Story of Seasons: Pioneers of Olive Town Review

Exploring, travelling and collecting are some of my favourite things and that is certainly reflected in some of my favourite series of games such as Animal Crossing and Pokémon. Throw in some crafting and/or farming with a nice slew of collectibles and I’m usually a happy gamer. Story of Seasons has played true to the farming sim mould for most of its iterations; you get given a run-down farm and you make it come to life. While there’s nothing wrong with the classics and they’re certainly still fun, who doesn’t like a new gimmick or spin on things every once and a while to keep you coming back for more? From the first trailer I could tell that Story of Seasons: Pioneers of Olive Town was going to scratch my escapism itch by offering a calm farming experience combined with more development and enhancements than ever before. Throw in the return of the super cute animals from Story of Seasons: Friends of Mineral Town and you’ve got yourself a winner.

Story of Seasons: Pioneers of Olive Town (SoS:PoOT) starts with the story of the titular Olive Town, with your grandfather (a once beloved member of the town) passing on the key to his farm. His farm was once amazing but it is definitely less than amazing when you first set foot on it. It’s a veritable wilderness with any existing buildings being completely rundown and wildlife roaming free. The starting farm area alone is a very reasonable size but as you explore you will quickly notice that it is only just the beginning. The farm can expand to over three times the starting size as you repair and remove obstacles with either money or materials. As you explore these areas, each season sees new forageable plants start showing up and potentially new variations of animals. Every time you ship something new it will become available in the relevant shops, allowing you to get even more new seeds as well as purchase materials with cash if you’re loaded.

The range of crops and farming area are both wide and varied

As you progressively improve your farm, which is one part of SoS:PoOT’s story, you will get to experience cutscenes related to an underlying system and a character that I won’t spoil. This system relates to the egg-like Follower Sprites that pop out of the ground when you do things around the farm. These sprites allow you to do a number of cool things, including working as minions for the larger sprites to collect different kinds of goodies for you once you can visit the Earth Sprite Village.

It’s super nice to be able to quickly and easily customise your farm and the position of buildings with little hassle. You can quickly move any buildings or objects wherever you like once it’s repaired by moving them to your inventory rather than having to contact some NPC or pay a fee. This allows you to fully customise things and make a farm that suits your personal play style. The player customisation is also wonderfully diverse and modifiable which will be widely appreciated I’m sure.

The gameplay loop of clearing the land for materials, processing them and crafting things you need or saving them for larger projects was something I found really satisfying. To process various materials you require different kinds of makers that you unlock as you level up your skills and the rarer the material the more time processing takes. There are many different kinds of makers that some players may find cumbersome, but as the farm area is so large and I like being organised I didn’t mind the high number and I set up a processing area where I also stored my surplus items.

There is a wide variety of in game events that vary from cutscenes to mini games like this barrel toss

While your materials are chugging away you can be farming the land, doing some mining, hunting for forageables, fishing, emptying ponds with your bucket for potential treasures, cooking, taking photographs of wildlife for the museum or raising animals, all so that you can make sweet moolah. This in turn allows you to restore the buildings and access more and more of your farm. It’s so easy to completely forget about the town and get absorbed in your new farm life, at least until you run out of seeds. Olive Town is right next door and does offer a bunch of helpful services, with there seemingly being a storefront for just about anything (pets, produce, flowers, tools, buildings, you name it). You can unlock two more shops by completing Town Quests which also improve the appearance of Olive Town and attract more tourists, which is the other part of SoS:PoOT’s story. The story is present but isn’t overwhelmingly persistent, allowing you to enjoy farm life at your own pace. There are also a boat load of NPCs in town though they are a bit bland in the general dialogue department, but the writing is better within cutscenes.

Each area of the farm comes with its own mine that goes deeper and deeper and includes more and more adversaries in the form of different kinds of moles. Getting your mining goodies can require a game of whack-a-mole to stop the moles hitting you with their stamina sapping AOE attack. You are rewarded for knocking them out with useful materials and potentially sweet, sweet treasure. The more you progress in the later mines the more moles appear per level, and the little suckers get a lot faster too. These moles really make you pay attention in a rather simple mine design and if you go deep enough in each mine, who knows? Something good may happen *wink*.

There are many great quality of life additions to love in SoS:PoOT but there are some definite highlights. Free buildings (a coop, barn and more) as well as free animals are an awesome bonus and include cows, sheep, alpacas, goats, rabbits and chickens. The same goes for your first horse once you find it as long as you build a stable. Animals do not require tools for specific tasks, rather you just interact with them as many times as required to collect milk/fluff, brush and then pet for happiness and it is much appreciated streamlining. Another welcome addition is the tool bag for storing all available tools in the game, allowing you to put them away if you need more inventory space which is also decently sized. Your tools are instantly upgraded instead of taking a day or two and with each upgrade you can do more damage to objects within a wider area with a charge attack. The later upgrades do cost a pretty penny but are totally worth it, especially for the satisfaction of lopping down multiple trees or smashing a group of rocks in one swing.

The new bucket item can help you find materials and potential treasure within small to large bodies of water

As you do different kinds of tasks you gain experience for each skill, with a new perk unlocked as you level up. These perks include things like faster harvesting to more items per individual node for things like materials to even crops. The more you mine for instance the quicker you will get at smashing through rocks even if you don’t upgrade your tools, though of course upgrades mean a big improvement. The character progression feels natural but it is also really satisfying and gives you a sense of purpose to everything you do. As you progress in the game and continue to find Follower Sprites you will eventually be able to unlock some really sweet perks for both your character as well as new pets, mounts and very special farming areas giving the player even more things to work towards once your farm is performing nicely.

The art style is bright, cute and alive and the farm and surroundings look great in each season. There are multiple kinds of weather including crazy rain during summer storms, which makes each season interesting. The music is also pleasant without being too in your face and avoids feeling overly repetitive, which is important as you’re going to be listening to it for long stretches while toiling away on your farm.

On the technical side, the game can have some frame drops, in particular when there are lots of items on screen or when you first load into the farm from town. If this was any other genre I would have been ticked off, but I was too busy getting into the game to be bothered much, though I can’t deny that it did ruin the ambiance on occasion. A mid-review patch did improve the performance and loading times and another patch is planned so if variable frame rates are your kryptonite I don’t think this issue will be an ongoing problem.

My cute animal menagerie quickly grew into quite the fluffy family, from pets, to livestock to mounts.

Final Thoughts

There are many more positive things about this game than I have room to say here. With so much to do it’s very easy to play for hours and hours without realising it. If this was any other genre than a farming sim then I may have been bothered by the performance hiccups, but I was having such a great time that I didn’t really care nor did I experience any bugs in my 45+ hrs. There is already bucket loads of content in this game and even more is coming via DLC, and all things said and done SoS:PoOT is a farming sim that will have wide appeal for fans and newbies alike.

Reviewed on Nintendo Switch // Review code supplied by publisher

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