Story of Seasons: A Wonderful Life
Story of Seasons: A Wonderful Life is a remake of the GameCube game Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life and like all good farming sims these days starts with our main character inheriting a farm and switching city life to a much slower-paced lifestyle in a small village called the forgotten valley.
You meet with your father’s old friend Takakura, who shows you your farm and acts as a mentor for the first part of the game. You start out with a small shack of a house, a barn a small chicken coop.
People Person
Luckily for us, it turns out our protagonist is pretty well-liked in the village and as is tradition in a Story of Seasons games friendships and relationships can be forged with most of Forgotten Valley’s denizens.
You can propose marriage to any of the 8 eligible candidates in the valley, but first, you’ll have to spend time with time and ply them with gifts. As you build relations with people they will open with their back stories and occasionally even give you a useful item, or machine for your farm. (Don’t buy the Seed maker, just befriend Daryl!).
I was surprised by just how quickly I was able to propose marriage in A Wonderful Life and I was happily engaged to Cecelia by the 3rd day of summer.
The Longest Story of Seasons Game?
Story of Seasons: A Wonderful Like might just be one of the Longest Story of Seasons games I have ever played. Even though the seasons are only 10 days long instead of the usual 30 the game has 6 unique chapters for you to playthrough. The first year in the valley took me around 20 hours to complete and if you are not married by the end of that year, it’s Game Over for you with you essentially receiving the bad ending.
As you go through the years, people will move about the village, some will leave, and some new people will move in for you to interact with. Some villagers even die as time passes and it is legitimately heartbreaking seeing how upset and reclusive their partner becomes afterwards.
The end of year one has you welcoming a new addition to your family and it’s down to you to look after them and steer them in the right direction. As the years pass, your child will grow up and develop their own interests like most teenagers. The child-raising aspect is pretty cool and a nice addition to an already great farming sim.
Villagers have set routines and it’s always easy to find someone after a few days of studying their movements. That said, occasionally, one will be standing directly in your way which can be quite annoying, thankfully if you keep walking into the villager you’ll eventually pass through them which is a very welcome addition from the developers.
Personality-wise, the people in town boil down to a bunch of stereotypes, but pretty good ones. You have the Rich snobbish family that has a butler, the archetypal mad scientist obsessed with experiments and some simple farm workers with a shop of their own. Many more people come and leave so there’s a good variety in dialogue even if it is a little surface-level at times.
Farming
Animal produce is your main source of income in Story of Seasons: A Wonder Life and you end up with quite a few different species to raise and care for. The series staple Cows and Chickens make their appearance as expected along with Sheep, ducks, and goats.
As per usual with a Harvest Moon / Story of Seasons game, each animal has an affection level denoted by hearts from 0 – 10. The higher you get these bonds; the higher quality produce you’ll receive. Cows and goats need milking, Sheep need their wool to be cut and all the animals need a good snuggle daily and some feed daily.
Female cows produce milk daily, Chickens lay eggs around once every two days and sheep can be sheered about once every ten days. The quality of the produce follows a tier system with standard Milk for instance being called ‘Milk (B)’. Give your animals enough love and you’ll soon receive some A-grade milk with a max bond producing S-grade Milk which fetches a much higher price when selling.
If you leave two cows of different sexes alone together, there’s a good chance that you’ll end up with a pregnancy, which gifts you a new calf to care for, however, the mother will only produce milk for the calf leaving you out of pocket for some time.
A similar thing can happen with your chickens except you’ll find a pinkish-hued fertilized egg instead which needs to be incubated for a few days before hacking into an adorable chick.
Behind your barn, you have a large field in which you can let your animals out to pasture. A simple ring of the bell outside the barn and chicken coop will have your animals enjoying some outside time along with any tall grass you may let grow, just don’t forget to call the back inside at night as it may diminish the quality of produce you’ll receive. If I recall correctly, your animals could get sick in the GameCube version which is not the case here thankfully.
Your animals will often stand in the way of their feeding areas making it impossible to put out fodder for them, however, I discovered very late into the game that with no items equipped, you can actually push them out of the way. Please learn from my mistakes!
If you look after you’re your animals well and you’ll soon reap the rewards.
As will all good farming games, you’ll be planting and cultivating plenty of different crops. Crops are grown according to what season it is. Some crops only grow between Spring and Summer and others between Winter and Spring. You’ll need to be mindful as to not plant something as the season is about to end as the crops all take a set number of days to mature and will be ruined if it rolls over to the next season.
You can use fertilizer to increase the grade of your crops just like you can with animal produce, to do this you will need to remember to buy fertilizer and apply it to your crops at least once a day.
Your crops can be sold daily, gifted, or made into several dishes your can prepare at home. New recipes can be learnt almost daily for the Harvest Sprites. The more you cook, the more dishes you’ll unlock so it’s wise to keep a small amount of each crop in your refrigerator for any out of seasons recipes you’ll come across.
In the second year, a method for hybrid crops becomes available allowing you to make rare mashup crops which can be sold for additional funds.
Stamina System
Almost every action you perform on the farm will drain some of your stamina, this can be alleviated by eating food or sleeping and as your farm grows it becomes quite the task of trying to keep on top of it.
If for any reason you do end up running out of stamina, you’ll pass out and wake up hours later and will most likely have a bunch of hungry animals wanting food.
There are a few different ways you can spend your days around town if you have completed all of your farm duties for the day.
Dig Site
If you choose, you can opt to spend the day digging over at the dig site. You’ll be equipped with a shovel and let loose to dig away until 5 pm. You’ll find all sorts of trinkets and artefacts that can be sold for a profit and as the years progress the site will expand allowing you to discover more valuable items.
While digging, both the characters in the mine will constantly walk in your path, which removes the option to be able to dig as they are standing directly on top or adjacent to where you want to dig. Throughout my playthrough, I found no solution to this and just had to wait for them to move but as the site expanded it was as much a problem but still, very frustrating.
Pro tip: Holding down ZL allows you to make more precise movements.
Fishing
If you procure a fishing rod, you can fish in many different locations across town, even in the sea.
There’s no mini-game here, just wait for the fish to bite and hold down Y to reel them in. I was surprised by just how many different types of fish there are in A Wonderful Life and each area seems to have its own selection of fish to catch.
Fish can be used in recipes, gifted to people or can be sold to the merchant Van for a pretty good price.
Twice a month (3rd & 8th) Van will set up shop for the afternoon in the middle of town allowing you to sell pretty much anything. You can offload your fish, dig site finds and even plants foraged from around town. It’s worth checking out his inventory from time to time as he sells new outfits for our protagonist as well as some upgraded tools that massively help you out back at the farm.
he also sells energy drinks for 500g each that can restore your stamina and health bars if you are in a pinch.
The character redesigns are great and very similar to the character models in Pioneers of Olive Town and the town now looks much more vibrant when compared to its GameCube counterpart. Performance has been great also; A Wonderful Life ran smoothly for me at all times even when my farm was particularly busy which is nice as Pioneers of Olive Town suffered from an awful lot of slowdown when I reviewed it a few years back.
There are a few things I did not like in Story of Seasons A Wonderful Life with the main one being the lack of direction, there’s no hand-holding here and even as a series veteran, I felt a few mechanics could have been explained better, like how to unlock more recipes etc. The first year is tough and you barely feel like you are making any progress, this is probably not helped by the 10-day limit for each season, and I didn’t feel like I really hit my stride until well into the second year which is fine but makes the game feel like a bit of slow burn at first, which I guess it kind of is.
Another very small and minor gripe I have is the extremely slow speed when buying multiple items from any of the vendors, say I wanted 500 bags of fertilizer, and I’d have to hold down the button for over 30 seconds with the counter slowly ticking up to 500. A very small gripe, but one that happened on more than one occasion during my playthrough.
Conclusion
Story of Seasons: A Wonderful Life is a great farming sim and it’s nice to see this old game being remade for a new generation of gamers to enjoy. Although the game starts off a little slow, you’ll soon be making tons of profits and memories with your in-game family. While the lack of hand-holding may put off some people, there’s a really great game in there once you get to grips with the systems and it’s quite possibly the longest Story of Seasons game yet taking a whopping 60 hours to fully complete.
8
Nintendo Switch review code kindly provided by Marvelous
