STORY OF SEASONS: Pioneers of Olive Town

This is the first story of seasons/harvest moon game I ever played and I must say it didn’t give me the best impression. If you have played stardew valley or animal crossing you’ll be right at home. Sadly, this entry in the long running franchise feels half-baked and has some truly questionable decisions that make the whole experience that more painful. It’s fun up until the point where you fully renovate the town, then it becomes a mind-numbing grind. I love getting up in the morning, talking to my soulmate, checking up on crops, collecting and refiling makers, taking care of animals, possibly harvesting mushrooms or honey, occasionally getting fruits from the trees. Then in my spare time either fishing, mining, cutting, chopping and talking to the people. Ultimately hitting the hay and calling it a day. Rinse and repeat. Speaking of people, every once in a while there are special events that you can attend, the execution is terrible tho, you’re only forced to watch what’s happening for the most part. One thing that the game is supposed to do better than everybody’s favorite stardew valley is the story - it’s better sure but not a whole lot, many of the characters are simply too shallow and forgettable. The visuals are also an improvement, obviously, even though pixel graphics have their own charm. And overall, the game does a good job at explaining what you should do next unlike stardew which can be helpful for beginners in this genre. That’s where my praise ends. I already touched on the grindy nature, even playing the game on sapling difficulty, I just hit 50 hours and I still haven’t fully maxed out all the skills, it’s not only skills, there are other things that take ages to gather like the forsaken orichalcum - you see, instead of putting the ore more frequently in the lower levels of the mine it makes almost impossible to spawn anyway, so the best way to get it is by paying a visit to the stonebakery every few days and mining it from there, incredibly tedious process. Besides that, the makers to process the ores and other things take up so much space on the farm, why do they have to be so big, and to be efficient you need as many of them as possible, same goes for chests. Not like you got a ton of options to furnish your farm and house with, I expected the game to have plenty of decorations but that’s not the case at all, the selection is quite abysmal and limited. On top of that, there are some clothing items but most of them are boring and look similar. The game has sprites too, I assume a staple of the franchise, they provide you with generally useless resources, 2 sloppy mini-games and a couple of helpful maps to make your suffering more bearable. I could go into more detail and rant for days, however, I’m going to stop it here, after all there are other reviews. Since it’s my first time in the story of seasons universe I’ll be kind and give the game a positive review but it’s a mixed bag to say the least - 5/10

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I personally didn't like it. Uninteresting characters, progression, collection... no QoL, no logic in the economy (Cooked dishes cost less than the raw ingredients???). It just made me want to play better farming sims.

Pioneers of Olive Town didn't live up to my expectations, I expected so much more from XSEED Games, and a farming sim released in 2021. There are a lot of new mechanics introduced in this installment, however, almost all of them feel shallow. there's almost no depth to any of the mechanics, and they feel boring, repetitive, and time consuming.

While I've loved the BokuMono games for 20 years, I can't recommend this one. Compared to past renditions of the farming sim, Olive Town feels... lazy? Underdeveloped? It carries the look of BokuMono, but the spirit is dead. Progression is pretty fast, but plenty of the mechanics are incredibly irritating. For one, there's no auto-sort. Like, what? Then the crafting machines takes forever to process (it takes 23 hours to convert ONE ITEM into TWO bags of seeds). You need a bunch of orialchum ingots (which you need to burn an entire day and 4-5 food items to get ONE of—MAYBE) to repair the hydroponics facility/greenhouse, so you're stuck waiting a year for processing seeds if you want to plant a single-season crop. And God forbid you have a multi-harvest crop that is single season. The silo and its related buildings only hold 99 fodder, which if you have a lot of animals you fly through in a matter of days, so you have to constantly refill it and keep a bunch in regular storage. Speaking of which, you're going to have to trash up your farm with a ton of storage boxes if you want to keep any crops to cook with or use those seeds you're waiting a year to plant. Good luck, bozo! It's fairly obvious this is a Switch port based on the control scheme; namely that you have to click every time you want to increase an amount of something or every time you hit a tree or boulder rather than having a click-hold. It looks great, honestly, but wow could they not have fixed this for a PC release? The relationships are incredibly shallow and boring. Townies rarely comment upon anything you do, even if you're dating or married to them, and the same few dialogue lines are cycled at all times. The relationship events could have been interesting if that changed anything about your day-to-day interactions, but nope. One thing that was cool though was your notebook changing character descriptions as you get to know someone more. I don't know if Marvelous have gotten tired of the formula, or maybe they feel like they're being upstaged by Stardew Valley and the boom of farming/lifesim games in the past decade or so, but if you want the nostalgic and relaxing chore simulator, you're better off just getting Friends of Mineral Town or some other game.

I never finished this game, but I remember it being a very pleasant experience. I can't vouch for their other games, but this one is a very standard farming sim. You start on a small plot and eventually grow, make more plots, get more ingredients. Certain ingredients grow better during different seasons, save your money and plan accordingly to maximize profit. Once you have enough money you buy farm animals, farm animal housing, Feeders to automize feeding. Cows, Chickens etc... You also get upgradeable equipment, that gets increasingly difficult to obtain that lets you affect the terrain faster. You can find your best girl, Its Reina. and yea, that's it. Very standard farming sim with a cute aesthetic. Game is stable: no issues no crashes no stutters Music is fitting, relaxing. Voice acting? - I can't remember if there was voice acting. I think it was all text dialogue so if you are not a fan of reading everything. That might annoy you. But this is a game that for better or for worse assumes you just want to relax and have nothing but time to kill. TLDR: Yes, it's worth it. However, I'm not sure this is the gold standard in what people who play farming sims are looking for. All i can say is i had a nice time while playing it. Just going to throw this in really quick too. If anyone from Marvelous USA sees this. Please bring back tamsoft.

STORY OF SEASONS: Pioneers of Olive Town is a Nintendo Switch handheld game that was lazily ported to Steam. It's an unabashed, lazy ripoff of Stardew Valley (Copyright ConcernedApe, 2016). Many lazy "amateur" developers don't pay attention to morality, and get so lazy they just steal the ideas of actual, real game developers without credit, such as the "developer" here has done. Putting aside the unethical intellectual bankruptcy of stealing someone else's game concept for profit, this is also breaking that unwritten law of stealing other people's game ideas... you should at least try to do better than the game you're ripping off. STORY OF SEASONS: Pioneers of Olive Town is considerably worse than Stardew Valley, despite marginally better graphics (it's hard to do worse than pixelcrap). But what made Stardew Valley shine (as much as pixelcrap can) was the writing, characterization and charm of the narrative that underpinned the experience. That's almost completely absent here with bland, forgettable characters, dry and unengaging narrative, and pathetically boring gameplay loops that you have to grind to get anywhere (and why would you want to?). Of course, being a bad game is just one thing... wait until you see the absolutely insane price tag on this. On the upside, the game does feature customisable controls and resolution, so at least some of the basic, minimum requirements have been met. Unfortunately there's a number of other technical defects and shortcomings which contribute to the game being difficult to recommend to gamers. Because this is designed for handheld/portable gaming appliances, it carries a number of deliberate design deficiencies. Compromises were made to cater to the low power handheld gaming appliances that the game was designed for. These are unfortunate compromises and limitations that PC gamers shouldn't be forced to accept, but it's evident that PC was a second thought for the mobile game developers. The game is deficient as a result of these choices, and would have been so much better without the handicaps that designing games for low power handhelds forces upon a game. While this might run well on a Steam Deck, we must remember the vast majority of gamers here are gaming on PC. The game features low-polygon "retro" assets with cartoony, mobile app style shader effects, making this look like a barely functional mobile app from 15 years ago. This visual style is a method that lazy devs often use when they have a lack of interest/capability to create highly detailed, high poly models and instead use shader effects to disguise that shortcoming under the name of "art", or "We made it look bad on purpose", which really isn't something gamers should have to put up with. It's unclear why the developers weren't willing to arrange high quality, high polygon count contemporary assets and high resolution textures for the game. It's far below the state of the art visuals gamers expect as a result of their decisions. These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game. Let's talk about price and the value this represents for us gamers. Should you buy this game? Is it among the best the Steam catalogue has to offer? STORY OF SEASONS: Pioneers of Olive Town has the greedy, completely insane cash grab price of FOURTY UNITED STATES DOLLARS, full AAA pricing. That makes this a cash grab, trying to get paid AAA bucks for a crappy Nintendo Switch game, heck, this more of a glorified mobile app. That's insulting. There's enough defects and quality problems with this game that it's really impossible to recommend to gamers. The price is a slap in the face, ridiculous greed. Remember what I often say... if you don't agree with what I've said about this game, by all means buy it and play it. My review is just here to inform your buying decision, and if you think I was wrong and you bought the game, then I've done what I really wanted to do... inform your buying decision.

This is single player farming game and yet it's more grindy than grindy mmos and after around 2 years of in-game play time it becames very boring.

There is nothing unique between this game and any other look-a-likes.

It's a Story of Seasons game wearing a Stardew Valley hat, and wearing it badly. Copies it right down to the sprinklers and machines, except this game has a boring story, boring characters, and boring dialogue. The story has no engaging objective and no challenge. The point is to develop the town and attract tourists, and it apparently needs all these "big upgrades", so I'm asked to donate like 5 rocks I found lying on the ground and next day BAM, the entire town has all newly paved roads, AND streetlights? It's like there's no real milestones to work towards. And you've got a mayor who is super rude to his own son for no legit reason. Textures are flat, frames drop whenever I exit buildings, the character models don't look that great. Lacking sound effects which is weird for a farming sim, the bodies of water you fish in are silent. There's nothing cozy or fun about this game, it's just plain boring. I wouldn't even recommend getting this on sale. This is low-effort slop from XSEED which is a shame. It makes SoS: Trio of Towns look peak, and that's a ten year old game with weird bugs and still far better than this.