STORY OF SEASONS: Friends of Mineral Town

To start things off: I was playing this game in Japanese as a learner, it does have Furigana, which helps a lot, but it is not in the menus or books etc., only in conversation. Still nice to have some of it to understand the story better without having to run every sentence with unknown kanji through translators to see if I may know the word itself already. If you're interested in playing something Japanese, this game has a lot of simple text, so it should be pretty approachable to almost anyone who doesn't mind running things through google lens. You can turn Furigana on or off to your liking. It also has a lot of repetition, so you'll really get good with these basic sentences! Now to the game itself! I have been playing on a controller and liked the controls, but my wife prefers the keyboard and this game has god awful keyboard controls. The esc key isn't even used, you go to the menu using what feels like random buttons, use backspace to get back out of the menu or have to rightlclick (which is better, but doesn't even get explained) Anyway, I highly recommend using a controller because of the poor keyboard optimizations. Sadly the game has some performance issues, having stuff randomly slow down a lot when using Vsync. Turn it off, it will have some tearing, but at least it seems to work without any other troubles. Another issue with the game is, that it has a bug regarding the special event about horseracing. If you don't play the game in the same language your system is set to, you won't see the betting odds, or how many medals you bought or how many medals you own or something costs.. anything related to that are just blank spaces. The characters are all very lovable though, I really enjoy seeing their stories and how they interact in them! The interactions between the different characters are very cute, I like all the stories going on and getting to know all of these characters! The artworks are also very cute, really well done! I also really like that Farm Map. It shows you where your animals are, if there's eggs to collect in the barn, which crops are planted, if they are watered or not and where the little helpers are. So no running around checking everything, you just see it in a single buttonpress! It has a lot to do, most of which gets explained in books from the library or tutorials, however some things you'll simply have to find out... or do some research... I wish some things would have been clearer without me having to google or check a guide. Knowing everything would be lame too, but some things are a bit weird, so I really think those should simply be explained somewhere ingame. It does have a few instances of being annoying sometimes. Like how specific events can only be triggered in a very specific day, with specific weather and time, which may or may not get triggered anyway, because the npcs aren't present at that spot...? Just try it another day, it'll work at some point. The horse you get later on to ride on, is kinda big, it seems to get in the way a lot, when trying to go past it. Should have just been made walk through imo. (I noticed very late that the button that moves yourself forward, lets you run through all kinds of animals and townspeople. Makes this much better...) It also wants you to grind... a lot. You absolutely have to breed animals to be able to get higher hearts and therefor better products and also to be able to win certain events you need at least 8 hearts. The most you can get without breeding is 5 and you only gain 1 heart per breeding process. It also takes a long time to finish and to get the hearts up. The mines are unneccessarily long too. Stuff like that. So if you're wanting to go and hunt all achievements, you'll be playing this game over at least 200 hours. while a normal playthrough to have seen everything will be closer to 100 hours. Which means that you will be doing 100 hours of just feeding animals, go to sleep, repeat. Or reloading your save for several hours to get X Wool, as this drops very rarely and can't be crafted etc. But other than that, I am pretty happy with how everything was done in this game. If you just want to have fun, play the main story, see all cutscenes, get married and you're done! Much better than grinding mindlessly for hours haha