Story of Seasons A Wonderful Life
Note: This is a 2023 remake of the beloved 2003 GameCube classic Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life. While the remake includes updated visuals, additional marriage candidates, new animals, seasonal events, and quality-of-life improvements, it’s essentially a 20-year-old game with a fresh coat of paint. What makes the problems even more frustrating is that they had two decades to address the original’s shortcomings and seemingly chose to not.
If you’re looking for a farming life experience, you’d be better served looking elsewhere. This instalment feels like a hollow shell of what the genre can offer, populated by a world so bare it might as well be a digital wasteland. The characters are perhaps the greatest offence, sporting weird designs that range from completely personality-free to relying on tired old tropes that were stale decades ago.
The story follows suit, offering a flat and boring narrative that fails to give you any reason to care about this world or your place in it. Even the core farming mechanics feel poorly thought out; feeding and milking animals twice daily becomes a tedious chore rather than a satisfying routine. And don’t get me started on the purchasing system, a horrendous design that forces you to buy items one at a time, suffering through the same dialogue exchanges repeatedly instead of something sensible like a shopping cart.
The world itself feels like an afterthought, lacking both visual appeal and logical design. Where other games in this genre create cosy, lived-in spaces that invite exploration, this one presents landscapes that feel disconnected and purposeless.