I feel like I have to open this review by saying I love farming games. Regardless of what the premise is or who the characters are, I always know that I’m going to get some level of enjoyment out of it. That said, Story of Seasons: Pioneers of Olive Town is frankly one of the biggest mixed bags I’ve played in quite some time.
As seems to be tradition with farming games, the story begins as your character makes their way to Olive Town to take on their grandfather’s old farm and restore it to its former glory. Olive Town is a quiet place, and the mayor, wanting to transform the town into a bustling tourist hotspot, enlists you to help make his dream a reality.
This restoration element of both your farm and the town is what drives a lot of the gameplay. Dotted around the farm are various facilities, from bridges to barns, that are completely run down, each requiring a specific amount of materials to fix. Similarly, the mayor will occasionally visit you in the morning to let you know his latest grand scheme to bring more tourists into town, which will require you to bring him a bunch of new materials. This does a great job of drip feeding you new goals to work towards, and I personally loved how the mayor’s requests (which also drive the story) gave you some choice over which materials you gave, generally making each goal very manageable.
The basic farming elements of Pioneers of Olive Town are also better than ever. Every skill you’ll use, from tilling your fields, to taking care of your animals, logging and mining are all assigned handy experience bars. Practice really does make perfect; through completing your farming tasks and gathering materials, your skills will level up, giving you bonuses such as tasks consuming less stamina and being able to complete tasks faster. This is incredibly rewarding, and really incentivises you to put effort into every skill available for the bonuses you might reap.
As you level up various skills, you’ll also unlock new things to craft. These range from “makers”, which are rather bulky contraptions that transform raw materials such as logs into processed materials like lumber, to cute decorations (the cow topiaries are my favourite) to decorate your farm with. The decoration options are a very welcome addition for giving your farm that personal touch, although it’s just a shame that so much of your space has to be taken up by the various makers, as they’re a necessity for getting the materials required to restore both the farm and town.
You’ll also use the processed materials, like lumber and ingots, to upgrade your tools for even more efficient gameplay. The upgraded axes, for example, can chop down multiple trees at once, which is oh so satisfying. Upgrading your tools for these great benefits is yet another goal the game gives you to work towards, sucking you into that addictive gameplay loop.
Of course, as in any farming sim, crops aren’t the only things you’ll be aiming to grow. Relationships with the townsfolk have always been of equal importance in the Story of Seasons series, but unfortunately the quality of these interactions has taken a nosedive in Pioneers of Olive Town. Despite having a great variety of interesting looking characters, all of them cycle through incredibly bland phrases that are so impersonal, for the most part, literally any character could say any one of them. This barely changes when your relationships with the characters improve; even after I married Iori, he continued to repeat all the same things he had been right from the start of the game, only with a new line thrown in to acknowledge our marriage. Ouch.
The only saving grace for this aspect of the game is the heart events. As with previous entries in the series, as you fill each character’s heart level by speaking with them and giving them gifts, you’ll trigger short cutscenes in which they’ll have a conversation with your character and you’ll generally learn a bit more about them. Due to the exceedingly dull everyday interactions with the characters, these are really the only way you get to know them at all. Thankfully though, the heart events also expand beyond just interactions with your self insert, but also to the other townsfolk chatting with each other. Personally, I found these far more interesting than those with my own character, and they generally did a much better job on expanding on the townsfolk’s personalities (which was sorely needed), and demonstrating the sweet pre-existing relationships between them all, which you’d honestly be quite likely to miss otherwise.
Another complaint I have in regards to the townsfolk is the lack of character portraits. Despite having gorgeous art for each character in your relationships list, you don’t see these at all when interacting with them in game. This isn’t too big of a deal in the heart events, where you can see their faces and expressions clearly due to an adjusted camera angle, but you get none of this in your day-to-day interactions when the character models are just too small to see any emotion in. Not only is it such a shame to not see the lovely character designs properly (the models really don’t do them justice), the already dull interactions just feel even flatter.
Despite this, the game is far from all bad. One fun new addition to Pioneers of Olive Town is the museum. Similar to Stardew Valley and Animal Crossing, you can donate any new fish you catch, treasure, and even photos of wild animals. Filling the museum is yet another fun objective to make sure you’re never short of goals to reach even after finishing the main story, which admittedly doesn’t take tremendously long (I had the credits rolling in Autumn of the first year).
All in all, perhaps the game’s greatest strength is simply how much there is to do. I found myself filling each day from start to finish, whether that was due to trying to level up my skills, to take photos of nighttime animals, or frantically gain more materials for the next development project. Compared to Story of Seasons: Friends of Mineral Town, where I might go to bed at 4PM after doing everything I needed, the experience of Pioneers of Olive Town felt far more rich, and if it’s fulfilling farming gameplay you’re after, this has it in spades.
Overall, Story of Seasons: Pioneers of Olive Town is a game that’s almost let down by its own ambition. It strives to do so many things, and does a lot very well, but this makes the low points seem all the more apparent. If you enjoy farming games, there’s still a lot of fun to be had, but if your main draw to the game is interacting with characters that the series has always made so charming, you’re probably going to be left disappointed.
3/5 stars.
Images: Marvelous Europe and Catherine Lewis
