Story of Seasons: Grand Bazaar is a remake of the DS exclusive Harvest Moon: Grand Bazaar released back in 2008 with a new coat of paint for Nintendo Switch, Switch 2 & Steam. That said, it’s not a complete 1:1 remake like the previous Friends of Mineral Town or A Wonderful Life, and some late-game changes will keep returning DS veterans happy.
The premise of Story of Seasons: Grand Bazaar is quite straightforward: It’s a tale about the once-thriving Zephyr town and its dwindling Bazaar. Our protagonist arrives as the town’s new farmer and is quickly drafted by the town mayor, Felix, to help attract more people and rebuild the Bazaar back to its former glory. Along with the weekly Bazaar, there’s the Bazaar review board rating, which will award you a rank dependent on how many stalls you have set up and how much revenue you generate. The primary goal of Grand Bazaar is to achieve the top ranking Bazaar by the review board, whilst fixing up Zephyr town along the way.
Gameplay
Story of Seasons: Grand Bazaar will have you tending crops, raising animals, making friends and even finding love. There’s a lot to do each day, and Grand Bazaar follows the calendar and clock system the series is known for, with each day taking around 20 minutes or so.
Like other games in the series, what you do each day is entirely up to you. You can choose to take the game slowly if you want. You start each day with a full bar of stamina, and any activities relating to farming, animal keeping, foraging or fishing will all sap a tiny amount. The core gameplay involves finding a good balance between managing the ever-ticking clock, Stamina, and any social obligations you make with the town’s residents.
You start the game in Spring with your small plot of land and a handful of tools to get you started. To plant crops, you’ll need to clear your plot of any debris using your sickle and axe, sprinkle your seeds and water them with the watering can. After a few days or so of repeated watering, your crops should be ready to harvest. Each of the actions I just described will chip away at your stamina bar, so the bigger the farm, the more stamina you’ll end up requiring.
Thankfully, there are ways to increase your maximum stamina via Power Berries; however, they can be quite elusive and usually only found as rewards for fulfilling townsfolk’s requests.
The easiest way to mitigate your stamina drain is by upgrading your equipment. Almost every piece of your equipment can be upgraded numerous times. For example, the watering can be upgraded to water a 3×3 tile, saving you a lot of stamina, and the same upgrades are available for the Axe, sickle, Hoe, and fishing rod. Ores found while out mining in the mountains can be used to create higher-tier tools
To upgrade your tools and make use of these ores, you’ll need to make use of the Windmills that Zephyr town is famous for, which are now in disrepair. As you progress through the story, you’ll repair and unlock these windmills, with each one allowing you to process your materials. For example, the Red Windmill allows you to refine your milk into yoghurt or your Lumber into sturdier processed Lumber, whereas the Blue Windmill allows you to process Honeycomb into Honey.
These Windmills become essential as you play through the game, and you spend a lot of time setting items in them and travelling between them to collect processed items.
As you progress through Grand Bazaar and open up a few additional stalls, you’ll eventually gain access to Wonderstones. These colourful orbs can be inserted into your windmill to offer a wide range of buffs, from quicker processing times or even exclusive elite items. Just be warned, these don’t come cheap and could be considered the ‘end game’ items and won’t unlock for some time. You’ll need to make use of Wonderstones if you want to craft some of the game’s ultimate equipment.
Zephyr Town is split up into 5 unique locations: Your farm land, the main town square, the bazaar, an equestrian park and the mountains. It takes quite a while travelling from place to place, especially when you are running errands for the townsfolk or tracking down certain items that only appear in specific areas. Luckily, this is where one of Grand Bazaar’s unique mechanics comes into play. Being a mountainous location, Zephyr Town benefits from strong winds and early on, you are gifted a glider that allows you to reach inaccessible locations and get around a little quicker.
Nature Sprites
To help you improve the town, you’ll enlist the help of the Nature Sprites. Small creatures, each representing a different area of Nature. These Sprites are essential for the success of your Bazaar as they permanently increase the grade (and the potential profit) of items.
There’s a total of 5 Nature Sprites, each representing a different group of item types such as Fish, Honey, Mushrooms, foragables like ores and woods, and Bugs and insects.
To increase the Nature Sprites’ rank, you’ll need to donate to them several items of the same type. This may seem counterintuitive, as these are items you could be selling at the Bazaar, but in the long run, increasing the rank of all similar item types is well worth it! After a set amount of donations, any subsequent finds of these materials will be of a higher rank. For the most part, you can ignore this if you want, but certain quests will require higher rank items, which can only be gained via levelling up the ranks.
Townsfolk
There’s a wide range of townsfolk in Story of Seasons: Grand Bazaar, 26 in total, with 14 being romancable. Every person has their routines, likes and dislikes, and story segments as you progress through the game. The writing is witty and charming with a fair amount of voice acting in important scenes, which makes a nice difference from the usual one-word greeting you receive in previous titles.
To build relationships with the people of Zephyr town, you’ll need to converse with them daily, give them gifts and fulfil requests for them. It’s a nice system, although in past Story of Seasons games, I did find it a little tedious locating and greeting everyone individually.
Thankfully, there’s a simple greet function this time around that works like an AOE around your character. This allows you to quickly greet everyone in your immediate vicinity instead of having to stop and talk to each of them individually, which is quite a nice addition and something I hope to see moving forward with future Story of Seasons games, as it speeds up the flow of the gameplay.
As a character grows fonder of you, you eventually unlock the option to propose marriage, provided you have a double bed! This time around, you’ll also need to have some form of bond with the family members or parents of your suitor, so you can’t just focus on showering gifts on your beloved every day and have to interact with others. Once married, you can raise a child and start a family, which I would consider the endgame.
A Grand Bazaar
Here is where Grand Bazaar differs from past games in the series: there’s no shopping bin. You either have to sell your items at the weekly bazaar or to the town’s keeper, Miguel, although you’ll get a much lower price than you could earn at the Bazaar.
The Bazaar is run by the Mayor and happens every Saturday. Your stall is where you’ll be selling all your farm’s produce, along with any special items you refine from the windmills, such as jewellery or processed animal products like mayonnaise or yoghurt.
There’s a morning shift and an afternoon shift at the bazaar, and you’ll want to put your produce out on benches for everyone to see. To help you attract potential customers from the crowd, you’ll be using your bell to grab their attention towards your stall.
Sell enough items and you’ll be able to call in the Nature Sprites as a Cheer Squad. They help you sell your items quickly while improving the rank and freshness of each item. This is fun, although it requires you to mash the sell button!
As you level up the Bazaar, you eventually unlock decorations for your stall. These are more than cosmetics, as they can give various buffs, such as encouraging bulk buying from customers or even increasing the quality or freshness of products placed on them, so it’s well worth picking up some new decorations when you can.
As you start the game, there will be only a handful of stalls, but as you rank up the bazaar and fulfil the townsfolk’s requests, you’ll soon have many more stalls to shop at. Between shifts, you have the opportunity to peruse these stalls for the wares, and it’s well worth visiting them.
There’s a stall to buy animals and livestock, a stall for construction works, such as expanding your farm, and even the Mayor himself has a stall that sells secret techniques allowing for more efficient farming, albeit at a large cost (well worth it!). The Bazaar is a lot of fun, and I often found myself a little excited as Saturday rolled around in-game.
Storage
Unlike other Story of Seasons games, you cannot hoard your crops because they eventually go bad and degrade. You can upgrade your storage, which will keep things fresher for longer, or you can sell them off as soon as they start to go bad. While I initially found this annoying, it did mean I started using crops and produce in recipes a lot more often than I would in most Story of Seasons / Harvest Moon titles, and I actually ended up making a fair chunk more cash selling the prepared meals at the Bazaar.
Events
While juggling crops, livestock and personal relationships with the townsfolk, there are various events, festivals and activities you can take part in, from cooking competitions to Horse riding. These are great, and you will start at the Bronze tier, slowly working your way up as the game progresses. You also usually get a nice reward for coming 1st place, so they are well worth taking part in. These can be decorations for your stall, offering stat boosts or even the elusive Power Berry.
The only gripe I have with these events is that you are usually only told about them the day before, giving you very little time to prepare. That said, all upcoming events are clearly listed on your calendar, so please be mindful of what’s on the horizon, as I got caught short on more than one occasion.
I played mainly on my Steam Deck, and the performance was great with no slowdowns or graphical oddities. I was a little worried about the performance as Story of Seasons: Grand Bazaar is the best-looking game in the series yet, but I am happy to report that the performance was smooth throughout my whole playthrough. The default control scheme on Steam even makes use of the Steam Deck’s back buttons by default, which is a nice touch.
Playing on my PC, I was pleased to see that the button layout automatically mapped to my Switch Pro controller I had connected, and even seamlessly switched to Nintendo’s button prompts.
During my playthrough, I rolled the credits twice. The first time was by maxing out the Bazaar ranking, which happened for me right at the end of the first year after 55 hours of play time. The second time was when my character got married, which happened on spring 8th of the second year, a few hours later. This is far from the end of the game; there’s a ton to do, which I won’t spoil here, but to give you an idea of how long you could play Grand Bazaar for, it’s worth mentioning that there is an achievement for starting year 6 on your farm.
Conclusion
It’s clear after nearly 60 hours with Story of Seasons: Grand Bazaar that it’s not just a simple remake of an old DS game. You can tell a lot of time and love has been poured into this by the developers, and it shows as it’s one of the best games the series has ever offered. Zephyr town is a charming place full of charming characters, and you’ll genuinely feel attached to them as you help them rank up the Bazaar. There’s a ton of content to sink your teeth into, and it’s easy to look up and realise it’s 3 am and you should really be asleep, and this is especially true if you are playing the game handheld.
For series veterans and newcomers alike, Story of Seasons: Grand Bazaar is well worth a place in your collection. Very few games are this charming or addictive, and I’m sure you’ll be hooked!
9.5
Steam review code kindly provided by Decibel-PR