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FOAMGap 16: Story of Seasons A Wonderful Life
2 days ago
so i usually like to beat games before doing on of these... whatever these are... but nearly 80 hours in (and only ~2/3 of the way throuhg form my estimate) i dropped the game. however its hard to spend that much time with something and not have some thoughts.
so given the fact i did a drawing a few years ago referencing some thoughts i had on the character redesigns of Story of Seasons Friends of Mineral Town compared against Harvest Moon Back to Nature/64/Friends of Mineral Town it should be no surprise i have some history with this series (really just BtN/FoMT and to a much lesser extent AWL; as mentioned the Design of the cow is more or less just a cow plushie i got for pre ordering AWL on Gamecube back when i was in highschool) though this time i don't have much to say about character designs, though there are apparently some drastic changes but given the only character i really remember from the original is my Waifu of choice Nami (i don't have a type... f*** you, you have a type...) who is all but unchanged. However, Gameplay is a different Story.
much of my memories with Harvest Moon back in the day had a tinge of, for lack of better wording, fighting for my life to survive; with AWL being more prominent in this sense. This is something that the remakes have never had me close to feeling (well there was one time in SoSFoMT where i had put every plot and resource on the farm it gives you too use only to have every crop finish growing the same day and then spending 2-3 full in game days harvesting them all before i learned that free nature sprite labor is a thing) but this wasn't a problem when i played SoSFoMT the softening of the difficulty made for a smoother and more fun experience that fit well in the way i was playing it (play a day or two lying in bed on my steamdeck before going to sleep) but SoSAWL is a different story.
given the more overt narrative focus and broadly more 'realistic' approach to how crops and live stock function it feels like there is a specific vibe the game is going for and the remake feels like it tries to have its cake (streamline and make things easier) and it it too (have that same vibe) but doesn't really hit the mark.
the issue is mainly that days are long (my ~80 hours took me just short of year 4 winter which is 150 days or ~35-40 minutes per in game day) but there isn't much meaningful to do. in a given day my farming tasks would be largely finished by ~10AM to noon leaving me until 6-8PM that i would have to find something to do until i could confidently call it a day, and there isn't much to do and most of it is shallow: you can fish which is just two button presses and some waiting, you can work at the dig site which is just walking around and repeatedly pressing a button, you can talk to people but they have very little to say (outside of cutscene events which have arbitrary enough triggers that unless you're walking into every house and room in town once a day you probably won't see many) and almost never get more or different dialogue as the game goes on. honestly the only mechanic with any depth besides farming is influencing your child, something i wasn't interested in.
now this is not to say the original was any deeper with this side activates or NPC interactions, but the higher difficulty would help to avoid seeing the limitations; needing to eat more often meant fishing had a concrete benefit even if it might not be intrinsically engaging, making money being harder means helping at the dig site has more benefit since selling what you find can be a decent way to make money, and you have less time to interact with the NPCs so their limited dialogue is less likely to stand out. Really AWL feels like it wants you to have a virtual life in this small coastal town but so many of the difficulty reduction and QoL updates in SoSAWL just make you bump up against the edges of the simulation constantly and leave it feeling lesser in my opinion
ALSO WITH ALL THE QOL UPDATES WHY CAN I ONLY HYBRIDIZE TWO SEEDS AT A TIME AND HAVE TO GO TRHOUHG THE SAME SHORT CONVERSTATION EACH TIME
so given the fact i did a drawing a few years ago referencing some thoughts i had on the character redesigns of Story of Seasons Friends of Mineral Town compared against Harvest Moon Back to Nature/64/Friends of Mineral Town it should be no surprise i have some history with this series (really just BtN/FoMT and to a much lesser extent AWL; as mentioned the Design of the cow is more or less just a cow plushie i got for pre ordering AWL on Gamecube back when i was in highschool) though this time i don't have much to say about character designs, though there are apparently some drastic changes but given the only character i really remember from the original is my Waifu of choice Nami (i don't have a type... f*** you, you have a type...) who is all but unchanged. However, Gameplay is a different Story.
much of my memories with Harvest Moon back in the day had a tinge of, for lack of better wording, fighting for my life to survive; with AWL being more prominent in this sense. This is something that the remakes have never had me close to feeling (well there was one time in SoSFoMT where i had put every plot and resource on the farm it gives you too use only to have every crop finish growing the same day and then spending 2-3 full in game days harvesting them all before i learned that free nature sprite labor is a thing) but this wasn't a problem when i played SoSFoMT the softening of the difficulty made for a smoother and more fun experience that fit well in the way i was playing it (play a day or two lying in bed on my steamdeck before going to sleep) but SoSAWL is a different story.
given the more overt narrative focus and broadly more 'realistic' approach to how crops and live stock function it feels like there is a specific vibe the game is going for and the remake feels like it tries to have its cake (streamline and make things easier) and it it too (have that same vibe) but doesn't really hit the mark.
the issue is mainly that days are long (my ~80 hours took me just short of year 4 winter which is 150 days or ~35-40 minutes per in game day) but there isn't much meaningful to do. in a given day my farming tasks would be largely finished by ~10AM to noon leaving me until 6-8PM that i would have to find something to do until i could confidently call it a day, and there isn't much to do and most of it is shallow: you can fish which is just two button presses and some waiting, you can work at the dig site which is just walking around and repeatedly pressing a button, you can talk to people but they have very little to say (outside of cutscene events which have arbitrary enough triggers that unless you're walking into every house and room in town once a day you probably won't see many) and almost never get more or different dialogue as the game goes on. honestly the only mechanic with any depth besides farming is influencing your child, something i wasn't interested in.
now this is not to say the original was any deeper with this side activates or NPC interactions, but the higher difficulty would help to avoid seeing the limitations; needing to eat more often meant fishing had a concrete benefit even if it might not be intrinsically engaging, making money being harder means helping at the dig site has more benefit since selling what you find can be a decent way to make money, and you have less time to interact with the NPCs so their limited dialogue is less likely to stand out. Really AWL feels like it wants you to have a virtual life in this small coastal town but so many of the difficulty reduction and QoL updates in SoSAWL just make you bump up against the edges of the simulation constantly and leave it feeling lesser in my opinion
ALSO WITH ALL THE QOL UPDATES WHY CAN I ONLY HYBRIDIZE TWO SEEDS AT A TIME AND HAVE TO GO TRHOUHG THE SAME SHORT CONVERSTATION EACH TIME
