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Story of Seasons: Grand Bazaar, a remake of the original Harvest Moon: Grand Bazaar, is a newly released farming game developed and published by Marvelous Inc. The game released on August 27th on Steam, Switch and Switch 2. In this game, you take on the role of a new farmer who has just moved to Zephyr Town, a place whose bazaar was once one of the grandest in the world. However, the bazaar has lost its spark, and it’s now your job to help restore its prosperity and make the town thrive again!
The Grand Remake
While I unfortunately didn’t get to play the original game, I used to be absolutely obsessed with watching Harvest Moon speedruns for a good while. I kind of remember most of the general gameplay. That’s gotta count for something! Anyways. I’ve had an absolute blast playing this game and honestly, I can’t stop. This could very well be the best farming game I’ve played in years! What’s your favorite game of the genre that released recently? Let me know in the comments!
Gameplay
Story of Seasons: Grand Bazaar is a remake, or rather a remaster if you ask me, of the original Harvest Moon: Grand Bazaar for the Nintendo DS. While the overall gameplay loop is still the same, a lot of new stuff has been added! This includes a ton of quality-of-life improvements, new characters to meet, and some nice overhauls to the gameplay and story.
Just like in the original game, your main goal is to bring the bazaar back to its former glory after the town has fallen on hard times. You’ll need to make some big profits, sell lots of your goods and help other people open up their own stalls to make your town’s bazaar the best of the best!
I highly suggest playing the game with a controller if you have the option to. The keyboard controls are a bit all over the place. This has unfortunately been a common issue in the other PC versions of the series. You can definitely get the hang of them, but a controller was just a lot more comfortable for me personally. Now then, let’s get into it!
Farming Day-to-Day
Like in most farming games, as you move into town, you kind of just get handed a free farm for you to live on. No loan to pay off to some random tanuki crook or anything.
Since you’re just starting off, your farm space is pretty limited. You only have a small patch of soil, but it’s more than enough to get things going! Your house even has a storage space and a little barn built right into it, which can house quite a few animals from the get-go. Talk about convenience! As you progress through the story, you’ll be able to unlock some extra patches of land for you to grow crops on. You can even build a second barn if you’re more into the rancher kind of lifestyle. Of course, your barn animals need just as much tending to as your crops, so don’t neglect them!
The game’s got the usual array of different crops that grow in different seasons, but also some that grow in winter, which is a bit more uncommon for games like these. It’s nice to not just sit around for an entire season, twiddling your thumbs and waiting for the snow to melt. Just remember to fertilize your plants regularly to increase their quality! Another nice touch is that you can actually water your crops twice a day, making them grow even faster.
If you’d like to take a break from farming, you can always spend your day fishing or catching bugs. Surprisingly, the game doesn’t do a great job explaining how bug catching works. You don’t need a net to snag them, just sneak up on them and grab’em as fast as you can! I did kind of have to google that one if I’m being perfectly honest.
Upgrades
On your farm, you can find one of the game’s three windmills, which are used for refining goods. Be it turning milk into cheese, eggs into mayo, and much more! You can also throw in some rocks and wood to make stone and lumber. Combined with ores, they can be used to upgrade your tools into better, more efficient variants. Your improved tools will cover a larger area, allowing you to, for example, water multiple crops with one swing of your watering can. Zephyr Tow may not have a mine to get ores from, but luckily, you can find all the ores you need scattered around the map. They even respawn throughout the day!
A new addition to the remake are the Harvest Sprites, who you may be familiar with from other Story of Seasons or Harvest Moon games. If you provide them with different resources, like fish, bugs, or forage-ables, they will boost the quality of their respective items! This is not only nice to boost your income a bit, but it will also help you with some quests down the line.
The Harvest Sprites also allow you to collect a currency called “Happy Energy”, which you earn by literally just going about your day. Almost any activity will net you some. Collect enough, and you can spend it on some neat goodies, like decorations for your bazaar stall, new seeds, or to unlock special boxes around the map that let you access your storage from pretty much anywhere!
You can also buy a bunch of useful skills from the mayor at the bazaar, including a double jump and special abilities for fishing and farming. They are incredibly handy for making daily tasks easier and faster.
The Town Residents
Besides just working on your farm and gathering resources, you will also be spending some quality time interacting with the residents. You can improve your relationships with them by simply talking to them and giving them some gifts that they may like, pretty standard stuff for this type of game.
Even better, a few nice quality-of-life improvements make interacting with the residents a lot easier. For one, you can just press a button to greet them as you walk by, which gives you fewer friendship points, but you won’t be stuck in a dialogue. Another neat feature is that you know everyone’s gift preferences from the very beginning, so you don’t have to guess or look up what to give to them. All of their preferences can be viewed at any time in the Resident Info menu. On top of all that, the game actually tells you when and where friendship events happen! This is a really great feature since some of them can be really easily missed.
There are some other new additions in the remake! Not only will you be able to meet some new faces, but some of the original characters have been overhauled too. One of the biggest relationship improvements would probably be the new quests people can give you when you hit certain friendship milestones. These little errands usually just involve collecting some items for them. Just be aware that your friendship won’t be able to go any higher until you finish their requests!
It is also a good idea to befriend some of the non-marriage candidates, since they’ll give you some cooking recipes and other neat goodies. Sometimes, they’ll even give you a quest to open their very own stall at the bazaar!
The Bazaar
The bazaar has seen a lot of changes since the original game. The way the story progresses, the stalls you unlock and how you do so, and some of its gameplay are all a bit different. You might even see a few more familiar faces from other games in the series! As you play through the story and improve the bazaar, more and more stalls will be unlocked. These new shops will let you buy all sorts of special things, like pets, new types of crop seeds, or even upgrades for your farm!
The gameplay itself is pretty simple. The bazaar opens every Saturday. Here, you can sell all of your crops, produce, fish, random junk and pretty much anything you come across. You can still get rid of some of your items by selling them at the regular store, but they will net you a lot less in comparison.
Before the bazaar opens, you’ll need to store all of your products at your stall. Once it begins, you place your items on the tables in front of you and ring a bell to get people’s attention. They’ll pick out what they want to buy, and all you have to do is interact with the item to sell it. Easy-peasy!
Cheer Time!
Another new addition to the remake is Cheer Time. If you make enough sales, you fill up a meter that lets you call the Harvest Sprites to help you out! Not only will they cheer you on and lure in more customers, they’ll also boost your sales and prices. Every Sprite has a special boost that they can apply to your sales, increasing their value or boosting the number of items a customer may buy. It basically turns the bazaar gameplay into a button masher. It’s a good way to get rid of those pesky items that haven’t sold by the end of the day.
Making money in this game is generally pretty easy, so you’ll rarely ever be short on cash.
Events
There are a bunch of different events that take place each season! They are a great way to earn trophies to display in your house and at your bazaar stall, and earn a lot of friendship points with the residents.
Some events, like animal and crop shows, take place in multiple seasons and can even boost the quality of your produce if you win! Make sure to only hand in the highest quality crops and to treat your animals well, and you won’t be struggling to win these. You can also participate in fun pet shows where your animals have to perform cute tricks, or horse races in which you have to jump over as many hurdles as you can in the given time limit.
Yet other events may just be fun get-togethers with the other residents, like Tea Parties or the Juice Festival. You can get a whole ton of friendship points by simply showing up with a nice beverage to share with the others. These events are a nice way to break up the normal day-to-day cycle.
Graphics & Audio
Story of Seasons: Grand Bazaar has a super cute art style that is very much in line with the other modern Story of Season titles. The character models are adorable, and they still look like their original counterparts. The dialogue portraits are also very pretty, and it’s nice that you have the option to turn them off if you want to. The UI is clean, and the menus are easy to navigate. My only little nitpick is that your player character is just stuck looking like a 10-year-old, no matter what you do. Though that’s more of a personal complaint.
The soundtrack is absolutely fantastic. It offers a variety of calm and catchy tunes that change depending on the situation you’re in. The sound effects for interactions and the menu are fun and perfectly fit the game’s vibe.
But the best part? The game has voice acting! All cutscenes are fully voiced! Even though daily chatter only has some general keywords as you enter dialogue, it adds so much to the immersion. The characters are cast perfectly, in my opinion. Since I avoided spoilers, I was genuinely so positively surprised when I first started playing. How fun!
Longevity
I beat most of the game’s main story in about 70 hours. However, that can really vary depending on how you play. Even after finishing the main quest, there’s still lots to do and collect! So you can easily get well over 100 hours out of the game. Going for 100% and maxing out everything is a huge grind and requires quite a bit of RNG, but it’s absolutely not needed to beat the game. It is a fun challenge if you’re up for it though!
Final Thoughts
Overall, I absolutely love this game. Every day is packed with things to do. You really always have something to keep you busy, which I really love about this game. In a lot of farming games, by the time year 2 hits, I often find myself skipping days right after I watered my crops. Not here though! I feel like I have barely scratched the surface of all that the game has to offer. The addition of voice acting was a fantastic surprise. I love all the quality-of-life improvements and the overall gameplay loop is just so fun. The game really knocked it out of the park for me. It is easily one of my favorite games that released this year. Honestly, I don’t have anything to complain about. I’ll probably even take on the grind for 100% completion just because I can’t get myself to stop playing!
What more can I say? Story of Seasons: Grand Bazaar absolutely deserves the Thumb Culture Platinum Award!
Disclaimer: A code was received in order to write this review.
If you enjoyed this, why not check out my previous review of Whimside.
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