Remakes and remasters are more common than ever in 2023. Most interesting is to see how these new versions tackle the issue of a complete redesign versus simple modern visual improvements. Story of Seasons: A Wonderful Life is a remake of Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life that straddles the line between these two philosophies fairly evenly, but still offers a dated experience in a number of ways.
Story of Seasons: A Wonderful Life is coming to modern consoles and at first glance it looks like nothing more than an updated remake. However, some significant changes have made it more immersive for players. In A Wonderful Life, each player is a young person who inherited a farm from his father in a small town called Forgotten Valley. Before claiming your inheritance, you must provide your name and choose your appearance.
As for the customization suite, the updated version surpasses its predecessor. Players can customize their avatars with gender specific pronouns, body and fashion options. Additionally, none of the clothing or hair options are gender specific either. You can match any body type with any hairstyle or outfit you want. Once you’ve decided on your name, appearance, and pronouns, you can head to Forgotten Valley. Note, however, that you cannot change your pronouns after the selection screen. So make sure you make your decision before you head out.
In a game that has become a staple of the farming simulation genre, your character packs his bags and moves from the big city to the farm for a quieter life. Upon arrival, an old friend of your father’s will show you around the farm and provide you with notes that will serve as a tutorial for the game. These notes are extremely useful early in the game, providing guidance when questions arise without requiring players to complete a restrictive tutorial sequence.
As you’d expect, you’ll grow crops and raise animals, the produce of which you can sell for a profit. There are the usual four seasons in A Wonderful Life, and each lasts 10 game days. These days last 24 minutes in real life, which doesn’t sound like long, but it can get longer as you play. Ideally, your daily routine will include tending to your crops and animals, visiting the forest spirits to see if they have new recipes for you, helping dig around the archeological site, fishing, foraging, cooking, and chatting around with your neighbors around the Forgotten Valley.
Getting to know the other residents of your small town is crucial, as the game insists that you must marry one of the local singles by the end of your first year there. I appreciate that A Wonderful Life breaks the gender bias of the original game’s romance, meaning players can marry any eligible single in Forgotten Valley, opening the door to queer romance.
However, these relationships are disappointingly superficial. Since your relationship barely lasts a year, you don’t have much time to bond with your future spouse. When you arrive, some of the villagers already have relationships that are never really addressed when you decide to marry one of them. This robs the game of a potentially interesting element of small-town drama, and it’s also unsatisfactory from a narrative perspective.
Additionally, the in-game spouses don’t have much new or interesting to say once you’ve tied the knot. After she married Cecelia, she stayed at our house for the most part, repeating the same phrase over and over again about learning new things about housework. My little kid had more unique dialogue for me than outside of the cutscenes.
Unfortunately, the day-to-day mechanics of A Wonderful Life feel similarly shallow. While the pronouns, customization, romance, and graphics have been updated, your daily life in the game hasn’t been treated in the same way. It doesn’t take long to complete your daily tasks, especially when you start upgrading your tools. Chatting with the forest spirits is also done quickly. Digging for artifacts can take as long as you like, but the process is slow and monotonous. The game encourages you to chat with everyone in town to build your relationships with them, but their dialogue is often monotonous and giving them gifts from your inventory takes almost no time. You can even do fishing and foraging while doing other tasks around Forgotten Valley.
When the original version of this game came out, that sure seemed like plenty to do. But after games like Stardew Valley, that level of activity is underwhelming. It’s easy to go to bed early to push the calendar ahead, rather than using every waking hour to get the most out of your work. In theory, you should also devote some of that time to cooking, but I often only used my kitchen when I really needed to. Story of Seasons: A Wonderful Life has an abundance meter, but it doesn’t drain quickly. I didn’t really pay attention until my character gave me the hunger icon, which normally triggers when the bar is about a third full.
This gauge is somewhat emblematic of my overall experience with this game. Ideas that were once novel are outdated or uninteresting by today’s standards. While Story of Seasons: A Wonderful Life is a welcome update to a classic farming sim, the game leaves no nostalgic bias for an experience that seems missing from the genre’s modern landscape.