Gamer Diary: Story of Seasons Friends of Mineral Town

I remember playing the original Harvest Moon: Friends of Mineral Town when I had it on the Gameboy Advance. It was one of the few GBA games I had at the time and it was a birthday present from a friend. I’ve always been a big fan of the franchise with its adorable features and lowkey game play. It was the last new Harvest Moon game I had gotten in over a decade after having really, really bad money problems from the middle of high school to the end of college. Up until that point the portable versions of the Harvest Moon games were much, much simpler than the TV console games. The first two games didn’t feature marriage at all, and the third one, while it had a lot great features to visit like a movie theater and a shopping mall, only had the opposite gender player character as the marriage option. They were still all amazing and Harvest Moon was the only franchise I sunk anywhere near as much time as I did the Pokemon games. Friends of Mineral Town was like a soft reboot of the N64 game, with a lot of reoccurring characters like Popouri, Marie and Karen. And as much as I liked it, I never played the game quite as much as I did the Gameboy Color series because as expanded as the graphics and game play were, the controls were sort of…nutty. It was very easy to accidentally equip or use the wrong item or tool, and the reoccurring Harvest Moon problem is the pacing of the time of the day. Some games in the franchise the days crawl along, with running out of things to do very quickly before the afternoon or night rolled along (GBC 1, GBC3), even with tons of crops and animals to take care of. Other games in the series, like N64, barely gave you time to water your crops let along talk to anyone or do anything resembling thorough exploring. I found Friends of Mineral Town to fall more into this camp.

And between financial problems and not having appropriate systems, it wasn’t until a couple of years ago that I got back into the franchise…except what I ended up playing wasn’t a ‘real’ Harvest Moon game. I got Harvest Moon: The Lost Valley on clearance, but I wasn’t aware at the time of the Marvelous/Natsume split and the fight over the trademark. Lost Valley wasn’t a bad game, per se, it just didn’t feel like a proper Harvest Moon game. It was more of a reskinned Animal Crossing with some Minecraft thrown in. Interesting, but some of the features were Not Great. So when it was announced that Friends of Mineral Town was being remade for the Switch, I was on the fence. Friends of Mineral Town was not my favorite game in the franchise, and there were other, similar games that filled that niche of casual-but-engrossing game play, including Stardew Valley and fellow Marvelous franchise Rune Factory. Then I heard through the grapevine that one of the big features to be included in the remake was the option of gay marriage. Regardless of the gender of your farmer, you have the option to woo any of the romanceable characters in the game, and new characters were being added for good measure and more options. Obviously, this was highly influenced by the same feature in Stardew Valley, but it certainly got my attention. Add in the fact that you can raise alpacas and keep a capybara as a pet and I’m sold. So when I saw the game on sale during Black Friday, I IMMEDIATELY added it to cart.

It was a smart choice. Not only is Story of Seasons: Friends of Mineral Town a great reboot of the original game, the expanded features really made it so much better. First of all, the controls are much, MUCH better than the GBA game. Having more buttons than the GBA system means more dedicated controls and being less like to eat something you intended to give or use the wrong tool. More characters, more events, more crops, more animals and fantastic graphics. The pacing of the day is in the surprisingly-difficult-to-master sweet spot where you can take care of your chores and explore, and talk to folks without having to scramble too much to do either. The game does have some minor bugs still, it’s very easy to get stuck between townsfolk and be trapped there until they decide to move and wastes a bunch of time, and sometimes there are some weird clipping issues, especially with your livestock. The script for the villagers is also pretty sparse, and they tend to say the same things over and over again regardless of how deep the friendship level with them gets. Additionally, the exploration areas are still fairly tiny, so foraging isn’t particularly fun or productive, otherwise there’s plenty to do, so exploration is only really important before your crops and animals start rolling in. And some of the pet and livestock options are really out there. I already mentioned the alpacas, but you can also raise cows that give strawberry milk and angora bunnies. While you don’t default with a pet like in other Harvest Moon/Story of Seasons games, you can keep multiple pets at once so long as the first pet you got likes you enough to accept a new pet as well.

Honestly the toughest decision in the entire game is what gender to play as because I couldn’t decide if I wanted to be a girl that romances Marie or take a swing as a boy. I decided to be a boy and woo the blacksmith’s grandson Gray. And hot damn if the romancing in this game isn’t some of the cutest freaking stuff in the universe.

Look at my tiny adorable husband.

Not everything is super obvious in the game. In order to even have the option to buy a pet, you first need to have the shopkeeper Van come to town, and the game never tells you how to do that. I had to look up online that you need to make offerings to the Harvest Goddess for 30 days in a row before he appears. There are also a lot of secrets that you might need to look up to discover, like where to find Kappa or how to uncurse special tools.

Story of Seasons remains a nice escape from the horrors of reality, and the new features in this updated version of Friends of Mineral Town nicely brings the charm of the original game with some seriously needed fixes to be a good debut of the franchise to the Switch.