Doraemon Story of Seasons

Genre: Top-Down Management Sim / RPG

Players: 1

.

Review:

Doraemon Story of Seasons is a Management Sim with RPG elements along the same lines as other “farming RPG” games like Stardew Valley and Harvest Moon, with this title specifically taking the long-running Story of Seasons series (the games we know as Harvest Moon were actually some of the earliest Story of Seasons games before a dispute between the publisher and developer split the licenses) and combining it with the even longer-running Doraemon franchise, a manga and anime that’s super-popular in Japan, but not very well-known in the US.

For those unfamiliar with the Doraemon franchise (which is likely most of the readers here), Doraemon is about a giant blue time-traveling earless robot cat of the same name from the future who is sent to our time to help a lazy kid named Noby so his descendents can enjoy a better life. One of the noteworthy focal points of the franchise is Doraemon’s pouch, which holds a multitude of futuristic gadgets that do all sorts of crazy things that get Noby into trouble more often than not. From what I can tell, this game marks the first release of a Doraemon-branded game on Western consoles, although Doraemon has appeared in other games before that have made it to the West.

I’m not a follower of either the Doraemon franchise or the Story of Seasons franchise, but it seems pretty clear that their meeting in this game is a clashing of some pretty big stylistic differences, and the result leaves the game’s presentation an ungainly mess of parts that might work well on their own, but clash horribly with each other. There are some very good qualities here – The backgrounds are absolutely gorgeous 2D watercolor-style art, and the placid tone they evoke is furthered by the absolutely beautiful and understated soundtrack that does a wonderful job of building exactly the sort of atmosphere you’d want out of a “Farming RPG”-style game… but so much of this is undone by the game’s other half.

All of the characters here feel like they came straight out of a world that’s far more goofy and childish than the tone they find themselves in, with them acting in not just a stereotypically “anime” fashion, but stereotypically “anime intended for children” fashion, with exaggerated emotions, over-explaining basic concepts, and stumbling over themselves to try to be polite and helpful, and this all accompanied with loud voice clips in Japanese over poorly-localized English text. And the story here is so ridiculous it feels like it’s all just an excuse to mash these characters into a farming RPG, with your characters whisked away to a magical town where child labor is enforced by law – oh, don’t worry, after the initial shock all of the young children quickly decide it’s a good thing that they be forced to go begging for work, to the point where Noby is disappointed that he’s having so much trouble finding someone to hire his ten year-old labor (it’s apparently unclear how old Noby is supposed to be, other than that he hasn’t hit puberty yet).

As if to highlight how much these two franchises clash, one of the most common activities you’re likely to be doing, as you might expect, is clearing rocks and trees from your farm and hacking away at similar obstructions. As you do so, your slow but steady work will be accompanied by the backing of a soft, placid music and surrounded by pastel trees… all while your character screams at the top of his lungs with every swing of the axe, hammer, or hoe.

Well, okay, so maybe Doraemon wasn’t the best fit for a Farming RPG, but is the gameplay at least good? Ehhh…

Here’s the thing – Doraemon Story of Seasons hits all the proper beats. There’s a good variety of stuff to do, a decent-sized population of villagers to “befriend” (not date, as is the genre norm, because you’re just a kid), and a regular calendar of events to infuse the game with variety. However, aside from the Doraemon franchise, there’s not much that this game does that’s truly unique for the genre, or truly exceptional. And in fact, in a few areas, I’d say it’s worse than the average.

Firstly, there’s the atrociously slow pacing – the opening tutorial alone will have you waiting for a seemingly interminable amount of time to get to actual real gameplay. However, it doesn’t stop there – the game slows to a crawl during any of the game’s lengthy conversations, many of which crop up at random intervals even if you avoid other people, as the game regularly assaults you with cutscenes. However, the pacing of the gameplay itself isn’t much better – it takes a lengthy amount of time to gather enough resources to do anything worthwhile in this game, making the fun of doing chores in this game feel like… well, chores.

There’s another problem that caused frequent frustrations for me, and that is that this game is extremely picky about determining which object you are facing, with the slightest movement in any direction causing you to target the wrong object or even no object at all, even if the thing you want to interact with is right in front of you in the direction you are facing. In a game that is all about doing repetitive tasks, this issue makes performing those repetitive tasks unnecessarily tedious, and makes it all feel even more like work.

Even more frustrating than this is the way shops in this game work. As per usual in this sort of game, shops all have a set schedule. However, this schedule is not posted anywhere I can see in the game – I had to look online to see when each of these places would be open, with some of the hours these places keep being absolutely ridiculous – the general store, for example, apparently doesn’t open until 3PM. That’s bad enough as-is, but it gets even worse, as the people in this town have a mind of their own, and often won’t abide by their own shop hours, running off to do heaven knows what and leaving you wondering if you should stick around and wait for them to return, or just leave and do something else productive. Oh, and don’t think that cornering one of these characters in the shop they run will do you any good either – if you talk to a shopkeeper in their shop but it’s not during the shop’s open hours which are not posted, the dialogue option for you to shop will not appear, and the game gives the player no indication why this is.

I really wanted to like Doraemon Story of Seasons, because its good qualities are very good. The music and backgrounds are truly charming, and right from the start had me wanting to see more of the game, but as the annoying characters kept talking and talking and talking and the actual gameplay seemed to take forever to begin, it started sapping my enthusiasm for the game. When I tried engaging the tasks of farming and found myself struggling with the controls to get my character to register the object I had him looking at, I found myself concerned about where this all was headed. And when I spent multiple days on a wild goose chase trying to figure out how to get the damn shopkeepers to actually sell me something, I finally decided that those good qualities simply were not enough to save this game from its flaws, especially when I could simply be playing Stardew Valley instead. So if you’re looking for a good Farming RPG on the Nintendo Switch, just get that game instead. Don’t bother with this one.

tl;dr – Doraemon Story of Seasons marries the long-running Story of Season franchise of Farming RPG-style games with the even longer-running Doraemon manga and anime franchise. Unfortunately, this feels like a marriage that was on the rocks from day one, as the goofy and childlike characters clash with the placid tone of the rest of the game. This is made worse by finicky controls, atrocious pacing issues, and unreliable shopkeepers that make the work of running a farm feel less like fun and more like… well, work. If you want a game in this genre, you have better options on the Nintendo Switch.

Grade: C-

^{You can support eShopperReviews on Patreon! Please click HERE to become a Sponsor!}