 Welcome to Issa Gaming! Today I am reviewing Story of Seasons, pioneers of Olive Town, now out on the Nintendo Switch. I love farming sims. I love the constant sense of progressing towards the next house upgrade. I love growing a bunch of crops, putting in all the work to then see great profit when selling. I love collecting and crafting in games and I love customizing everything, like in general. I love customizing things. So this is a game that's very much for me. This is my series, the original Harvest Moon series. I have played almost all Harvest Moon games through the years and since I was little when I started with Harvest Moon for the ship Nintendo. The original series's new name is now however Story of Seasons and this is their newest entry since 3 o'clock towns on the 3DS. I mean if we are not counting Friends of Mineral Town which was a remake. But I can say already now that this game is better than Friends of Mineral Town. Thank you so much to Marvelous for providing this review code. Back in the old days your grandfather pioneered Olive Town and now much later you decide to go there and take over the old farm. It's the very typical and basic farming sim story. You meet the mayor, you meet the townspeople and you start living your new life as a farmer. But you also help out with developing the town to become more attractive to tourists and expanding the town's variety in shops and facilities. You get to know all the townspeople's backstories by slowly befriending them over time and eventually you can get married. You can marry both genders and you can look whichever way you want with hair, skin color, face, eyes and you can decide on how you want to be addressed regardless of how you choose to look. There are plenty of fun cutscenes to unlock. Some are of course more entertaining than others. But the town people's daily dialogues are very bland, repetitive and predictable. Almost always involving something about an upcoming festival or one that recently was. I don't know, I try to talk to everyone every day so that I can slowly increase friendship level with everyone. And I'm also trying to hand out flowers to everyone as a daily friendship bribe. They all seem to like it so. Gameplay. This is a farming life simulator game. And in a way that means the more you put into it, the more you're gonna get out of this game. You start out with very little. On a farm that looks like an overgrown mass with trees and rocks and weed growing everywhere and puddles. But cleaning up a messy farm in a farming sim has always been something that I consider to be weirdly satisfying. You can chop down trees, you can break rocks, you remove puddles with your bucket and you cut grass. Your farm has a lot of buildings that needs found or crafted materials in order to repair. The first ones being your first coop to hold chicken, and your first barn to hold cows and such. And also there are bridges to unlock even more farmland. To start making some money for yourself, you till some soil and you plant your first vegetables. Then you need to water and tend to every day with seeds you buy at the general store. The town has a lot of shops. You have the animal shop where you can buy cows, chicken, sheep, goats, rabbits, etc. And it also holds the pet shop with mainly cats and dogs. I have three cats currently on my farm. They are called Mia, Nuffie and Tom and Jerry. You have the tool shop run by Clemens, which originally was the guy that I wanted, but turns out he wasn't a bachelor. But this is where you can upgrade all your tools, such as your watering can, your axe, your hammer, including upgrading your bag inventory space. I recommend you do that as soon as possible, because this game has a lot of items. The town also has the general store, like I mentioned. You have a grocery store, a flower shop, and a carpenters workshop, where you can do all the home and building upgrades if you have the materials and money needed. Also, there is a hotel and a cafe and a bistro, a tourist info center where you can upload your pictures. And lastly, a museum. The museum is fun, just like in Stardew Valley and in Animal Crossing. You can donate treasures and artifacts, you can donate fish that you have caught, and pictures of wild bugs, birds and animals that you have spotted across town and on your farm. This new camera feature is fun, and you can actually walk around and look up close at everything in first person mode. And the pictures you take can also be shared online to be viewed in other players' loading screens. Load times feels a bit long at the moment, but Marvel has said that they are working to patch that in an update coming really soon. I'm not gonna lie, one of my first impressions with this game, besides really liking it, was that the world in itself is disappointingly small at the moment. There is only this town that you can see on this map, and you have your farm, which there is no map for. I mean, there are no other areas to explore currently. There's no mountain. There's just no other area, so the town and your farm. There are three mines found on your farm. One with iron, one with silver and one with gold. And the mines feel very simplistic, but I didn't mine. With your tools upgraded a tiny bit, you can lack bigger areas of rocks, trees and grass. So make sure you prioritize getting upgrades for your tools. As early as you can. It's gonna make your life so much easier. Now, this game has a big emphasis on machines called makers. This can be a good thing, and this can actually also be a bad thing. There are a bunch of makers in this game. In fact, I think there are too many of them. Why so many makers? Tell us the reason why. I mean, there are makers for ingots, makers for lumber, jewelry, bricks, threads, clots, yarn, seasonings, powders, condiments, jogers, cheese, butter, essences, I mean. A bunch of these makers could have been combined, but what I try to do is make dedicated areas for each theme of makers. Like, for example, I have an area with cloth, thread, yarn, and such, you know, clothing makers put together. And I also have another section of my farm dedicated to seasonings, powders, condiments. You know, I put them in themes, like the ones that are similar to one another. I also recommend you focus on having a lot of ingot and lumber makers. As these are the most essential makers in the entire game, you're gonna have to use them every day. Because most things, like house upgrades and barn and coop upgrades, they require ingots of some sort or lumber. So make sure you keep them running at all times. You craft these makers in the menu along with a bunch of other things that you can craft, like sprinklers and a bunch of farm decorations. A lot of things to craft in the crafting menu. I love customizing my farm with fences, pathways and such. That is so fun, and I recommend you do that because there actually pops up too many cluttering things every day. Like new rocks and new puddles and new trees all day, every day. And that happens a bit too much if you ask me. You can also decorate inside of your home, but that is very limited. You can't place anything anywhere. That was also a bit weird. Fishing is good, progression feels nice. I enjoy the entire gameplay loop because I always feel like I have something to do and something to look forward to and work towards, if you know what I mean. There is a lot of managing inventory, both in your bag and in chests that you place around your farm. And if your bag is full, you can put some of your tools away to fit a bit more in your bag. That is actually convenient, it has saved me several times. There are some simple festivals happening in town locationally and there are also small sprites, minigames to be found. Also a small sprites location that you can travel to, which I found really confusing because I have no idea what's going on over there. Cooking is fun and I try to create every single dish at least once. Later you get a horse and also a fun motorcycle that you can also color customize. Lastly, there's also an achievement list for all of you completionists out there and you can collect titles for your card. There's just a lot of things to do in this game. Graphics. I actually went a bit back to your friends of Mineral Town on the Switch and I have to say pioneers of all your town looks 10 times better and is optimized, I mean with menus and how you manage your inventory and all of that, so much better in pioneers of all your town. So in my opinion this game both plays and looks better. This game just sometimes looks a bit like a pokemon game in its graphical style and I like the graphics a lot. I like the look of the crops, I like the look of the animals, the look of the town, I love the look of my character and I forgot to mention that you can also change your clothes and hats, collect a bunch of those. Everything looks super cozy and colorful and these cows are just the cutest cows I've ever seen. Performance as of right now pre-launch which is when I'm playing it. It is a bit laggy at times with heavy frame drops when I'm running through my farm but all of this could have been patched already for all I know. There is actually a ton of cool 3D models found around everyone's room when looking in first person mode through the camera and I can see that they have put a lot of work into just details in this game. A lot of things that are just easily overlooked, I enjoy details like that. Very nice. Music. There is a tiny bit of voice acting like sounds and noises and such, short hello's and hi there's. There is footsteps and sound effects for most things. Everything is sounding very natural and fun. I can say I generally liked most of the actual music in the game but I wish there were more variety in what's being played on your farm for each season because you end up spending a lot of time on your actual farm and you end up spending a lot of time listening to this music and at some seasons I just couldn't wait for the next season to come around just to get some new background music to listen to and I don't think it should be like that. The seasons are of course spring, summer, autumn and winter as usual but the quality of the music that is good. It is just cute and as expected really for a game of this genre I just wish that there were more variety on your farm for each and every season. Pretty sure that you have made up your mind already whether this game is for you or not. I super recommend this game for everyone who has previously even just enjoyed a farming game or previously enjoyed a life sim like this. Pioneers of Olive Town has got everything going for it and in the right direction. The only things that I can complain about in this game is that the world is super small and I wish there were more areas that I could explore and I wish a lot of the makers could have been combined just for the sake of simplicity but I love this game already. I give this game 8.5 out of 10. The only things that is pushing it away from a nine is like I said the world is small and the makers are messy and such stuff like that. Thank you so much for watching the entire review. I hope you want to check out my discord channel. We actually hang there like every evening right now we're in that sort of mood every day all of us and we just hang in voice chat so feel free to join my discord. We are a very lively and welcoming community over there. Now thank you so much for watching and I will see you later.