REVIEW: ‘Story Of Seasons: A Wonderful Life’ Requires A Long, Slow Commitment (Switch)

Long before Stardew Valley ruled the low-key farming sim roost, there was Harvest Moon. Now known in the West as Story of Seasons (and not to be confused with Natsume’s ongoing Harvest Moon games), Marvelous and XSeed Games present a Story of Seasons: A Wonderful Life. This is a remake of the 2003 Harvest Moon title, mostly recreating the original game and its subsequent special edition with a few quality-of-life improvements and changes to the names of a significant number of characters. In this rendition, you arrive in the Forgotten Valley to take over a farm from your late father’s best friend Takakura and over the course of many years, you grow your farm as well as your family as you find a life partner and start a family together.

Story of Seasons: A Wonderful Life is really a life sim as much as it is a farming sim. Your objective in the first chapter is to find a spouse whilst also being tasked with starting up a potentially successful farm. Off the bat, I’m appreciative that not only does the game allow you to choose your pronouns, including they/them, as well as your characters’ features so as not to box you into any specific gender or performance, but the game also makes male and female suitors available to you regardless of which pronouns you select. The game has four male and four female characters with whom you can choose to pursue romance, and there is nothing that gatekeeps you from any of them.

Aside from your own ignorance about how to play the game. Unfortunately, it was never quite clear to me without extensive Googling how it is that you actually go about courting or even befriending any of the characters in the game. This was my greatest frustration and disappointment. Every eligible bachelor has a heart system as well as a friendship system, which feel difficult to distinguish from one another. The hearts are essential to your ability to marry one by the end of the first chapter, which is essential to moving on in the game.

The hearts are filled by either presenting gifts, something that is never explicitly explained or even really hinted at, or by responding correctly during seemingly randomly triggered cutscenes. You can go up to characters and talk to them endlessly and only get the same line in response over and over. Without a clear way to trigger these cutscenes, I found myself just wasting time running in circles hoping something interesting would happen, disappointed more often than not. Beyond these cutscenes though, there is no discernable way to advance your relationships with or knowledge of the game’s many interesting characters on a day-to-day basis. It requires patience to just keep following them around day to day and just hoping they’re ready to talk eventually.

When you’re not going around trying to figure out how to socialize, the name of the game is farming. It’s a familiar system for anybody who has played similar farming sim games. You have an array of tools to start, like a hoe and a watering can, and it costs energy every time you use one. If you work too much in a given day, you could wind up passing out, so you need to either conserve energy or prepare food from your bounty or purchase some in town to keep your energy up. Upgrades over time to your tools or your farm as a whole will help make planting, watering, fertilizing, and harvesting easier, of course. And you can also raise a host of animals like cows, sheep, and chickens for their milk, wool, and eggs respectively, as well as their adorable cuddles on a daily basis. All of this takes place on a cycle of four seasons lasting 10 days each where certain crops can only grow at certain times, requiring you to plan carefully what you plant and at what time to maximize your yields.

All of the farming mechanics work swimmingly. The issue I had playing Story of Seasons: A Wonderful Life is really just that once you finish your morning’s chores, which don’t take all that long, because the socializing is so random, I got quite bored with running in circles around town with nobody to have serious conversations with or events to trigger pretty quickly. You can spend hours fishing if you want once you buy a rod, but the fishing mechanic is very simple and not very interesting. And you can only visit the archeological dig site once a day. I found myself “going out of town” to skip ahead several hours more often than not just so I could get to my afternoon chores faster more often than not. While I’m sure that there might have been benefits to trying to spend every day talking to every one of my neighbors or bringing them gifts more often than I did, once I decided who I wanted to marry, the game offered me virtually no clear incentive to do any of that. It was just wake up, farm, give a gift to my beloved, farm, sleep, repeat.

I don’t dislike this cycle of gameplay by any means. The music is charming to the point where I could gladly leave the game on in the background just to listen to the main song. The visuals are perfectly delightful to the point where I could spend all day cuddling my cows. And every character in the game has so much more personality than the vast majority of NPCs out there. I just wish I could have been doing more to actually get to know any of them.

At the pace of play that I had to endure to review the game, I didn’t feel like I was able to just sit back and enjoy a wonderful life the way the game encourages you to. It’s not a game about getting through the seasons as quickly as possible to grow a farming empire. Sure, there’s a capitalist system that rewards hard work with material outcomes, but all of that work is really in the service of being able to make a life for yourself, support a family, and hopefully over time work more efficiently and less hard.

If you can take the time to pace yourself and slowly enjoy everything the game has to offer from charming neighbors to home-cooked meals, then there is a whole lot to enjoy about Story of Seasons: A Wonderful Life. Don’t rush through it. Try to enjoy the little things it has to offer, even if the game doesn’t always do the most it could to encourage you towards them.

Story of Seasons: A Wonderful Life is available June 27th on Nintendo Switch, Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 5, and PC.