I want to preface this by saying I have played a lot—and I do mean a lot—of farming simulators in my time. I've pushed through the good, the bad, and the straight up tedious. However, Story of Seasons: Grand Bazaar has been the most fun I've had with a farming simulator since I played Stardew Valley for the first time. Which is incredibly high praise. It doesn't take a farming aficionado to know that. But what really stands out is the handful of novel features that really streamline country living.
For example, the way you improve your friendships with the residents of Zephyr Town is by greeting them every single day—it doesn't even need to be one on one. This means you don't have to wait poised and ready outside of their front doors each day so you can spring whatever present you've randomly gathered, but you do need to make the effort to go and see them still. What Grand Bazaar offers is a single button that lets you greet any characters as you run past them which, yes, counts as this daily conversation.
When you're running between windmills, or travelling between your farm and your bazaar stall, this button really comes in clutch. I don't want to spend half a day tracking down individual people to talk to them when I've already got so much to prepare for. Now I can just run past while they're gathered in a big group and shout and wave frantically. Each time, they are still just as thrilled to see me, whether or not I'm chatting face to face or they just hear my greetings from a distance.
If you've got a particular character you'd like to romance, then stopping to have these little chats does give you a few indicators as to whether or not you're making much progress with them. Since Story of Seasons: Grand Bazaar doesn't offer you much guidance in terms of favourite gifts, other than a vague "blue" or "elaborate meals" it's still important to actually talk properly to someone every now and then.
This is your key to getting information about things like their favourite meals and gifts which is far more beneficial than just guessing like I was doing for most of the time. You do have to remember this information though, as it's not logged in your relationships tab, which is a little annoying, especially for someone like me who has a brain with the same structure as a sieve.
Farming is also massively streamlined. You can sow multiple seeds, till multiple squares of land, and water multiple crops without needing to upgrade your tools. You do need to make these upgrades eventually, and that does increase the range of each tool, but you at least start with the ability to cover three squares at once. Gone are the days of painstakingly watering each individual section of your garden and rinsing through your stamina before actually completing any of your to-do list. A chunk of your stamina is still stripped each time you do opt to tend multiple crops, but it certainly feels more efficient and rewarding.
You can also harvest multiple crops at once which is a real game changer. I get so sick of having to individually pluck my harvest from the ground, so being able to essentially ground pound my way through fields of fruits and vegetables meant I could quickly crack on with whatever else I needed to do that day. Which was more often than not taking the crops I had just harvested to the various windmills throughout Zephyr Town and crafting them into higher quality products before carting them to the market on the next Saturday.
Which leads me to my final point: making money feels a lot faster. Instead of working for a slow trickle of funds each day, you invest your time into earning a nice lump sum.With that said though, I don't think that's necessarily something that will influence other farming simulators, it's more so just a feature I liked. Rather than tossing whatever you've collected during the day into a shipping container and making money overnight, Grand Bazaar's main story encourages you to save your higher quality products for the weekly bazaar.
You work two shifts on a Saturday, morning and afternoon with an hour between to restock your supplies. Or you can spend this time wandering around the bazaar, as Saturday is also your only opportunity to visit the stalls as well which sell things like animals, upgrades for your house, farm, and kitchen, and even new outfits.
In the bazaar, your products sell for more than they would if you sold them to the shop during the week, and you immediately get any funds after a shift rather than having to wait until the next day. Which is great if you're like me and try to wrap up an hour early and immediately spend all your cash on new upgrades, seeds, and animals while you can. Although it feels like a total blur as customers hurl cash at you and take your items, I finished the day a lot of the time feeling like I had actually just put in a real life shift, yet also feeling a strange sense of pride with how much money I made.
These markets also give you more incentives to produce trendy items too, and I like having more guidance so I'm not left cobbling together whatever I've got lying around to make a few extra pennies. Trends change each month, which is a nice way to keep you on your toes and create items you might never turn to otherwise. I know I'm a total creature of habit and I like to make the same sort of things which I know make money, so it's nice to be pushed to try something new.
Basically, Story of Seasons: Grand Bazaar has given me a look at what streamlined farm life could look like. Having put a month's worth of work into my little farmyard now and the town's bazaar, I already know it's the type of game I could easily put hundreds of hours into without feeling tired out. I really hope future farming sims adopt these features in their own way as they just make life so much easier. Because who doesn't need an excuse to spend more time tending to the land?
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