Then you could customize further by choosing various personality traits, fave gifts and horror gifts, even make dialogue! These would probably have to be moderated though. Have a bunch of body types, face shapes clothing choices (enough so that you could make plenty of combos). There could be a "NPC" creator for User Generated Content, so players could make different characters.
When you have your kid(s) and they grow up you can choose to send them off to found a new town or join a different one. You'd only be able to marry NPCs (to avoid awkwardness). Or you could go settle someone else's town. I'd love to see a game on the Wii U where you set out into the wilderness, and found a town, then other players (and NPCs) could come and start to settle your town. It'd be sweet, but wildly unlikely, if there was a huge 'MMO'-like (not really an MMO, but similar?) Harvest Moon. PS1: 2 (Only one made it to American Shores, BtN For Girl was a japanese exclusive and more or less the same.) Interesty analysis, but why did you leave out the Sony titles? So there's way too much incentive, and way too many potential sales, not to relase one or two. So it's nothing new at all, but despite that, There's no doubt that we're going to see a HM title for Nintendo consoles Natsume's highest Metacritic ratings are for HM console games (MM currently is at the top I think). And most of those were all released within the last 5-6 years. So we're looking at 14 HM titles on handheld in the same period: twice as many. That's a total of 7 games (really more like 6.5) for Nintendo consoles since 1997, when the first HM was released. GC:3 (and AWL and AnWL aren't really that different.) The thing about focusing on handhelds isn't exactly news, you see they have been doing that already, especially in the last few years. I just hope that the games come through as awesome as they should be. Really to be honest the only thing a Wii U brings to the table is increased graphics and an awesome controller. As well as movement with the game pad and such.
Since there are no 2-D images on consoles for HM anymore, we should expect something really high def. The main features brought to the Wii U would def be the gamepad, since it's amazingly for a console. I don't really want ANB on the console really. That seems to be the them with marvelous. But I kind of see a whole new Harvest Moon coming out, nothing based on handhelds.
More realistically a 2015 release date wouldn't surprise me. I do agree it won't be any time this year. The 3DS is nice but they came out with a really good game to keep up busy for quite sometime. Nintendo is their station and the game pad gives a lot of opportunities to play around. I'm pretty sure they will make a Harvest Moon game for the Wii U.