Story Of Seasons: Grand Bazaar Review

Story of Seasons games, once known under the Harvest Moon banner, have remarkable staying power. Since the first game in the series was released in 1996, there have been countless iterations on the farming formula that has effectively come to define an entire genre. In more recent years, remakes of the originals have allowed older fans to revisit the classics and new fans to experience them for the first time. Although I never played Grand Bazaar in its original release, the original Friends of Mineral Town was the game that got me hooked on the genre, and the latest series remake successfully combines the classic formula with its own distinct identity for a satisfying, moreish experience.

Grand Bazaar is set in Zephyr Town, a municipality whose once-celebrated bazaar has diminished to a shadow of its vibrant former self. The narrative opens, as many good farming sims do, when you decide to move to the town and start a new life for yourself as a farmer. Naturally, it soon falls under your purview to help rebuild Zephyr Town’s bazaar to its former glory, and, if you work hard enough, perhaps even attain the exalted rank of World Bazaar.

It’s easy to fall into the steady routines of life on the farm

The premise is hardly complex, but it doesn’t need to be, as the game’s charm and appeal come from the steady rhythm of completing your daily chores and working toward the many, many objectives that you can pursue. In addition to growing crops, raising animals, and selling wares at the bazaar, there are plenty of the expected genre offerings such as foraging, cooking, romance, and friendship building, as well as a stunningly tedious fishing mini-game. Zephyr Town also holds contests and festivals during which you can earn prizes and the favour of the townsfolk, and the sheer amount of content will keep you engaged for the long haul. The game strikes an excellent balance between consistency and variety to create a gameplay loop that is reliable enough to form routines in, but with enough novelty from week to week to prevent it from getting stale. This subtly shifting consistency is augmented by a delightful soundtrack that similarly retains a clear personality while responding to changes in the weather, season, and time of day.

One of Grand Bazaar’s core gameplay elements lies in the windmills of Zephyr Town. Once unlocked, the windmills enable you to upgrade your farming tools or process goods into a range of products to sell for higher profits. There are limits to how much you can process at a time, but the game alerts you whenever a windmill finishes processing to free up a slot for the next batch of items. A lot of time does get spent running back and forth between the windmills on a daily basis, so the lack of a persistent notification history is not game-breaking, but due to the sheer volume of notifications you receive, it’s easy to miss the occasional few and lose out on valuable processing time from not attending to the windmills immediately.

Raise your animals with love

While losing a little processing time here and there shouldn’t seem like much of a grievance in a relatively low-stakes farming simulator, the problem here is the lost efficiency, speaking to a broader issue with the gameplay. Running at one game minute per real-life second, the brisk clip of the in-game clock leaves precious little time for inefficient decisions, and despite generous shortcuts on the map and a fast travel system, I regularly found myself rushing (and failing) to finish my evening chores in time to go to bed at a reasonable hour. This time pressure compounds as the game progresses and you add more tasks to your daily chores, even in spite of tool upgrades that help you complete farmwork more efficiently, and it infuses the experience with a constant low-level anxiety that’s surprisingly hard to shake.

The weekly bazaar, held on Saturdays, adds a high point for every week, where over two shifts you sell your wares to tourists and townsfolk. This is effectively a mini-game where you must balance tasks such as serving customers and rotating stock in order to sell as much as you can. It’s a fun, lively, and profitable change of pace from daily life on the farm, and although the bazaar experience would benefit from some quality of life changes such as a clearer view of the produce counter and having the ability to lay out your wares for sale before each shift to save time, bazaar days noticeably help to establish both a reliable weekly routine and a clear identity for the game.

Building up Zephyr Town’s bazaar to attain World Rank is the goal around which the main narrative centres. As you advance the story, other characters become inspired to open their own stalls at the bazaar, and helping them to do so unlocks helpful new amenities such as farm upgrade services and various shops. In addition to things that are mechanically helpful, the fashion offerings are particularly good; there’s a wide variety of styles, designs, and accessories to complement the similarly broad player appearance customisation options, and while you can’t change your name or pronouns after starting the game, no other customisations are locked, allowing for free and flexible self-expression.

Sell your wares at the weekly bazaar

In a Story of Seasons series first, Grand Bazaar is also enhanced with voice acting, which, while it helps to bring out the characters’ personalities, I am not fully sold on in its current implementation. Your player character does not speak during cutscenes, instead communicating with gestures and facial expressions which are occasionally so stilted as to be unintentionally funny against the earnestly delivered voice lines of other characters. While it becomes less noticeable as you get further into the game and see enough of these cutscenes to become desensitised, it’s certainly jarring at first, and it’s particularly awkward during scenes where your love interest is talking about their feelings and you’re not contributing to the conversation verbally at all.

Nevertheless, I particularly loved the way in which the town is made to feel like a real place through the use of minor characters. Although some of the main characters are a little bland at times, with many of the problems they face being simple issues to be solved with one conversation or a fulfilled request, the minor characters who you see passing by contribute to that unmistakable sense of living in a city where most of the people you encounter are strangers that you will never get to know. This contrasts against many other games in the genre, where characters are often restricted to ones you can get to know well. It’s a small detail, but one that elevates the town atmosphere with important verisimilitude.

Festivals and contests add important variety to the gameplay

Many of the game’s individual gameplay mechanics have also been crafted to complement the whole of the experience. For example, while cooking is a common mechanic in life simulators, games in this genre often fail to offer strong incentives for actually purchasing food from shops beyond giving you a way to quickly replenish stamina. In Grand Bazaar, however, eating new foods allows you to learn their recipes, which are essential for many of the game’s minor objectives such as the cooking contest or to fulfil requests, so using these amenities to learn all the recipes becomes an important part of your core gameplay. This is, once again, a simple detail, but it speaks to the synergistic whole in whose service many of the game’s components have been designed.

The not-quite-exception but not-quite-rule to this pattern is the storage system and the related perishability mechanic. Your farm’s storage is initially limited and can be gradually expanded over time, and although storage slots can stack up to 99 items of the same kind together, the eye-watering range of items that you can collect or produce makes it difficult to keep within your storage limits almost from day one, and this problem persists even after all the possible storage upgrades have been completed. This and the spoilage mechanic, which sees item freshness degrade over time, encourage you to offload your produce at the bazaar, and while this is an effective way to discourage the excessive hoarding that can be optimal in other games, there are times when you really do need to hold onto a host of items for a long time to achieve your goals, and the limits here often detract, rather than add to, the otherwise enjoyable experience.

Final Thoughts

Due to the highly repetitive gameplay loop common to life and farming sims, longer games in this genre often live or die by the way they implement quality of life design choices. While there are plenty of small areas for improvement across the board, Grand Bazaar does enough well that it’s easy to sink entire days into its cosy world at a time. With its gorgeous atmosphere, sufficient content to sustain upwards of 100 hours of play, and plenty of well designed smaller details that are delightful to discover for yourself, the game is a solid choice for anyone craving the genre’s reliable, relaxing routines.

Reviewed on Nintendo Switch 2 // Review code supplied by publisher

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