Story of Seasons

• 1. Introduction

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  Story of Seasons began its life in English under a different name: Harvest Moon. Its creator was the Japanese game designer Yasuhiro Wada, and the premise he built is stubbornly humble. You arrive at a dilapidated old farm. Your job is to rebuild it into a success.

  The first game in the series appeared on the SNES in 1996. It asked players to do almost nothing glamorous. They tended crops and animals, made friends with the neighbors in the nearby town, and eventually married and started a family.

  That modest loop raises some odd questions. Why does a series about weeding and watering carry two different names on two sides of an ocean? Who owned which title, and when? And how did a game about slow, daily chores end up shaping an entire corner of the industry?

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• 2. Two Names, Two Publishers

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  Victor Interactive Software developed the series, and in 2003 it was acquired by Marvelous Entertainment, now known as Marvelous Inc. Developers were not the ones who decided what English-speaking players saw on the box, though.

  From 1996 to 2013, Natsume Inc. oversaw the English translation and distribution of the Japanese Bokujo Monogatari series in North America. Natsume released those games under the name Harvest Moon.

  In 2012, Marvelous stopped licensing the series to Natsume. Natsume saw an opening and began developing its own Harvest Moon games for North America and Europe, starting with Harvest Moon: The Lost Valley. Fans and game news sources were left confused by the resulting spin-off series.

  The split deepened in 2014. Natsume kept the rights to the Harvest Moon name, even as Marvelous announced that its American publishing brand, Xseed Games, would take over North American distribution. Xseed therefore brought the series to North America under the title Story of Seasons, beginning with a game of the same name. It was the first game released under the new international series title.

  Europe had its own history. Earlier Harvest Moon games there were localized by Rising Star Games. In September 2015, Nintendo of Europe confirmed it would publish the latest entry under the Story of Seasons name.

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• 3. Fields and Seasons

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  A cleared field is the first thing the series asks of a player. Before anything grows, the ground must be emptied of weeds, rocks, boulders, branches, and stumps. Then the hoe comes out to till the soil, seeds are chosen and sown, and watering begins. A rainy day does the watering instead.

  Crops are the primary source of income. Smart players learn to weigh cost, sell price, the number of harvests, and growth time before planting anything. Finding the best pattern of planting, watering, and harvesting is half the game.

  Seasons change what is possible. Each one offers different crops, and in most games nothing may be planted in winter. The very first Harvest Moon went further and did not allow planting in fall. Some later games added a greenhouse or basement so that winter farming could continue.

  Turnips, potatoes, tomatoes, and corn were the staple crops, all introduced in the first game. Later titles brought cabbage, carrots, onions, strawberries, sweet potatoes, pumpkins, rice, pineapples, and cucumbers. Even grass can be grown, and it is harvested as fodder for the animals in the barn.

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• 4. Barn, Coop, and Stable

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  The first Harvest Moon kept its animals simple: cows and chickens only. A barn housed one and a chicken coop the other, and both ate the same fodder. Milk, eggs, and even the animals themselves could be sold.

  Later titles added sheep and a separate feed for chickens. They also added machines that turned milk into cheese, eggs into mayonnaise, and wool into yarn. More recent games let players raise ducks, goats, alpacas, and differently colored cows.

  Harvest Moon: Tree of Tranquility brought silkworms and ostriches. It also let players befriend wild animals and persuade them to move onto the farm.

  Attention matters. Animals that receive care grow fonder of the player, and their products may improve in quality. Neglect can lead to sickness and even death.

  Breeding is possible too. Eggs placed in an incubator hatch into chicks in a few days, while a Miracle Potion impregnates a cow or sheep. Buying and breeding several horses arrived in Harvest Moon 3 GBC for Game Boy Color. It continued in Magical Melody, Tree of Tranquility, and Animal Parade.

  Many games also hand the player a dog and a horse as pets. Newer titles stretch that list from pigs and cats to pandas and turtles. Some pets enter horse races or dog races for prizes. In Harvest Moon: Back to Nature, the player can even raise fish.

  Not every animal is welcome. In older games such as Friends of Mineral Town, wild dogs visit the farm at night to harass any livestock left outside a barn or fence. Gophers in some older titles eat the crops.

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• 5. Mines, Lumber, and Festivals

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  Wood is the most common building resource in the series. Players chop tree stumps and branches, then turn the lumber into new buildings or fencing. Stone and golden lumber appear in some games as well.

  Mines are present in many titles. The minerals dug out of them upgrade tools or become gifts. Wild herbs and flowers can often be gathered too, for cooking or for selling.

  Money itself comes from more than crops and animals. Fishing, mining, and foraging all pay. Time and energy are both limited, so the player must balance these jobs to finish each day's work.

  Then come the festivals. Most games hold annual festivals that the player can attend. Some are contests with prizes, and others are purely social. A few mirror real holidays, including Thanksgiving, New Year's Day, and Christmas Eve.

  Livestock festivals let players enter their animals against other farms. The rewards can be tangible. A cow that wins might gain the ability to produce gold milk.

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• 6. Love and Family

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  A Blue Feather is the usual way to propose in the series. Before that moment, the player gives gifts and spends time with a love interest, and enough affection makes marriage possible. In some games, love interests have rivals who will marry them if the player does not act.

  The player character has mostly been male, though some games offer a female character. Most games in the series offer marriage, but a handful do not. Harvest Moon: Save the Homeland, Harvest Moon GB, Harvest Moon 2 GBC, and Innocent Life: A Futuristic Harvest Moon never allow it.

  Same-sex marriage has a tangled history here. The Japanese version of Harvest Moon DS Cute allowed players to marry someone of the same sex, under a system called "Best Friends." The North American version removed the feature over concerns that it would have raised the game's ESRB rating.

  The remake Story of Seasons: Friends of Mineral Town does permit same-sex marriage. In the Western release it is treated identically to opposite-sex couples. The Japanese release does not call it marriage proper and brings back the "Best Friends" title.

  Children are possible in many versions, but the details vary widely. Multiple children appear only in Harvest Moon, Harvest Moon 3, Animal Parade, Rune Factory 3, Story of Seasons, and Rune Factory 5. In Story of Seasons, the pregnancy happens once, because the player character has twins.

  Animal Parade was the first game to allow two children of either gender, and Rune Factory 3 allows three. Only A Wonderful Life, Another Wonderful Life, Harvest Moon DS, and Harvest Moon DS Cute let a child grow from toddler to full-grown adult.

  Tree of Tranquility goes further and lets the player restart the game as their child after completing an end game event. Rune Factory 2 is the only title in which the player controls two characters, a father and his son or daughter.

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• 7. The Numbers

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  In September 2011, Rising Star Games announced that the series had sold more than a million copies in PAL regions. Sales in Japan told a similar story. By April 2011, the DS games alone had sold more than 948,000 copies there. The PSP games, in the same period, had passed 81,000.

  Some individual launches stood out. The Tale of Two Towns reached No. 4 in the Japan Software and Hardware Weekly Chart, shipping 63,610 copies in its first week on sale.

  The renamed Story of Seasons did even better. In March 2014, it was the top selling game in Japan, at 131,000 units sold. By July 2015, Xseed Games announced it had become its fastest-selling game ever, with over 100,000 copies sold in North America.

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• 8. Seeds of a Genre

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  Story of Seasons has been called a "pioneer" in its genre, and the evidence is easy to find in the games that followed. It inspired a large number of social network games about farming. Among the most notable were Happy Farm in 2008 and FarmVille in 2009.

  Happy Farm is considered one of the most influential games of the 2000s. In early 2010, FarmVille reached a peak audience of 84 million monthly active users.

  The series also tried the social format itself. In 2009, Marvelous Entertainment released a version called Let's All Harvest Moon on the Japanese social network Mixi, where it attracted 2.3 million users.

  Other farming games on social networks appeared in 2009 and 2010. They included Sunshine Farm, Happy Farmer, Happy Fishpond, Happy Pig Farm, Farm Town, Country Story, Barn Buddy, Sunshine Ranch, and Happy Harvest. There were even parodies, such as Farm Villain.

  A more personal inheritance came later. Eric Barone, the developer of Stardew Valley, has said several times that Story of Seasons inspired his game. As farming and life simulation games grew popular again, especially among independent developers, Story of Seasons and Stardew Valley were regarded, alongside the Animal Crossing series, as the foundation of a new golden era for the genre.

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