With its giant inflatable tree, pastoral picket fences and fully-stocked stables of farm-animal plushies, Natsume’s booth at this year’s E3 represented a rustic respite from the show floor madness, and we happily headed down to the farm to check out its newest title: Harvest Moon Skytree Village 3DS ROMS . This latest is Natsume’s third in-house developed farming sim since the Bokujō Monogatari series — which used to be localized as Harvest Moon — became Story of Seasons, and marks a return to the 3DS after last year’s mobile Seeds of Memories. It’s also a return to the Minecraft-inspired terra-farming gameplay of The Lost Valley, but with some significant improvements, and after spending some quality time digging around in the E3 build we’re definitely excited for what this harvest has in store. Harvest Moon: Skytree Village takes place in its titular town, which has been in a bit of a downward spiral lately; where once it was green and thriving, it’s now taken on a sombre tone thanks to an extended drought and the ever-waning presence of the Harvest Goddess. Playing as a plucky local farmer, either female or male, it’s your job to restore the town’s seven Skytrees and bring back the Harvest Goddess through a combination of diligent farming, attentive animal husbandry, and item-based courtship.Though Skytree Village shares an engine and general style with 2014’s The Lost Valley — along with the central mechanic of terraforming your farm — Natsume has had its ears to the ground since that game’s release, and our hosts emphasised that listening to fan feedback was the first order of business for Skytree’s developers. The first criticism they set out to address was with the chibi character models, and the move away from big-headed denizens of The Lost Valley was one of the first things we noticed when we picked up Skytree Village. The character models here are conventionally proportioned “beautiful anime people” — as our Natsume rep put it — and it really does give the game a different feel. Since, like The Lost Valley, Skytree Village uses 3D character models instead of character portraits in dialogue scenes, this change goes a long way in terms of characterisation, and the models we saw were definitely charming.