A worthy addition to the farming game genre
http://www.nintendoworldreport.com/review/72112/story-of-seasons-grand-bazaar-switch-2-review
There’s nothing quite like the feeling when a game gets its hooks into you. Where you spend time thinking about the game when you’re not playing, and when playing means hours melting away effortlessly. The latest game to do that was, for me, Story of Seasons: Grand Bazaar, which is a refreshing take on the farming genre with all the nostalgic charm of a long-running series.
Grand Bazaar, like many a farming game, takes place with your character moving to be the farmer of a small town, this time Zephyr Town. The town has a weekly bazaar that is down on its luck, but it’s your job to revitalize the farm, bazaar and the town itself. The bazaar is the biggest deviation from the farming game formula - rather than selling items by using some sort of shipping box, the vast majority of your income will come from selling items at the bazaar. Each Saturday in game you have a morning and afternoon shift where it’s a mad rush to set items up at the tables at your stall (which you can buy/upgrade), bring people’s attention to your stall with a bell, and sell your heart out. While you can sell some items to the town’s store if you absolutely need to, you’re really meant to be focusing your sales on the bazaar. Not only do you need to hit a certain level of sales to level up the bazaar, but you can unlock various bonuses through decorating your stall that increase your revenue.
Planning around the bazaar becomes a major focus but one that required a different type of thinking than a lot of farming games do. For example, you have a limited number of inventory slots at the bazaar. So you start to realize that higher value items like your cooking or crafted jewelry tend to make the most sense to stock, and that you should focus on processing your crops. But since there is a limited amount of slots, making things in bulk usually makes the most sense. I’d imagine you could come up with a variety of strategies, but I spent a lot of my time cooking to increase the value of my items.
Another part of the mechanic is how you process your items. Zephyr Town’s main gimmick is wind, and you do all your crafting in three windmills that progressively unlock throughout town. Each makes different items, with the amount of time it takes depending on how windy it is on a given day. If there isn’t any wind, crafting will be slower. This didn’t tend to shift how I used the windmills, but I could see it making a huge difference depending on what you want to focus on crafting, as some items take up to days to make - considering each windmill has a limited number of things it can produce at once, this is another element to consider. Wind also comes into play with movement, as your character gets a glider early on that allows you to ride the wind to get places faster or even jump over to places you couldn’t get on a still day. The movement feels a bit awkward at first, but eventually it became really fun to glide around town, finding new things.
However, beyond the unique elements of the game, Grand Bazaar does a great job with the classic farming formula. There is the standard day to day farm tasks that make up a good portion of the game - growing crops, raising animals. This all feels good to play, and the focus on crafting makes you really consider which crops to farm. For example, rice is extremely versatile for recipes and can be processed into rice flour and vinegar for use in other recipes and with pickling vegetables, so I tended to grow a lot of rice. I also liked how pets worked in this game - in addition to having dogs and cats around your farm, they can also herd your animals in and out of barns with some training, which improves your animals’ happiness and uses up less food. There are a lot of clever additions to this that make Grand Bazaar feel well thought out. My only real complaint was, even when I got my farm upgraded as high as it could be, I never really felt like I had enough planting space. This could be another element of strategy, as each seed you plant might produce more than one crop, but fruit trees take up a lot of space and I always felt like I wanted more space to expand my farm even further.
Another element of the game that worked really well for me was your relationship with the town and its residents. Throughout Grand Bazaar you work on improving the bazaar, and part of that is opening up new stalls, usually as a result of some quest. One character might require materials to build the stall, another might require you to sell enough in the bazaar in one day to prove your worth. This leads to some interesting quests to focus on throughout. Characters also have personal quests as your relationship goes up with them, which can often stretch you to create items you might not otherwise create or farm things you wouldn’t otherwise farm. I wish the characters were a bit more interesting to justify this work, but I found the challenges rewarding.
The game also looks and sounds great. The art style is charming, and the music is a real treat to listen to as you walk around the town. Grand Bazaar also runs beautifully on Switch 2, with fast loading times and no real framerate hiccups. This all leads to there being no friction to the experience and a presentation that made me want to spend a lot of time in this world.
I do wish I liked the characters more. The story is kind of basic, and the characters are pretty standard archetypes. I liked all the characters, don’t get me wrong, but I started to avoid the character-driven cutscenes because I knew it would add little to my personal experience. There’s a mechanic where you can call out to other characters to get a small boost on their friendship rather than the full friendship boost for an actual conversation and I ended up doing that a lot. I don’t think they’re bad characters, but given how much I liked the rest of the game I wish I would have gotten a bit more from them and the overarching story.
Overall, though, Story of Seasons: Grand Bazaar is a charming and addictive breath of fresh air to the farming sim genre. I spend dozens and dozens of hours with the game and know that I could spend more if I wanted to. It adds new, fresh ideas to the genre while refining classic gameplay. While there are some elements I’d personally change, Story of Seasons: Grand Bazaar is an easy recommend to anyone looking for a new farming game to sink their teeth into.
Topic: Story of Seasons: Grand Bazaar (Switch 2) Review (Read 90 times)
