The Harvest Moon franchise has been going for ten years now, but recently saw a spin-off straight role-playing game edition hit the DS in the form of Rune Factory. Now it is coming to Wii as well!

Due for release on DS in the US very soon, Rune Factory: A Fantasy Harvest Moon has already proved to be a highly lucrative spin-off from the traditional farming sim of Harvest Moon, with more than 100,000 units sold in Japan so far, a figure that eclipses the totals of many other Harvest Moon games from the past. But now it has been confirmed that Rune Factory is coming to Wii, and will be completely ditching the Harvest Moon tag from now on, starting with the late 2007 release of Rune Factory 2 for Nintendo DS.

All of this information comes from an exclusive interview on Cubed³ with the creator of Harvest Moon himself, Yasuhiro Wada of Marvelous Interactive. Other than the talk of Rune Factory on Wii, Wada-san also reconfirmed that Harvest Moon: Magical Melody will no longer be released as a GameCube title in Europe, but will instead be reworked for Wii, ready for launch in just a few months:

Cubed³: When can gamers eagerly awaiting Magical Melody expect it to arrive in Europe?

Yasuhiro Wada: I believe very, very soon! September!

Cubed³: Will there be anything additional to compensate for the delay? Or even anything extra included for use on the Wii?

Yasuhiro Wada: Originally this was made for GC so intentionally I didn’t add many changes apart from Wii controller support.”

In addition to this, when asked about the chances of seeing older Harvest Moon games or even Lufia titles appear on the Virtual Console, his response was “I’m thinking positively but I can’t answer anything concretely at the moment.”

There is also mention of No More Heroes being brought to Europe by Rising Star Games on Wii in Spring 2008, discussion about Project O, the joint Wii venture between Marvelous Interactive, Cing and Townfactory, the future of Harvest Moon, Nintendo’s Friends Codes system and more.

Be sure to check out the full interview: Interview with Yasuhiro Wada, Creator of Harvest Moon

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