In your typical life simulator, there is a sense of forever. It’s well earned, after hours of planting crops and toiling by the sea, or in mines, or in barnyards, but at the same time, the time skip happens so suddenly you’ll start thinking about the very nature of your ‘wonderful’ life.Īs you gaze upon your new child – in my case, a son – you’ll realise how different and rare the world of Story of Seasons: A Wonderful Life really is. This moment passes in the blink of an eye. Your home has been expanded, your partner looks older, and most importantly, you have a child you love dearly. Time then passes, and by the dawn of the ‘second’ year – in the game’s timeline, this accounts for many years – you’re living happily with your spouse. Middle age Screenshot: GamesHubĪt the end of the game’s first year, in which you’ll come to understand seasonal crops and the most effective ways of raising and breeding animals, you’ll meet a love interest, and either propose or be proposed to – with a delightful cutscene affirming your love. Particularly once you find your beau, and begin a quiet, sweet romance. While much of their dialogue is simplistic – this is, after all, a faithful remaster of a GameCube classic – they become more intrinsically part of your day as you advance your farm, and slowly build a thriving community business. Each townsperson has their own approach to conversation, and require different gifts to ply their friendship. Then there’s guitarist Gustafa, the reserved Lumina, and the charming Cecilia. You’ll also meet Nami, the quiet and sarcastic loner, and Rock, the work-hating idealist. You’ll meet Gordy, and eventually crack his tough and shy exterior to discover a deep thinker and tinkerer. You’ll meet Molly, one of the baristas at the Cafe Bluebird, and learn about her past as city slicker. The action is largely player-driven, and you’ll spend your days choosing how to to live your life, with freedom and peace at your fingertips.īut as you travel through town, you’ll stumble onto unique cutscenes that reveal more about your neighbours and their quiet little dramas. Story of Seasons: A Wonderful Life is not narratively dense. When you’re not tending to your farm, you’ll head into town to meet your neighbours, romance your beau, and potentially uncover a range of small, quirky plot lines. You’ll also spend your time snuggling and feeding cute animals, ensuring they’re as healthy as possible, to milk or shear them for profit, or nab their eggs for breeding or selling. Once they’ve matured, you can drop their fruits or vegetables in a deposit box, slowly earning a profit for your farm. To plant crops, you’ll hoe a field, bury seeds, and water them every day. Those familiar with modern farm simulators will understand this routine immediately – after all, games like Stardew Valley owe a lot to Harvest Moon / Story of Seasons. As you familiarise yourself with your new farmland, you’ll develop a routine – wake up early in the morning, plant or water crops, let your farm animals out to pasture, refill their feeds, and tend to their needs. Takakura gifts you a cow, plots of land, and a hope for more – and then the wide world of A Wonderful Life is open to your whims. Read: Marvelous announces multiplayer Story of Seasons game Following in his footsteps, you begin a similar journey. While the game doesn’t explicitly reference his death, your father is treated as an unseen, spiritual figure – a symbol of Takakura’s unrealised dreams of running a successful farm. But A Wonderful Life invites this introspective with its calming, slow story about collecting life’s many ‘Wonders’, learning to open yourself up to love, and rearing a child amongst a wholesome community.Īs the game opens, you meet a man named Takakura, who was formerly friends with your father when he lived in the Forgotten Valley. To get so existential over a simple life simulator, first launched as Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life for Nintendo GameCube in 2004, feels silly. It understands the ‘between’ is what makes the journey worthwhile. Its primary hook is centred on the act of living, and eventually, dying. Story of Seasons: A Wonderful Life understands this, in a way many modern life simulators don’t. Time is finite, and that makes everything, and everyone, feel more special. Because we know we’ll die one day, moments become more precious. One school of thought laments this fact another celebrates it.
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