Story of Seasons: Friends of Mineral Town (Switch)
Story of Seasons: Friends of Mineral Town is a remake of a remake that also includes the content from the gender-specific alternate versions of those games. Beginning as Harvest Moon: Back to Nature on the original PlayStation with an alternate female protagonist in its on-the-nose Japanese-only companion game Harvest Moon for Girl, those games were remade on the Game Boy Advance as Harvest Moon: Friends of Mineral Town and Harvest Moon: More Friends of Mineral Town before finally most everything across the various versions was combined into this remake. While this all sounds a little messy, it also makes it sound like there was a good deal of time to learn how to improve on the formula, but even now this farming game bears some marks of being based on a game from when its genre was young. There’s certainly a comfy charm to its old-fashioned elements, but it can feel a little strange most of the modernization came from giving it an unapologetically cutesy look.
Story of Seasons: Friends of Mineral Town sees you picking to play as either a boy or girl as you set out to start your farming life. Inheriting it after your grandfather’s passing, you find the farm in disarray, stones, weeds, and branches covering the farmland and already giving you quite a chore to deal with before you can start raising crops. Luckily, your farm is right beside Mineral Town, a small little community full of friendly people more than happy to help you out. Zack comes by the farm at 5 each afternoon to collect anything you’ve set aside for sale, local stores sell plenty of seeds, livestock, and farming equipment, Saibara the blacksmith will upgrade your hoe, axe, and other tools, and there are even Nature Sprites you can befriend who will help you with chores around the farm. At the same time, getting to know people around town can be a task worth pursuing on its own, not only because you might come across amusing events or get gifts and recipes for befriending them, but a good deal of residents can become your spouse regardless of gender if you pursue them diligently enough. It can feel like there’s a lot to do in Story of Seasons: Friends of Mineral Town and each day has a clock moving at a fairly quick pace with people having various schedules you’ll need to line up with to do what needs doing, but curiously, even as you’re trying to get your work done, it can also feel like there’s very little getting done on a daily basis.
This mostly comes down to how a lot of the tasks you engage with unfold. Once you’ve cleared enough space for some farming, you till the land and plant the seeds and then water them each day until they’re ready to harvest. When you get animals for your farm, you drop by each day to feed and pet them to make them happy and then, if it’s available, you shear the sheep, milk the rather colorful range of cows, or pick up the chicken eggs. To become friendly with the townsfolk, you need to speak to a person each day and give them a gift they’ll like, and most days they’ll just say the same thing they’ve said every other day. These core tasks tend to involve either waiting for something interesting to happen like the crops being ready to harvest or finally triggering a unique scene with the characters you’ve been cozying up to, but most days feel like maintenance or getting smaller rewards like eggs and milk that sell for very little. Trying to cram every possible productive task in a day can be a bit tedious, befriending Nature Spirits early certainly helping to alleviate some of the repetition if you do it early, and they even have training minigames that involve something a bit more active and variable beyond your daily chores if you do pursue their friendship. A stamina system does limit how much you can do in a day that also can slow down necessary tasks, the player either needing to dip in a nearby hot spring and burn time as they recover or invest in foods and other ways to regain energy to finish their daily workload.
Because many of the tasks are simple and similar across most days, sometimes a day in Story of Seasons: Friends of Mineral Town feels rather hollow. You’re buying time and waiting for something interesting to crop up, and rewards like a harvest or a romantic event can feel a fair bit off. Still, there’s some excitement to seeing a rainy day and knowing you can skip that daily chore, and as you become closer to your livestock, seeing them produce better products for sale is a nice payoff all the same. You have things to work towards beyond the immediate money-making opportunities, the local carpenter able to expand your house, Saibara’s upgrades make it so you can do more farmwork in one quick action like watering multiple plots at once, and some days do have special ceremonies like a fireworks festival, potluck, or horse race where you can even place bets. The tedium of less eventful days is eased by the frequent enough disruptions for something a little bit exciting or rewarding, and there are other tasks like foraging, fishing, and mining you can throw into a day to shake up your schedule a bit. In fact, mining becomes crucial eventually, since each season sees you needing to change your crops but winter covers your farm in snow so the only place to make money is by dropping by the mines to dig up precious jewels.
Most activities remain simple throughout, not requiring too much knowledge, reflex, or planning. This is partially why the repetition does set in from time to time, but after talking to a romantic prospect each day and getting very little personality from them, it is nice when you do trigger a new scene where they reveal more about who they are. You can actually play the field quite a bit before you commit to a marriage, this allowing the city to feel more lived in since you can see more of the personality behind the people who provide local services like the doctor who helps you if you exhaust yourself or the librarian whose library is filled with helpful farming tips and information. The rounded art style makes everyone in town fairly cute although a few do have more mature appearances so it doesn’t feel like some colony of kids, and when you do get to see more of a character’s thoughts and feelings, it can start feeling less like you’ll pick your potential spouse on looks alone since they do have charming and diverse ways of behaving. Marriage is essentially the endgame in that the credits trigger after it, but even though you can get married in just an in-game year if you’re persistent, Story of Seasons: Friends of Mineral Town has a lot of content to allow you to keep playing it for actual years thanks to long term payoffs like being able to eventually have a kid, enter your own horse in a race, or cultivate relationships with rarer characters like Kai who only drops by in the summer.
Story of Seasons: Friends of Mineral Town isn’t too rough with the player; animals won’t die, crops won’t wither if you miss a day of watering, and people won’t forget you just because you missed out on your daily check-in. This does mean some of the pressure of doing your daily chores is self-imposed, especially since you’ll determine how quickly you expand your farm, and there’s no debt or other system to force a game over on you. You can always recover in some way, and while there’s drawbacks to overworking yourself, you’re also never forced into a scenario that would require it. You’ll find yourself at that odd intersection of relaxed and busy where you always feel like you can do more but don’t have to, the tasks not overly demanding but also not providing much on an individual basis so it’s usually not a problem if something forces you to skip a day. It is disheartening to find shops closed on days you need them or have things cancelled for a festival, but the added life in the world, while technically inconvenient at times, also makes it a more interesting place to live your virtual farming life. There are mysteries to be found by looking around town and the outskirts, there are new products to experiment with, there are people with their own stories for you to uncover, those elements adding little bits of excitement to break up the norm of rural chores well enough that the game doesn’t lose its charm.
THE VERDICT: The day to day chores of Story of Seasons: Friends of Mineral Town can feel like you’re doing a lot for rather small rewards, but thankfully the scales do start to tip more towards interesting outcomes as your regular work pays off. Romances are fun to pursue, paydays from a nice harvest allow you to make major improvements to your work flow, and you can start simplifying some tasks while having the room to expand. The holidays and character scenes breath more regular life into the game to stave of some repetition, so while there will be many days where you just do the same old things and press against the limits of your stamina to eke out a little more productivity, there are enough goals in sight to make this a decent farming game but not one with a special draw besides a very cute art style and multiple games worth of nostalgia to evoke.
And so, I give Story of Seasons: Friends of Mineral Town for Nintendo Switch…
An OKAY rating. Story of Seasons: Friends of Mineral Town provides a good deal of farming for farming’s sake, the long term goals often just being to farm a bit better and expand your small agricultural business to include a few new animal types or produce larger crop yields each season. Some of the DNA that came from much older games shows in how the townspeople feel so wooden until their events crop up, and while limiting interaction complexity means your daily chores take more time than thought to complete, it also makes them feel a bit more like actual chores because of it. Sprinkling in extra activities and goals is what makes it so you aren’t too mired in work to enjoy your time with Story of Seasons: Friends of Mineral Town, but it also feels like there’s a lot of room for more surprises and discoveries. Mining can involve a lot more decision making as you try to plunge deeper to find more riches but stamina is so tight that a truly involved dig will take a long time to build up towards. The fishing has various species to catch but finding them is not emphasized with little thought put into discovering new ones and all of them are lumped together in your inventory so they don’t feel special. Some things feel rather shallow, but thankfully when you put enough things together, you start to get an experience with some substance even if it takes some time to see it. The people of Mineral Town do start to feel like familiar neighbors with cute little quirks, your farming starts to pay off enough you can actually check out optional activities like cooking and pet raising, and the farm becomes less of a burden as the Nature Sprites and upgraded tools let you better enjoy other parts of the experience to the point you can even turn in early for the night rather than eking out value from every digit of your stamina.
With more concrete goals to work towards and less barriers to building towards what there are, perhaps it would be a farming game with more flow, but if you are looking for a simpler representation of the simple life without many frills, Story of Seasons: Friends of Mineral Town is a decent farming sim that won’t ask too much out of you. The competition since the original version on PS1 has certainly stepped up their game and even future Harvest Moon/Story of Seasons games will outshine this quaint approach to virtual farming, but it feels humble rather than antiquated. Even if the days can feel too short sometimes, Story of Seasons: Friends of Mineral Town feels manageable and once you have a feel for it, the delightful little surprises make sticking with your sometimes repetitive farm work fairly worthwhile.