There's a bit of history surrounding the series of events that led to the name change that XSEED had to make for this game. It's actually a Bokujō Monogatari title, which was called Harvest Moon in the West. Since Marvelous, the company that owns the series, has decided to let it's child company work on the series; they had to let go of the name. This is because Natsume still owns that trademark. In fact, Natsume has decided to use that name, and now Harvest Moon is a series unto itself. This leads us to Story of Seasons, and it's actually still a pretty fun game, even if it seems to take a few steps back in the process.

     Story of Seasons is like most entries in the series, about farming. You make a custom character that's either male or female, and there are a decent number of face and hair presets. There really is no story, but the goal of the game is to raise crops, collect odd and end things, or build items to sell to the various merchants at the Trade Depot. Once you meet certain thresholds, new merchants will come in. While this gives the player incentives, it actually causes some unintended side-effects in the game design. In past games, you had a shipping box that you could put things in daily to sell immediately. Now you can only go to the merchant on certain days, and they aren't there that often. The only remedy to this is to find things to sell and get more merchants to come so you can sell more often. Good thing that there is a lot to do. You can fish, dive for treasure, mine for gems and metals, craft, and of course grow crops. There's also marriage, which is hetero only. Totally expected though as it wasn't terribly long ago that Farm Story introduced making female characters playable. Gotta love the rate of progress for the series. Interestingly enough though, the default selection of bachelors outnumber the bachelorettes. There's not much of a point to marriage though, but they do help gather materials for you. And it's something else to do in the game. Would have been nice if there were story bits regarding the courting process. Other things you can do are competing with other farmers for renting extra fields, or creating a safari to house exotic animals. There's even a multiplayer option, but it's more of a small diversion than anything. 

     Unlike Rune Factory, a lot of features like being able to easily check out friendship levels, or having the ability to increase your maximum Stamina and health levels don't exist here. Or at least initially, as the game has a drip feeding method of unlocking things. It's a deliberately slow grind, and that kind of pacing makes it hard to dedicate to extended play. At that point, the game is built to be played small bits at a time. While the game sports some nice artwork, the 3D models are kind of bland, and this is even more disappointing since the game has a pretty bad frame-rate. It's mostly 30 frames, but it dips whenever there's a weather effect going on. It's odd since Rune Factory 4 managed 60 frames easily, and the producer for that game is the same as Story of Seasons. The teams are different, but you'd think that would have been a priority. The game is still a great deal of fun, but these issues make one wonder if the team put there best foot forward. At the very least, Story of Seasons should be a fresh start for the series, and hopefully the next entry address these faults. But if you wanted a good farming sim, this game is worth a look.    


The Bottom Line: A fun follow-up to the series that brings a lot of new features but makes some backwards steps in the process.

Acquisition Method: Review code provided by XSEED Games.