Natsume, publisher of the Harvest Moon series has announced release dates and information for some of their upcoming titles.

Harvest Moon: Another Wonderful Life features a female main character and allows the player to court the males(Rock, Gustafah, and Marlin) featured in Harvest Moon A Wonderful Life, marry them, have children, and grow old, all while engaging in the usual farming tasks. Some improvements to this game will be cleaner text/dialog, the ability to have a boy or a girl, the choice to change clothes, and the option to sell the goat. Other hightlights that fans will appreciate are shorter chapters (every chapter is 1 year long), and a free play mode upon game completion. Harvest Moon More Friends of Mineral Town for GameBoy Advance will feature similar changes, and there will be the option to marry three secret characters.

Harvest Moon A Wonderful Life Special Edition for PS2 will feature some touch-ups to the original as well, including the ability to sell a goat, the option to marry Lumina, and to have a girl child.

Harvest Moon DS will likely feature characters from previous Harvest Moon titles such as Gwynn(Save the Homeland) and Popuri(64/BtN/FoMT), but this is still unconfirmed. What is confirmed is that the DS's stylus and touch screen features will be used for tasks such as sheep shearing and washing animals.

In non-Harvest Moon news, Chulip is in the final stages of localization, with developer Punchline, and will hopefully be released fourth quarter this year. It's quite possible this game will recieve the "T" rating for its slightly risque element of kissing a wide variety of people.

Also set to release is River King, a fishing RPG where you choose to play as one of four members of a family and go up against a rival to catch the river king. The character designer for this game is the same as the one for Harvest Moon, and even features some cameos from the farming game, and vice versa (the main characters of River King host the fishing show on the tv in Another Wonderful Life).

Harvest Moon: Another Wonderful Life and Harvest Moon: More Friends of Mineral Town will both be available July 26th, 2005. Chulip and River King will be available Q4 2005. Harvest Moon Wonderful Life Special Edition and Harvest Moon DS will be available sometime in Fall of 2005.