Sometimes the lines between remaster and remake can be blurred. Metroid Prime Remastered seems much more like a full remake, and a few games called remakes don’t quite live up to expectations. For Story of Seasons: Grand Bazaar – based on Harvest Moon DS: Grand Bazaar – even the term remake doesn’t quite seem to do it justice. This feels more like a fresh new entry in the Story of Seasons franchise that picks up the best elements of the DS title to deliver a spectacular farming sim that gleefully digs its own path.
Grand Bazaar casts you as a fledgling farmer in Zephyr Town, a gorgeous little place with a friendly cast of characters waiting to become your friends, or if you play your cards right, your spouse. While you may be familiar with the regular farming mechanics in this series, Grand Bazaar’s titular mechanic – the bazaar – adds an engaging twist to proceedings that kept me up for hours.
Every Saturday you take your best produce or crafted items to the bazaar and peddle off as much as you can, granting you the ability to earn a little more cash than the regular way of selling, but also the chance to level up your bazaar. Doing so brings other vendors to Zephyr Town along with more options as new shopkeepers allow you to spend your hard-earned money on new gameplay elements, expansions for your barn, farm, or pockets, and other neat additions.
Much like the addictive push and pull of Moonlighter’s shop mechanics, Story of Seasons: Grand Bazaar effectively balances its addictive farming gameplay with the bazaar-building side of things to keep you hooked. Ringing your little bell draws customers over, and occasionally they will flash up with an item they want; if you quickly place the requested item on your stall, they’ll rush over. Plus, you can use the new Nature Sprites (more those later) to cheer for you, which unlocks helpful bonuses and put a big stupid grin on my face every time I set off this fanfare.
Actually navigating your bazaar is a touch annoying, as you use full 3D movement to approach your stalls. I would have preferred to just press left and right to move, which would make the process much quicker. But, for me at least, the addictive loop of farming and selling at the bazaar meant often I played the game until I fell asleep holding my Switch 2 in bed. While I’ve never played the DS original, I have played other Harvest Moon / Story of Seasons games, and with the upgrades on Switch 2, Grand Bazaar might nestle into the very best of the series.
Now onto the other side of things, the farming. Much of this is what you expect, especially if you’re a genre aficionado. Grab some seeds, use a hoe to till some soil, scatter the aforementioned seeds, then keep them watered and fertilised to see the fruits of your labour. You eventually get a barn and get to look after some animals, and keeping them fed and happy rewards you with produce like eggs, milk, and even wool.
One thing that gets my goat with farming games is when the farming feels like busy work, and occasionally Story of Seasons: Grand Bazaar nudges that feeling. Thankfully, better farming tools are steadily introduced which improve your ability to till crops and slowly allow you to make more crops and earn more cash. However, you’ll also have to contend with your stamina, much like Stardew Valley.
Here, managing stamina is particularly painful. Smashing rocks or watering multiple tiles of soil sees your stamina plummet, and while you can eat food or take a bath to replenish this, you essentially have the energy of an 80-year-old after a marathon. Importantly, you can find ways to permanently increase your stamina, but for the first 40-50 hours of the game at least, these opportunities are very sparse.
One of the key changes in Grand Bazaar is the movement. You can double jump, just like the original, but you now also have a glider, which you can use to take advantage of the wind to sail across Zephyr Town easy-breezy. Between the ability to farm multiple tiles at once, the immensely satisfying platforming, and the small but richly-packed Zephyr Town, it’s so fun to scurry around and do your chores. You can even hop across rooftops and, on very windy days, you can use the extra height to glide to hidden areas and smash some rare rocks or find other foragable items. Just watch out for hurricanes, where you’ll have to use the new windscreens to keep the blustery menace from ruining your crops.
Another new mechanic comes in the form of those aforementioned Nature Sprites, adorable little creatures dotted around the map. Hand them your foragables like fish, mushrooms, and more, and they will increase the overall quality of these. However, the vast variety of items and different possible qualities means your inventory fills up much quicker than you’d like. Make sure to invest in storage or pocket space immediately. Thankfully you can quickly place boxes around town and in the many windmills – where you can craft better and more complicated delights – so you don’t have to lug everything around.
Fishing, unfortunately, is easily the weakest part of the game, which is a shame as I normally love catching fish. The actual gameplay is fine — you press certain buttons to reel in your fish — but it is painfully slow, especially with bigger fish. Compared to catching bugs, which you pick up immediately, or the fact you can just instantly smash rocks, I rarely wanted to spend my precious moments reeling in fish, so this part of the game stayed largely forgotten for me.
However, one part I really love is cooking. You earn recipes by eating food from the local restaurant, unlocking the item once you’ve gulped it down for the first time. Cook with your crops and animal produce to make dishes that not only top up your stamina, but also grant buffs like increased running speed or temporary stamina increases. It’s all instant, and you can make multiple of the same recipe at once provided you have the materials. I’ve been eagerly anticipating the occasional Cook-Offs, one of the many seasonal events that give you a chance to show off your wares, or earn some trophies for your house.
There’s a lot of smart choices in Grand Bazaar which help to make the most of your time and keep you engaged. A request system helps you unlock new bazaar vendors, and these often test your abilities. You can ring a bell to say hello to folks as you run around, allowing you to build friendship points easily. And when it comes to bazaar time, you can choose different pieces of decor to help keep food fresh or sell more items in bulk.
Marvelous has really taken a lot of time to perfect the gameplay loop of Grand Bazaar, and that polish has also spilled out into the characters and the visuals. When greeting your townsfolk, you’ll now be met with fully voice-acted dialogue, adding charm and personality to every interaction. The voiceover work here is lovely, and makes it much harder to choose who you want to marry. You aren’t restricted by gender option either, so there’s plenty of bachelors or bachelorettes to pick from, and that’s before mentioning some of the new characters added to this remake. If you must know, I’m hoping to settle down with June if I can impress her with enough tea.
While the Harvest Moon series is well known for its adorable chibi style, here everyone has been given more human-like proportions. It works with the gorgeous visuals to make Zephyr Town feel a touch more realistic and homely. The visuals on Switch 2 are crisp and colourful, with a rock-solid frame rate. Trees blow with the wind and the water ripples with a gorgeous detail. It might not be the most demanding game on the Switch 2, but it might be the best-looking Story of Seasons entry, even if the occasional texture can look very pixelated up close.
After about 50 hours with the game, I do have a few other small nitpicks. While it’s nice to be able to organise your items by quality or freshness, it’s annoying you can’t quickly sort by sale price. One other niggle is the implementation of HD Rumble. I might be spoiled by the clip-clop of the horse in Stardew Valley, but here it’s just a flat ‘BZZZTT’ whenever you hit anything. It’s annoyingly sharp and loud, especially in handheld.
Overall, though, Story of Seasons: Grand Bazaar is a fantastic reinvention filled with smart choices and heartfelt polish. I’ve had a blast doting over my farm animals, training up my dog so he can better corral my flocks, and spending time getting ready for the bazaar. Then, when Saturday hits, I open up my shop and enjoy the flurry of purchases, before spending my money on some much-needed new abilities, changes to the town, or some of the many customisation features. Even if they do demand quite a lot of wool and dye from you.
Conclusion
If you’re in the mood for an engaging, endearing, and cute farming game, Story of Seasons: Grand Bazaar should tickle your pickle with aplomb. It might not have the depth of other farming sims, but it’s fantastic to control, and the well-written (and voiced) characters alongside the many tasks and calendar packed with events to occupy your time, make you feel like part of a bustling little community.
I fell in love with Zephyr Town, and thanks to the satisfying gameplay and intricately connected web of rewards, I can’t see myself putting it down any time soon.
Source link
