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This gives the story a little more weight than the typical choose-your-own-adventure gameplay that has one main but technically optional goal, like completing the Community Center in Stardew Valley. Story of Seasons games are primarily narrative A Wonderful Life focuses on creating a family and seeing your child discover their passion in life, with developments happening in every year. game that helps you combine seeds to create new hybrid crops, a more inventive mechanic than the kind of simple maker machine you’d see in most farming sims.
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Beginning in year two, Takakura gets a talking plant that looks straight out of a Mario Bros. Daily activities vary from monthly festivals corresponding to each season, digging at the archaeology site, playing board games with twin firework fanatics Charlie and Cole, and typical farming-sim shenanigans like fishing and forging. Each “year” in the game, which takes about 6.5 hours to play, covers a certain era of the protagonist’s life: Year one, you’re settling into your farm and choosing a villager to woo. The town is physically very small, lacking a general store despite the many villagers, and has a café, inn, and a neighboring farm where you can buy seeds. You get a small house that expands with time, a chicken coop, a barn with a cow to get started with, and a few plots to garden. Greeted by Takakura, your father’s oldest friend who also lives in a cabin on the farm, you’re given a brief introduction to farming life and a tour of your new property. In SOS:AWL, you play as a person who’s tired of the city life and returns to their father’s old farm in Forgotten Valley, ready to give the country-mouse life a try. Story of Seasons: A Wonderful Life is a remake of the popular 2003 GameCube game of a similar name, formerly Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life, that thrives on simple gameplay and guided storytelling, with a few choices that can make replaying the game as easy as feeding your chickens. After two nonstop months of breathlessly playing Tears of the Kingdom, it’s time to take a break from the chaos.
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