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.
