Story of Seasons: Pioneers of Olive Town
Main game
3.46 average rating based on 70 ratings
- Developers
- Three Rings Inc.
- Publishers
- Marvelous, Marvelous Europe Ltd., XSEED Games
- Franchises
- Story of Seasons
- Series
- Story of Seasons
- Platforms
- Nintendo Switch, PC (Microsoft Windows), PlayStation 4
- Genres
- Role-playing (RPG), Simulator, Strategy
- Themes
- Business, Romance
- Steam
- View on Steam
Release Dates
User Stats
How Long Is Story of Seasons: Pioneers of Olive Town?
Related Content
Cute Farming Game, Not a Lot of Depth
This review is for the Nintendo Switch version
I'm going to be honest: If you pick this game up after playing something really great like Animal Crossing: New Horizons or Stardew Valley, you'll likely find this game boring and lacks a lot of excitement. For your standard farming simulator with relationship building, this game is perfectly fine, if not just a little tedious in the maintenance. It's a nice addition to the Story of Seasons series and keeps with the pace of past Harvest Moon games.
Characters
You move to Olive Town, where your grandfather once had a farm, and meet Victor, the town's kind of kooky mayor, who gives you pointers. From there, you meet several other characters, including shop owners, museum staff, port workers, park ranger, and just regular people doing their thing. As for the marriage candidates, a great thing is that all 10 of the candidates (male and female) are available as an option regardless of your gender, so that's pretty cool. The other villagers are pretty unique, although I wish some of them were selected as marriage candidates instead. There's also a mystery character.
Story
The story is straight-forward, you start a farm and slowly build relationships with the townsfolk by attending events, …
I'm going to be honest: If you pick this game up after playing something really great like Animal Crossing: New Horizons or Stardew Valley, you'll likely find this game boring and lacks a lot of excitement. For your standard farming simulator with relationship building, this game is perfectly fine, if not just a little tedious in the maintenance. It's a nice addition to the Story of Seasons series and keeps with the pace of past Harvest Moon games.
Characters
You move to Olive Town, where your grandfather once had a farm, and meet Victor, the town's kind of kooky mayor, who gives you pointers. From there, you meet several other characters, including shop owners, museum staff, port workers, park ranger, and just regular people doing their thing. As for the marriage candidates, a great thing is that all 10 of the candidates (male and female) are available as an option regardless of your gender, so that's pretty cool. The other villagers are pretty unique, although I wish some of them were selected as marriage candidates instead. There's also a mystery character.
Story
The story is straight-forward, you start a farm and slowly build relationships with the townsfolk by attending events, talking/visiting, buying things, and completing tasks. It can get a little hectic managing the number of things you want on your farm plus the town events plus expanding, I would say be mindful of how much you are taking on and try to obtain tools that will help you before your farm gets too big. These games aren't designed to have a major plot.
Gameplay
Again, pretty straight-forward. You will go through a tutorial as you learn things, and then it becomes part of your "daily" routine to complete them on a regular basis. You can walk/run around. There's another section where you interact with Earth Sprites, and can travel to another world, play mini games, gather resources, and all that. I didn't really get the connection between the Earth Sprite world and Olive Town, it felt more like an add-on to have more things to do.
Overall, it's fine for a standard farming simulator, doesn't offer too much or too little. It's just a little on the boring side for me compared to other farming games I've played.
I was kind of surprised to hear that a lot of people didn't like this game. I had a lot of fun with it. In fact, it was the first Harvest Moon/Story of Seasons game I really enjoyed since the studios split up.
It's got a lot of the Harvest Moon staples: the addictive day-to-day farming routines, a decent variety of bachelors/bachelorettes for the dating sim element... Mostly what impressed me about this one was that I felt there were a lot of extra things to do. Little projects around the farm that kept me engaged and made me feel like I was working towards something after I might have normally lost interest with that usual routine.
Game trial is ending today, but I'm not really able to play on weekdays anyway so I haven't been playing since Sunday. Managed to get until the first day of Summer, and it was nice to experience a different season a bit. I feel like there are considerably less festivals in this version, and I'm not sure how I feel about that yet. I do like how I set the pace of discovering new additions to my farm by repairing bridges and facilities myself.
I'm interested in playing more, and I'm curious about the season pass. I'm still not 100% sure that I'll be picking this up though. I played my last Story of Seasons game for a little over 100 hours, and I only stopped because life got uber busy and I did not have time to play anything. Back then, I did not have the resources to pick up another game so that contributed a bit to me solely focusing on that game. The circumstances are very different now so between me wanting to dig into other games and indulging in my non-gaming interests, chances are I might not get back to this for some time. We'll see.
I’m such a sucker for games like this so of course I like this Story of Seasons iteration. I don’t even need that much depth - even the simple repetition of the same tropes is enough for me. I see that this one has new mechanics such as donating to the museum, very much like Animal Crossing, and they are a welcome addition. I’m playing via the Game Trials event from today until next week so even though I initially planned to be deep into Animal Crossing right now, I’m holding that off until next week. I hope I don’t miss anything. Oh so many things I want to do.
Played this during the free Game trail at the end of September and had fun. Maybe because it's been so long since I've actually played an official full Harvest Moon/Story of Seasons game (okay so maybe the newest version I had ever played was one of the GBA entries), but I hadn't realized just how much Stardew Valley was based on the series. Not a value judgement just the fact.
I had a pleasant enough time playing it, but I have to admit it didn't wow me, either. I didn't get super far during the Game Trial, so I wondered if it would get more satisfying later on. Then I looked at online reviews and saw loyal fans bemoaning how hollow the game experience was... So I guess Animal Crossing New Horizons has company in the "My disappointment is immeasurable" club now. Cool.
Glad I got to try the game out before I ever bought anything. Back to Stardew ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ
