Horse Tales: Emerald Valley Ranch

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Back in the days of the mid 2000s to early 2010s, I was admittedly a fiend for playing animal games on my DS. Pet Vet, Nintendogs, Petz titles out the wazoo…I’ve always had an affinity for games about horses, though, and stuff like Bella Sara, Discovery Kids: Pony Paradise, and Barbie Horse Adventures took up quite a bit of my younger years. I was admittedly very excited for Horse Tales: Emerald Valley Ranch, which seemed like a return to my humble gaming roots.

Unfortunately, even my heavy nostalgia factor and incredible patience weren’t enough to make this game good, despite the adorable horses.

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Horse Tales: Emerald Valley Ranch is a laid back, lifestyle simulator where you’re tasked with rebuilding your aunt’s rundown estate and working your way up the ladder to become the best equestrianist in town. Explore a beautiful and vast open world on horseback, build up the estate with a number of items and buildings, tame and train horses, and compete in races to earn fame and continue to expand. Along the way, you’ll meet plenty of friends that can help you on your journey and support you on your mission to be the very best.

The game puts a lot of focus on exploring and gathering building materials, such as wood, clay, and ore, that are scattered around the landscape. These materials can be used to repair structures around your estate and the town in general (in fact, you’ll need to rebuild quite a few bridges in the beginning, so start collecting as soon as possible). Exploring also helps you find food for your horse, like carrots and sunflowers, train them, and discover sidequests around town. Of course, you can always take breaks from exploring to spend time with your equestrian companion by feeding and petting them. All of these are things that can help you earn fame.

Fame is a big deal, which can be earned by breeding horses, participating in and winning races, building structures on the estate, and helping out the townspeople. In order to build certain things on the estate, you must have enough fame. It’s one of those things that kind of forces you to explore and complete quests and racing minigames. Otherwise, you can’t really fix up your estate, and that’s the whole point, right?

I’m going to be entirely honest here. The gameplay in this game doesn’t really matter. Despite boasting an “open-world” to explore, there’s not that much to do or explore. In most open-world games, there’s something to do while you run around, something that makes walking or riding a horse from place to place a little less tedious. Horse Tales doesn’t. You just walk. And this might be forgivable had the visuals been pretty to look at. This game looks like it belongs on the DS; the landscapes aren’t that detailed, everything looks a little crusty, and it’s just not up to par for a game that places so much weight on the beauty of the world it’s set in.

Of course, that’s assuming the game runs for you. There’s quite a few bugs. There were times I’d jump over something on my horse and get stuck in midair. When this happens, you have to reset to your estate – and sometimes, reset the game altogether – to fix it. Certain races wouldn’t register my win, sticking me in a loop of doing the same race over and over and getting nowhere. The game would stall often, the camera would get stuck at times; all of these things make the game unplayable, and this isn’t even mentioning the annoying and often difficult controls.

Most every action, from mounting your horse to clicking ‘next’ on the tip screen, requires you to hold down a button, which is more annoying than anything, but it’s never a good thing when the controls of your game are annoying. I’d often get stuck in corners. It’s kind of a mess. It honestly took forever to get through as much as I did.

The concept of Horse Tales: Emerald Valley Ranch isn’t bad. There’s nothing wrong with explorative horseback riding games; the issues come when the parts of your game highlighted don’t live up to their potential. This one lacks the visual and gameplay variety to make it worth your time. On top of being a tedious travel simulator, the game barely functions at times between glitches and annoying and dysfunctional controls. Unfortunately, Horse Tales: Emerald Valley Ranch is just as dilapidated as the estate you acquire in it.