{"id":513536,"date":"2020-07-08T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2020-07-08T13:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/1900-6417494"},"modified":"2021-10-29T14:09:15","modified_gmt":"2021-10-29T14:09:15","slug":"story-of-seasons-friends-of-mineral-town-review-when-the-seasons-change","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.gamespot.com\/reviews\/story-of-seasons-friends-of-mineral-town-review-wh\/1900-6417494\/?ftag=CAD-01-10abi2f","title":{"rendered":"Story Of Seasons: Friends Of Mineral Town Review – When The Seasons Change","gt_translate_keys":[{"key":"rendered","format":"text"}]},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Harvest Moon, and now Story of Seasons, have thrived on their personality above all else. With each entry in the series offering fresh story and minimal improvements to gameplay, replaying one of the older titles is asking for disappointment, even if it has a new coat of paint. Story of Seasons: Friends of Mineral Town<\/a> brings the 2003 Game Boy Advance title into 2020 with enjoyable cutesy graphics and personality, but does little to add depth to the already outdated gameplay..<\/p>\n

After choosing from an extremely limited set of character customization options, you set out to take over a farm left to you by your late grandfather, where you once spent the summer 20 years ago. It’s unclear why your character left whatever life they had behind, but you are quickly thrust into the day-to-day work of maintaining a farm, starting with crops.<\/p>\n

Growing crops is one of the main methods of making money, but progression is slow. You can’t improve your crop yields in any meaningful way until the option to buy better farm soil becomes available in the second year, which is 25 to 30 hours into the game. Upgrading the watering can allows you to tend to more crops at once, but the increased stamina usage makes for minimal improvement to your crop yield.<\/p>\n

\"No<\/a><\/figure>\n
\"Gallery<\/a>\"Gallery<\/a>\"Gallery<\/a>\"Gallery<\/a>\"Gallery<\/a>\"Gallery<\/a>\"Gallery<\/a>\"Gallery<\/a>\"Gallery<\/a>\"Gallery<\/a><\/figure>\n

Upgrading tools improves your ability to farm slightly, but the best way to maximize crop output is through the Nature Sprites that live in the town. Tucked behind the church, seven Sprites live in a hut, waiting for you to make friends with them. You gain their trust by speaking with them and giving them gifts that they like, similar to befriending people in town. Once a certain level of friendship is reached, you can request they help with one of three farm chores: watering crops, picking crops, and caring for livestock.<\/p>\n

The catch here is that the Sprites aren’t very good at these chores to start with and need to be trained through playing minigames. Each chore has a corresponding minigame; the watering minigame and livestock minigame are both enjoyable, entailing tile memorization and frantic chicken feeding respectively, while the crop-picking minigame is a glorified button masher. But because you need to play the minigames dozens upon dozens of times to make meaningful progress, the novelty of them wears off quickly. And because all seven Sprites need to be leveled up individually, you could spend the majority of your playtime repeating these minigames with little in the way of a reward.<\/p>\n

There are no overall goals or quests for you to work towards, which leaves you lost as to exactly why you’re putting all this effort into the farm except for personal satisfaction and the promise of getting rich. Your actions and progression have little impact on Mineral Town and the Nature Sprites, lessening the sense of accomplishment you could get from turning the abandoned land into a thriving farm.<\/p>\n

Farming isn’t the only moneymaking avenue, as you can also spend your days mining and fishing. Unfortunately, neither activity pays very well nor are they actively enjoyable to do. Successful mining is based entirely on luck and an abundance of stamina recovery items. Every floor has a bunch of rocks you can break to try to find ore. The only way to progress further into the mine is by using a hoe on the dirt, and there’s no indication of where the ladder might be. Using the hoe drains your stamina, and if you aren’t lucky, you could easily waste the majority of your stamina bar searching for the way to descend, sending you out of the mine empty-handed and frustrated.<\/p>\n

\"No<\/a><\/figure>\n

Upgrading your hammer and hoe doesn’t improve your mining skills, and there aren’t checkpoints in the mine, so you have to start from the first floor every run. The ore itself doesn’t sell for very much and you don’t need more than a handful of each to upgrade all of your tools. Gems are worth more but can only be found in the lake mine, which is only available during winter. You never improve at mining and the payout doesn’t make up for needing a ton of stamina items to get into the lower levels.<\/p>\n

In the same vein as mining, fishing is based mostly on luck. While upgrading the fishing rod does increase your chances of getting bigger and better fish, the entire mechanic is based on waiting for an exclamation point and pressing the action button, which isn’t engaging and quickly becomes dull. If done correctly, you might catch a fish. Or a branch. Or a can. Or the fish might get away. All of this is a roll of the dice, on top of a mechanic that is fairly mind-numbing to start with. There are different species of fish that you can catch, but their sell value is only dependent on their size–small, medium, or large–which defeats the purpose of any species variety.<\/p>\n

\n

Farming isn’t the only moneymaking avenue, as you can also spend your days mining and fishing. Unfortunately, neither activity pays very well nor are they actively enjoyable to do.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

All of these activities are mainly there for the purpose of earning money, one of the primary barriers to progression. Nothing in life is free, and nothing in Friends of Mineral Town is cheap. Upgrading tools, farm buildings, and your house all cost thousands of in-game dollars, which is hard to come by for the majority of the first year. With crops yielding produce on a weekly basis and other income avenues not paying nearly as much, purchasing anything becomes a big decision, one that happens far too infrequently to keep you interested.<\/p>\n

Animals are equally expensive, to the point where you don’t break even on the investment for at least one year. In addition to being a financial burden, the game discourages its own system of getting more animals for cheaper prices. While it costs less to impregnate a cow than it does to buy one, there are four variants of cows, and getting one pregnant just duplicates it, so all four variants must be bought at full price if you want to produce all four types of milk.<\/p>\n

\"No