Story of Seasons: Pioneers of Olive Town is the latest entry in the Story of Seasons franchise and is the first game in the series designed specifically for the Nintendo Switch if you don’t include the remake of the brilliant Friends of Mineral Town from the Game Boy Advance. So, let’s see if Marvelous can keep up their winning streak with this fantastic series, is it any good?
Gameplay
Pioneers of Olive Town has all the elements series veterans know and love and much more! There’s quite a lot to go over and I will try to be as thorough as possible.
First, I should mention the basic system of time and Seasons. Each day starts around 8 am and the game progresses one minute a second, so each hour in-game is 60 seconds.
In Pioneers of Olive Town, there are four unique seasons, Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter. Each season takes place over one in-game month and certain crops will only grow in specific months. Each crop type takes several days to become harvestable, for some crops it’s three days for others it can be up to 12! If you think about it, Story of Seasons is just as much a time management game as it is a farming simulator.
In Olive town itself, there are various shops, households, the Townhall etc all of which are inhabited by the several denizens of the town. To further my previous comparison to time management games, each of these townsfolk has a specific schedule. For example, you want to get your tools upgraded on a Tuesday? Well… tough luck, stores closed and you’ll have to wait until the following day. You’ll quickly commit to memory which days the stores are opened or closed, if not, there’s an option in the menu that shows you which I only accidentally happened upon some 20 hours into my playthrough.
Like most Story of Season games, when you start on your farm the land is in a terrible state, there’s rocks everywhere, trees and grass. This is where you’ll notice the first of which I am guessing is a nod to Animal Crossing, your starting home, you start out your farm life living in a tent! You’ll soon upgrade to bigger and better things, but I have to admit, starting out in a tent did make me smile.
As you’d expect, your character is quite keen on clearing up their land and starting to earn some profit from it. Thankfully, you have access to a wide variety of tools that will help you get things the way you want them. Obstacles such as rocks and trees do not have level requirements like in the previous games but are a lot easier to clear with upgraded tools. As you clear your farm, you’ll come across a few dilapidated buildings, these game be repaired for the cost of some of the materials you are collect as you clear the farm. You’ll first want to get the materials together to build a house and unlike the previous games, you do not have to wait numerous days for the completion of these works to be done. You have the materials, you have the house.
In the north of your starting area, you’ll notice a mine, this is where you are going to be acquiring all the ores you need to make upgrades to your tools. Working your way through the mines will allow you to collect ores and gemstones, the first of which can be processed into ingots. To do this you’ll need to craft an ingot maker.
Yes, Pioneers of Olive Town has crafting and this time around it’s quite comprehensive. You’ll need to make various ‘Makers’ throughout your game, an Ingot Maker to process ores, Lumber makers to turn logs into planks and so on. You learn more crafting recipes as you progress through the game. These usually come via levelling up one of your skills, you see, with every action you take in the game you become more proficient in that particular field. If you spend a whole day in the mines breaking rocks and looking for ores you’ll most likely level up your mining skill, the same goes for if you spend your time tilling your land or raising animals. Every few levels or so, you’ll unlock a specific type of crafting recipe which will help you get further in said field, this is very rewarding and it’s quite satisfying to be rewarded for your hard work.
The gameplay of Pioneers of Olive Town is quite well-paced and has a natural feeling progression to it. For example, early on, you’ll spot a bridge that is out near the bottom of your farm, you can fix this to open up yet more farmland that contains the next tier of crafting materials, new logs etc. In this second area, you’ll find yet another mine that allows for the next ore upgrade (Silver ore) and as you work through that you’ll see yet another bridge to start working towards. The bridges do not force you to go chopping a certain type of tree endlessly, you have two options. You can pay with materials, or pay cold hard cash, this is a nice addition if you’ve mainly been focusing on tending to your crops or animals while neglecting chopping trees or mining for ores.
Fishing is back in Pioneers of Olive town and it’s quite a relaxing way to spend your time. The meter that appears while fishing may look a little reminiscent of the one featured in Stardew Valley, but thankfully, this one is a lot less frustrating but still provides some challenge. Just like every other stat, fishing can also be levelled up allowing you to catch more or expensive fish. Once you have upgraded your house and have access to your kitchen, you’ll be able to make numerous dishes with your caught fish.
Cooking, in general, is pretty fun in Pioneers of Olive Town with each dish taking you 30 minutes to prepare. These foods are vital if you want to make it down to some of the lower floors in the mines, you’ll need them to restore some energy. It’s worth mentioning that unlike other Story of Season games, your clock will not stop when entering buildings or mines which was quite shocking and took a little getting used to. This means in the mines not only are you fighting against your stamina, but you are also on the clock, best to head off early!
As you progress through Story of Seasons: Pioneers of Olive Town you will eventually meet sprites. These little guys help you out and you’ll occasionally unearth one while tilling your grounds or breaking rocks. These can be divided out between the different sprites you meet along the way, each providing you with several items each day dependant on how many of the found sprites you have split between them, it’s kind of hard to explain but the smaller sprites you find around your farm act as a type of currency.
Later in the game after certain plot points, I will not go into here, you can ‘spend’ these sprites to increase your maximum health, quality of land and a few other secrets (if you collect a lot!). To increase your maximum health further you can find the occasional rogue Sprite who will teleport you off to play a mini-game. I found betting a high score in these games usually resulted in your maximum health getting increased.
These mini-games can vary from simple memory games, such as trying to guess where seeds are planted in a plot of land to some more action-based games like seeing how many rocks and gemstones you can destroy under a strict time limit. I liked these mini-games a lot and often found myself heading back to see if I could beat my own score.
Yet another addition that seems to be ‘borrowed’ from Animal Cross is Pioneer Town’s Museum. Here, you can donate artefacts you have dug up on your mining adventures, donate fish you have caught and even donate pictures you have taken. Quite early on you are given a camera, which lets you slip into a first-person mode and snap the local wildlife. Each picture can then be individually donated to the Museum. While donating to the Museum is an interesting idea, I found it personally quite tedious. The process of donating items was extremely slow, there were no options to donate more than one thing at a time and I felt very unrewarded once my items were on display. It’s a shame really because it was a mechanic that was done so well done in Animal Crossing: New Horizons.
Let’s talk about romance, in Olive Town, you’ll find plenty of suitable candidates to start a relationship with and they all have their own unique story arcs, likes and dislikes etc. I decided to pursue Bridget and things started off real slow, but eventually, we became close and I even ended up marrying her! It only took the persuasion of fresh cold milk, which is her personal favourite and the occasional piece of expensive jewellery! The old system we know and love is back, in the menu, you can see how many ‘hearts’ each character has towards you which indicates their level of affection towards you.
In Pioneers of Olive Town, I always have enough activities to do, In previous entries in the series such as Story of Seasons: Friends of Mineral Town I often found myself running out of things to do which would result in me putting my character to sleep early just to start the next day. Thankfully, I never once felt like that during my playthrough, if I had a few hours to go before midnight I’d cook some food to help me out in the mines the next day or spend a few hours fishing, It is all very relaxing!
And I haven’t even touched on the art style and music of Pioneers of Olive Town yet! Both of which are very good by the way. The game character models are very nice and well put together, especially if you are comparing them to Friends of Mineral Town. There’s a great use of colour throughout the game and it looks really nice on the Switch. All the characters are very well animated but sadly, the character portraits that appeared when you would speak to someone in the previous games seem to have been removed.
Story of Seasons: Pioneers of Olive Town, unfortunately, suffers from a few technical issues. These never ruined my playthrough and served as minor annoyances rather than game-breaking. The issues I had were with frame-rate and loading times, there was a lot of stuttering on my farm, which became more noticeable as my farm began to expand and especially as I started to fill up the screen with makers. The other issue I had was loading times, once it took 21 seconds to transition from the farm to Olive Town itself, this never ‘broke’ the game but felt a little tedious at times.
Luckily, these issues seem to be greatly improved in an update patch that just released (v.1.03), I advise you make sure your game is updated to at least v.1.03 before playing the game.
Conclusion
Overall, Story of Seasons: Pioneers of Olive Town is a great game, it takes what made previous entries in the series and adds so many more features to the base formula even if some of them are slightly borrowed. My total playtime until I saw the credits roll was 35 hours and there is a ton of stuff i’ve still got left to do. It’s the most fun I’ve had with a farming simulator since playing Stardew Valley and that’s quite the compliment. As of writing this review I have still not completed the Museum or collected enough sprites to unlock everything at the shrine. This is something that is going to keep me busy for some time and I’m really looking forward to what Marvelous adds in the season pass! I highly recommend picking up a copy!
9
Nintendo Switch review code kindly provided by Marvelous
You can pick up your copy of Story of Seasons: Pioneers of Olive Town here.