![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
Venting my frustrations about the new Story of Seasons
I'm frustrated by Story of Seasons: Pioneers of Olive Town. I want to vent about the things I don't like, but I don't want to contribute to the narrative that it's not worth anyone's time. It is! It's an okay game. It's fun to play and easy to get lost in.
BUT... Marvelous outsourced the planning, writing, and development of the game to a third-party company. And you can tell.
It's fun to play. I enjoyed it. But it doesn't feel the same.
Possibly because it was developed by a company called Three Rings Inc. They planned, wrote, and programmed the whole game. Their resume before this is one PSP game, two Nintendo DS games, the Nintendo DS port of their PSP game, and two phone games. Story of Seasons is their first console game. Their only other brag-worthy title is that they made a One Piece game in 2012. And that's... that's not brag-worthy.
Marvelous gave Story of Seasons to some random studio. And despite the high level of disappointment the game they produced has encountered, they've stated that they plan to continue working with that studio in the future.
Harvest Moon isn't Story of Seasons anymore. And now even Story of Seasons isn't Story of Seasons.
It's a little sad to set down my expectations for a franchise. I'll still probably buy the games. They'll be... fun to play. But they won't be GOOD. So going forward, I might be better off looking at the many promising indie developers on Steam that are doing amazing things.
BUT... Marvelous outsourced the planning, writing, and development of the game to a third-party company. And you can tell.
- Everyone has agreed makers are terrible. That's why even the developers have apologized for their shitty implementation and are rolling out a patch. But I want to note that the problems with the makers were already done well... in SoS: Trio of Towns. You didn't need a maker for thread and a maker for thread fabric and a maker for yarn and and a maker for yarn fabric. That's insane. You had one FABRIC MAKER. And you only needed one of each, because you could be making 20 different items simultaneously in any given maker, and you could queue up multiples of each item if you wanted. In Olive Town, you need TONS of makers. So many makers that the Nintendo Switch will literally choke up attempting to process them all. It's just bad game design.
- Most people agree that the lack of character portraits is terrible. It's a long-term staple of the franchise, and it really helps to represent the emotions of characters whose models usually just aren't that detailed. The models are more detailed in this game, so it's okay in cutscenes -- because the camera angle is deliberately chosen to show off all the emotive facility of the character model. But in every other context, characters are expresionless, often facing away from the player or blocked by the player, and sometimes obscured literally by their own character design. (Good luck ever seeing Ralph's face under his hat. He is a MARRIAGE CANDIDATE whose FACE you can only see in cutscenes!) It sucks.
- A LOT of relationship events, including romantic heart events, are just... cutscenes that you the player can watch, but which your character may not even be PRESENT for. You almost never have any choices to make, and if you do, it doesn't matter what you choose. You don't feel involved, and sometimes feel actively excluded. Many cutscenes are just you watching townspeople interacting amongst themselves, and then at the very end of the cutscene, your character walks in and the scene ends. And while I like seeing these characters relating and being friends, I don't want it at the expense of MY character feeling like part of their community.
- There are exactly two holidays per season. One of them is a mini-game, which is usually pretty easy and you'll win without trouble. The other is a romantic cutscene. If you don't have a love interest yet, you just watch a cutscene alone and it's pointless and boring. If you do have a love interest, the dialogue may be the same NO MATTER WHO YOU GO WITH! I reloaded two different romance events with every single bachelor and they all had the same exact dialogue, just tweaked for tone. Then I stopped bothering.
There are no animal festivals. No crop festivals or harvest festivals. No gifting festivals or cooking festivals. Nothing. Just those two quick, disappointing "holidays".
It's fun to play. I enjoyed it. But it doesn't feel the same.
Possibly because it was developed by a company called Three Rings Inc. They planned, wrote, and programmed the whole game. Their resume before this is one PSP game, two Nintendo DS games, the Nintendo DS port of their PSP game, and two phone games. Story of Seasons is their first console game. Their only other brag-worthy title is that they made a One Piece game in 2012. And that's... that's not brag-worthy.
Marvelous gave Story of Seasons to some random studio. And despite the high level of disappointment the game they produced has encountered, they've stated that they plan to continue working with that studio in the future.
Harvest Moon isn't Story of Seasons anymore. And now even Story of Seasons isn't Story of Seasons.
It's a little sad to set down my expectations for a franchise. I'll still probably buy the games. They'll be... fun to play. But they won't be GOOD. So going forward, I might be better off looking at the many promising indie developers on Steam that are doing amazing things.