Story of Seasons

Genre: Management Simulation / RPG

Players: 1-4 Co-Op (Local Wireless / Online)

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Review:

Story of Seasons, released on Nintendo 3DS in 2015, is the first game in this family-friendly franchise of “Farming RPG”-style Management Simulation games since developer Marvelous parted ways with publisher Natsume. Natsume would continue on with publishing Farming RPGs under the title of Harvest Moon, while the original developer would release further releases in the West under the new Story of Seasons moniker.

This game is presented using simple 3D visuals that look pleasant enough, but not especially impressive in any way, and in fact, the game’s framerates suffer frequent slowdown and overall choppy framerates. These visuals are backed by a repetitive soundtrack that started to get annoying to me pretty quickly.

As Farming RPGs go, Story of Seasons gets off to a pretty poor start, with its entire first half hour or so devoted to a mostly non-interactive tutorial with loads of text. Having reviewed a week’s worth of Farming RPGs as I write this, I’m used to each game introducing players to the concept of tilling soil, planting seeds, watering the land, harvesting crops, writing in a journal to save and hopping into a bed to fast forward to the next day, but even so I found myself getting really restless with this game’s slow, plodding way of getting players acquainted with the basics of the genre’s gameplay.

It doesn’t help that so much of the farmland and local town is sprawled out over quite a large area here, and while it can be exciting to have more area to explore, it feels like this game doesn’t fill that area with enough to do in order to justify its size. Rather, it seems to compensate for this by having the player’s walk speed be absurdly fast, which may be contributing to the framerate issues I mentioned above.

Story of Seasons does bring some interesting ideas to the table, such as its market having players focus on maximizing profits by trading in goods most desired by traders, by having rival farmers can compete with, and by having a wildlife safari players can stock with traded wildlife.

However, while Story of Seasons does present the genre with some new ideas, in the end i struggled to get past the game’s horrible pacing issues. Farming RPGs are known for their relaxed pace and tone, but even so this is a game that felt like it was trying to put me to sleep before it even started properly, and then tries to overcorrect by having players speeding through its large map. I just never felt like this game gave me the compelling feeling of building up my own farm, and as such I can’t recommend it to any but the most completionist fans of the genre.

tl;dr – Story of Seasons is a family-friendly Farming RPG-style Management Simulation that brings multiple new elements to the genre, but suffers from nasty pacing and performance issues that really drag down the experience. You have multiple better options on the Nintendo 3DS in this genre.

Grade: C-

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