Harvest Moon: Frantic Farming (iPhone)

When Voltaire's downtrodden optimist Candide realises that "we must cultivate our garden," he probably didn't have instructing an elfish farmer to harvest plump eggplants and tomatoes in mind.

Frantic Farming puts you to work harvesting vegetables. Plots of land filled with seedlings, sprouts, flowering plants, and full-grown goods have to be nurtured to the point of picking. Ripe veggies can be picked by a cute little sprite prompted into action with a tap of the screen.

The catch, however, is that he can only harvest ripe vegetables. Stages are filled with plants at various stages of growth - seedling, sprout, small vegetable, and ripe vegetable - furthered developed with a generous watering. Every time your farmer picks a ripe veggie, he douses any adjacent plants with water. This causes them to grow, thus moving them closer to harvest time.

Since you don't have direct control over your sprite, Frantic Farming becomes a matter of agricultural puzzle-solving. Crops must be ripe in order to be harvested, but they also need to be coordinated in such a way that your sprite can pick them in quick succession. A continuous line of ripe vegetables has to be cultivated, done by moving crops to create chains of similar vegetables and timing when and where to water.

In Mission mode, such strategising is critical to completing each stage. Along with planning chains and watering, you're given a limited number of moves with which to reposition crops on the screen. Restricting the number of moves that can be made amplifies the challenge, though to an extreme. Puzzles across Easy, Medium, and Hard levels of difficulty become so tricky that the game ends up devolving into trial-and-error.

Score Attack mode plays more easily, but it hardly evokes excitement. Instead of carefully contemplating each move on a limited plot, the screen is filled with vegetables to be harvested before the clock runs out. The goal here is to hastily move crops around into big chains for points. It's more amusing than Mission mode, though it never seems to blossom.

Overall, there's a sense that Frantic Farming isn't fully grown. The frustrations of Mission mode should have been picked out like weeds, yet this garden is far from overgrown given that it's been stripped of the Story mode featured in the DS version. It does share the same pixelated graphics, though.

Despite it's clever concept, the general lack of sophistication in execution means Frantic Farming is not totally ripe for the picking. Tuning Mission mode, adding online leaderboards to make Score Attack compelling, and putting Story mode back in are all needed to make this garden grow.