SoS Opinions

[Butterscotch]

Story of Seasons, oddly enough, has a lot of throwbacks to Grand Bazaar. Instead of putting crops in a shipping bin, you must wait until a vendor is in town to sell it directly to them. You can jump into the river and dive for items, which is fairly similar to the way you often found items when diving in GrB. And like GrB, there really isn't a mountain area to explore and forage in. Most of the map consists of the town, your rival's farms and the rental farm areas.

Farming is a lot easier in this game. 3x3 plot are back and you work the entire plot at once, rather than tending to each individual plant. The treat system for animals is improved from ANB. You have a meter to help you keep track of how many treats you've given an animal.

The marriage candidates are really excellent. This is the first game in a while where I know I'll be starting a second file to marry a different guy and I'll probably start a boy file as well. The regular villagers, by comparison, aren't so memorable. There are a few standouts, like Marion, Giorgio and Eda, but overall, I find them to be somewhat forgettable.

A few gripes:

• the oh-so-useful farmbell from ANB is gone. If you want your animals to graze outside, you'll either have to put them outside yourself or wait until summer of year 2 to get a dog.
• the fish traps are replaced by the fish hatchery. It's a similar concept, but you can only have one hatchery
• while you can dive for gems and ores, the mining system is even worse, with only a single node to mine. (I'm hoping that a safari upgrade helps with this?)
• while the seed maker returns, the game adds an extra step by requiring you to dry your crops first. Like, if you want, say, onion seeds, you put the onion in the crop dryer, wait for it to dry, then put the dried onion in the seed maker. The extra step is unnecessary, imo.
• I found the font XSeed uses harder to read than Natsume's font. I got used to it, but at first, it strained my eyes a little

One more issue is a mild spoiler:

SPOILER: Click to show

{Click to reveal Spoiler}While unlocking the first few vendors is early enough, the last two are ridicously hard. Worse, you're not really given any in-game idea of what to do. You're told you need to ship a variety of things, but no one tells you exactly what to ship or how much. You're more or less *forced* to go online to gte help with this part of the game. I would imagine that someone without internet access or someone who consdiers walkthroughs "cheating" becoming frustrated with their game.

Overall, SoS is a pretty solid game and the more I play, the more I like it. I generally prefer it to ANB. Those of you who were disappointed by ANB might want to give this a try.

[Deleted]

I like it overall. I have little over 130 hours in it mostly just on my girl file with only 2 hours on my boy so far. Most of my likes are the same as Butters.

For me farming is by far my favorite part of the game. I mean I always like that part in all the games but I really like the new mechanics. It made the game so much simpler when it came to tilling, watering, fertilizing and harvesting.

I also like the idea of river driving and having fish hatcheries.

Issues:
- I feel like a lot of ideas graphic wise were recycled from ANB, but then again it’s not like the first time they franchise did that when it came to reusing model styles (IoH,SI,GrB, ToTT).
- I wish I could move my farm house.

- Why are things so expensive!? (Yes. I know there is seedling mode but I refuse to play it)

- Actual villagers don’t really do anything for me. In my girl file now that I’m married and waiting for my kids to age I’ve been trying to gift everyone in town just to pass the days after tending my fields and animals so this idea might change but for now none of them really make me want to know more about them.

- They reused the dating ring – I loathe this. I just want to see all the heart events before getting stuck with someone.
- I miss the multi-level mines.

[Butterscotch]

I think I preferred farming in ANB; the tool upgrades and geyser made it easy to manage tons of crops. It's more time consuming in SoS, especially with the public fields.

Sent from my GT-P3113 using proboards

[Deleted]

It wasa bit better. I know I wanted the upgraded watering can in SoS to be more like the one in ANB where you held it longer and it did various plots instead of just one.

[Simfarmguru]

I've enjoyed SoS now that I've got it. I don't know though, I actually find myself wanting to go back to ANB now...

This is why I'm NOT grabbing Trio of Towns yet, too many HM games to finish at the moment ^^;