago, on Heartflame Island, people lived happily in harmony with nature and the Spirits that watched over the island. But when a war broke out between the Volcano People and the Easter People 100 years ago, things started to change.

Over time, people became less concerned with the Spirits and tending to the land. Technological advancement made the old traditions of farming the land obsolete, and now farming could be done from anywhere with machines. People became attached to their technology, and eventually, even forgot that the Spirits existed, knowing them only as old folk legends.

However this made the Fire Spirit particularly angry, and his hot temper gave him the plan to destroy the technological civilization by erupting the volcano at the center of Heartflame Island, which is supposed to be dormant.

Dr. Hope's house

Not everyone had given up on nature and refused to believe in the Spirits, though. On the outskirts of the island, in the year of 2022, an aging roboticist named Dr Hope Grain is using technology to reuinite people with the land and the Spirits. He is about to finish work on his life's greatest work, a robot model called Innoncent Life.

The cool numbers thing lol

The Innocent Life model is desisgned to be able to work in the harsh conditions of the old Easter Ruins, but at the same time, is able to learn to think and feel as humans do. Dr Hope's ambition is for this newly created being to learn to appreciate the land first hand and appease the Spirits, before it is too late...

Innocent Life title screen

Welcome to my play diary for Innocent Life: A Futuristic Harvest Moon: Special Edition. To celebrate the anniversary of their popular Ranch Story (known in English-speaking regions as Harvest Moon) franchise, developer Marvelous created two special new entries into their series. One was Rune Factory, a fantasy version of Harvest Moon in which the protagonist battled with monsters and used magic powers in addition to maintaining their farm. And the other was Innocent Life, a science-fiction version of Harvest Moon where the protagonist is a robot and lives in a society with advanced technology.

While Rune Factory became an instant hit and went on to become its own series, Innocent Life was recieved fairly poorly, both due to its release on the PSP, which was rampant with piracy amongst its small userbase at the time, and because, well, it's really not a well-made game. There are programming oversights and clumsy game systems through, and the story is very haphazard with terrible pacing.

Still, the game got an upgraded release in the form of New Ranch Story: Innocent Life Pure, renamed to Innocent Life: A Futuristic Harvest Moon: Special Edition in the west, on the Playstation 2, where it saw a little more success riding on the franchise name and the much more popular console; however, the upgrades were few and the game was still pretty much as bad as before.

But of course, I seem to have a thing for bad games or something, because I quite like this game, and I decided to do a play diary for it on my LiVEJOURNAL. This was the first play diary I ever wrote, and it was originally intended as a way to introduce a couple friends to the game and nothing more. But as I continued writing, I found that I really enjoyed it, and went on to write other (and better) play diaries later. This one is largely full of screencaps with just some minor descriptions or comments at first, though eventually becomes a bit more polished, but not much. So, like Innocent Life itself, this diary is a bit clunky. But I still think the game and diary are worth sharing, since the game was most likely overlooked by a lot of players either because of its obscurity or its poor reception or both.

So please enjoy my adventures on Heartflame Island!

  1. Innocent Life
  2. Chapter 1
  3. Chapter 2
  4. Chapter 3
  5. Chapter 4
  6. Chapter 5
  7. Chapter 6
  8. Chapter 7
  9. Chapter 8
  10. Chapter 9
  11. Chapter 10
  12. Chapter 11
  13. Chapter 12
  14. Chapter 13
  15. Chapter 14
  16. Chapter 15