Story of Seasons: A Wonderful Life Review – Forgotten Valley’s Stuck in the Past

Story of Seasons: A Wonderful Life on PS5

Within minutes of booting up Story of Seasons: A Wonderful Life, I was hit by a wave of nostalgia. The guitar-twanging soundtrack kicked in and transported me back to playing the original, Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life, on the GameCube over a decade ago now. It was a heart-warming experience, encountering the cast of weird and wonderful characters all over again, but soon enough the cracks in this remake/ remaster started to show.

Story of Seasons: A Wonderful Life aims to freshen up the 2003 original, but the premise remains the same. You’ve inherited a rundown farm from your father and travel to the sleepy town of Forgotten Valley to give revitalizing it your best shot. In terms of changes over the original, this ‘Story of Seasons’ version adds pronouns and customization options to the character creator, gives you different outfits to purchase and wear, adds more crops to those originally on offer, adds more romance options including same gender, and enhances the various events that take place throughout each year. That all sounds quite a lot, but before my first year in the game had come to a close, I soon realized that, actually, Forgotten Valley is very much stuck in the past of the farming sim genre.

Where the likes of Stardew Valley and Story of Seasons: Pioneers of Olive Town have attempted to add a little more flesh to the bones of the traditional farming life sim experience, A Wonderful Life still very much feels a little lifeless. Outside of watering your crops, tending to your livestock and romancing whatever resident of Forgotten Valley that takes your choosing, there really isn’t a whole lot else to do.

Fishing can earn you some extra cash, but the number of different species seems limited. There’s an archaeological dig site, which has a limited amount of items and dig spots you can excavate each day — though this does expand with each ‘Chapter’ of the game. And you can set up a shop in the middle of town and sell items. Though, in my experience, only the same three or four characters would wander past, and one of them was a very annoying child that wouldn’t buy anything because he didn’t have any money anyway. The game may have had new content added since the original’s release back in 2003, but the foundations are feeling incredibly dated two decades later.

That’s a shame, because the core gameplay loop of any farming sim, Story of Seasons: A Wonderful Life included, is a cryptonite-like combination of compelling and calming. That’s what I assume A Wonderful Life is striving to maintain here. Offering you enough, without overwhelming you. But if you’re done with everything you need to do on your farm and social life by midday in each of the 24 real time minute days, it may suggest there’s not quite enough to do to tide you over.

The further you get into the game, the more facilities you can purchase to earn you money faster and lighten the load of the work you need to do around your farm. This would be great, if there was anything you’d want to do instead. But there’s not, and so you’re somewhat compounding the problem further.

The improvements that are here are certainly welcome ones, but given Marvelous is classing this as a ‘remake’ of the original, it’s certainly a barebones one from my perspective. Character requests give you something else to work towards, but they’re very much limited to giving the townsfolk a certain type of produce or a cooked meal. The character customization changes, while great for making the experience more inclusive, still feel limited in how your character actually looks.

I’d have assumed the archaeological site would be more in-line with that of Pioneers of Olive Town or Stardew Valley, where you can spend entire days mining away for rare minerals and high-value items. I’d have expected there to be additions to the standard crops you can grow, but there are none, with the additions focused on new hybrid crops that you won’t be able to begin experimenting with until Year 2 at the earliest. Character dialogue and relationship progression could have been way more fleshed out than listening to the same three or four lines from each character over and over again. I literally wooed one character by giving her a flower growing around the town each day… and that was it. The same flower, nothing else, and we were engaged before the end of Autumn Year 1.

At the far end of the town, there’s a path leading out to faraway villages. When you try to head down here, it asks if you’d like to visit somewhere new. “Great!” I though. Some substantial new content to explore. It then alerted me the trip would take six hours. Not letting that dissuade me with nothing left to do, I embarked on the trip, only to find myself stood exactly where I’d started, but with the clock advanced six hours later. A message read: “Those mythril tools at the blacksmith’s were SO cool…”

That sums up the extent of the improvements and additions here. It’s enough to make you notice, but not enough to actually offer anything that piqued my attention and made me take note. Perhaps more substantial changes will come the more time I spend in the game, but I don’t know how much longer the game can keep my attention. The shallow slog has taken its toll.

Verdict

I truly wanted Story of Seasons: A Wonderful Life to feel like the true 2023 evolution of the game 10-year-old me treasured so much. But this is still very much a basic farming/ slice-of-life sim from 2003 with a fresh lick of paint to the visuals and a handful of minor improvements elsewhere. Perhaps I had my expectations set too high for a remake of a two decade old game at this point. Perhaps my rose-tinted nostalgia glasses had painted a picture of a far more, in-depth and compelling experience. All I know is the disappointment is real.

Hardcore fans of the original game may find some fun here, but those who have played more comprehensive farming sims from recent years, like Stardew, don’t expect it to keep your attention for too long.