Story of Seasons: Grand Bazaar review – Just friendly farming

The gaming market is now saturated with farming sims, farming-lites, and farming RPGs in the wake of Stardew Valley’s tremendous success, but let’s not forget that Story of Seasons is the original. Formerly known as Harvest Moon in the West (and unrelated to the current Harvest Moon series due to legal shenanigans), Story of Seasons is what inspired Stardew Valley and its countless imitators, and I think the original series still has charms that its imitators just can’t quite capture.

Story of Seasons: Grand Bazaar is a remake of the Nintendo DS’ Harvest Moon DS: Grand Bazaar, and it feels like a revelation by comparison. The original Grand Bazaar had a solid cast of characters and an enjoyable farming loop of raising the best crops and crafting high quality seeds of each crop for you to deploy during each season. Throw into the mix some light relationship mechanics and animal husbandry, and you have a recipe for success. But Grand Bazaar goes a surprisingly long way to streamline the experience without losing what makes it great.

For one, you can now jump through a 3D world instead of being grounded in a 2D one. Many of the game’s loading screens have been condensed into a mostly seamless world, too. It seems minor, but this means you can now leap across rivers instead of tediously running around to a bridge, sprinting and hopping through areas to complete tasks faster than ever. You can also jump while using tools to increase their effective range at the cost of stamina, allowing you to more efficiently complete your tedious (relaxing?) farming chores. You used to have to push each animal out of and into the barn each day to have them exercise, but now you can simply ring a bell to have them follow you outside — one of dozens of minor changes that make Grand Bazaar a more enjoyable experience.

The Grand Bazaar itself becomes the crux of the experience, with most of your game “progress” having to wait until Saturday, which is when the bazaar opens up. On Saturdays you can sell off all of the produce you’ve gathered up throughout the week, and you can also shop at various Bazaar-exclusive stalls which offers tangible upgrades to your farm, like more storage space, more field space for crops, more animals, and even upgrades for your own bazaar stall.

While most other SoS games allow you to get rewards for your produce daily, this forces a certain pace to the game which can make the time leading toward a bazaar feel quite long – especially if you’re running low on storage space – but it can also make it incredibly rewarding, offering you a lot of money and upgrades.

While you don’t have your hands in the dirt tending to your crops, you can flirt with the various main NPCs around town, each of which have their own personalities, likes, dislikes, and requirements for dating them. There are also a bunch of secondary NPCs, which simply fill out the café, paths, and bazaar when the primary cast are busy with their own activities. These games would usually only give you a primary cast, but that has the side-effect of making the small towns feel quite empty, which wouldn’t fit the Grand Bazaar theme here.

If you compare Story of Seasons to the likes of Stardew Valley – with its years of updates and additions at this point – then you’ll ultimately be let down. This is a more simple, straightforward farming experience that rewards you for diligent, repeated effort with the few things you can have. But it is also missing a few things the original game had – like multiplayer – and that is pretty disappointing. Despite that, it’s a very good farming game, and currently the best to make full use of the Nintendo Switch 2.

Story of Seasons: Grand Bazaar is a faithful but ambitious remake of an overlooked Nintendo DS game, and it’s great. It’s a simple game that doesn’t ask too much of the player, but it’s incredibly satisfying to expand your farm, gather your produce, and make a massive profit at the Grand Bazaar. If you want a polished, cozy game to go into Autumn with, Grand Bazaar is a great choice.