I've been playing Pioneers of Olive Town since it released last month in Japan and in light of some of the negative responses by the players. I wanted to weigh in and give my honest feedback on the game.
I'm not so much trying to dissuade anyone from buying it. I feel like you should know what you're getting some of the things are my own preferences as a player. You will see there are quite a few staples that we've come to expect from these games that either. Just aren't there or weren't up to the same standards as the older games.
I'm going to try and leave things as vague as possible where story or heart events might be involved. But there are a couple of things that i want to mention. Just because i wasn't very fond of them, if you've been keeping up on the news. You've probably heard about the makers the lag and the debris on your farm.
There's no way to sugarcoat this each of these negatively affected my playthrough. There are a whole bunch of makers honey cloth wool seed makers another seed maker for trees, ingot wood and so on.
You can have 20 of each of these and for the most part you need them. Each maker will only make one thing. You can't have one maker make multiple things and ignore them until complete. You have to manually run to your farm every few hours and replace them.
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The time passes pretty quickly. So you could easily waste days at a time just taking things out and putting them into the makers. They're really oddly specific too like i said there's a seed maker for normal crops and flowers. Another one for tree crops i just don't understand the reason for this.
It just takes up so much room on your farm for no reason as i was playing though i tried to leave my farm as little as possible. So this didn't really bother me so much. At the start the loading screens were just. So abysmal every time you went from your farm to town or inside any building.
You had to wait for what felt like an eternity for the game to load since the update. They released this has improved and it's much nicer to go into town and to chat with the town folk. So hopefully this particular issue will bypass the western release now.
At the start the rate in which the debris regrows on your farm is a godsend. But after you have all three areas, if you don't run around and deal with it daily. You'll quickly be overrun by the forest again. It gets really tiresome to have to repeatedly spend days on the farm clearing up puddles and rocks.
I feel like this wasting so much time on menial tasks, caused the wedge
between the farm theme and the building relationships part of the game. Both of
these are integral parts of the series and should be reasonably well balanced.
Of course it's usually easy to run out watering your crops and tending your
animals.
But these tasks weren't even meaningful in this game adding into this the frame rate really drops when there's too much going on. But given that you need your crops your animals your 10 000 makers and so on. This happens too often and has actually caused my game to crash a time or two the animals are super cute.
So i did enjoy looking after them at the start. Eventually i really stopped caring and only did the minimum one good thing is that they don't get sick. They just get mad at you and stop giving you produce if you don't care for them very well.
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Daily time life is just as important as the farm aspect in these games. I wanted to talk a little bit about where this fell down for me too and in pioneers of town there are only eight festivals. Four of these are date cutscenes and four of them are mini games.
None of them are the quintessential animal crop or cooking festival which kind of made raising the quality of these a pointless effort on the plus side raising the level of. Each of them is super easy. But then again the challenge is usually part of the fun equal to the farming in these games.
For me is the relationship aspect and this is where another big issue lies in this game. To be fair the shortening of the loading times has made this a bit easier since I don't need to wait forever to get anything done.
But the characters in the game were really flat and just boring they more or less say the same thing. There weren't any heart lines which to me is something of a reward for raising the friendship levels. If they weren't talking to me about festival, they were only saying hello. Nothing changes between the friendship and the romance.
Dialogue, i know that dialogue isn't exactly amazing in story of seasons as a whole. It was still more varied than what we're getting pioneers and the heart events that i have done. Which is pretty much limited to damon and the aurier for getting all 10 hearts are really choppy.
Some felt like they were the same events split into two. Even though i would say i like these events, i didn't feel like they were particularly well written.
You can't even enjoy the date festivals with someone. Unless you're dating which felt pretty limited. Why can't i spend time with the guy i like when i'm not wanting to go into the romance stuff yet.
If i don't want to see my character up by myself, every season i have to date someone related to this is the marriage content. The first of all there are collectibles. You can only get if you utilize the divorce feature in the game. Which to me doesn't really have any place in story of seasons.
It just feels really odd thematically and then you have to marry everyone. The after marriage events are super bland and actually they're exactly the same for everyone and they also took out something that i've really enjoyed since harvest moon a new beginning. Where you could cook for your family and now you can't cook for your family.
So again what's the point in proving your cooking skills if there's no fun thing to do with it. I also felt like they removed some of the fun from the child content. It's basically after mentioning a child a couple of times, you get one and then there's only a couple of events with the child before they are fully grown child. Then the child themselves is not even a full character in their own right.
They just exist. You can't give them gifts if there's a child event with them after they fully grew up. I haven't found them other than the birthday event. You can't even choose not to have them. The good thing about the kid that i did really like and i hope that they keep in the future games is that they take a random mixture of features between you and your spouse.
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So they might have your eyes and your white hair, i just thought that was really nice. My biggest gripe about this side of the game is that unless you choose one specific marriage candidate. You will never meet all of the villagers.
If you want to complete your villager list, you need to marry that
character at least once. Which means you either have to choose them and stick
with them or you have to use the divorce feature which again i said i don't
really like so, and then to befriend. This hidden character you need to get
their hearts to 10 before you have a kid or they leave for good. I wouldn't be
bothered if they were locked behind the friendship half of the characters
events.
But to lock them behind marriage is pretty silly to me. You should never feel pigeon-holed into marrying any of the characters nor should you have to use the divorce feature if like me. There is a main story to this game and it's pretty standard for story of seasons games. The main story is just help me revitalize the town.
But the funny thing about this, was that even though everyone talks about the differences that you make. There aren't any cosmetic differences and there's just nothing nothing changes in the streets. It didn't have to be anything big just little slightly noticeable changes all that happens really is more tourists show up. Which is kind of cool when you see other players characters.
Another thing that i was really interested in in this game, was the museum. I thought it was such a fun concept. At first it was a novelty hunting for fish and relics and animals to complete it. The most fun i had with this, was with finding the animals which sometimes require you to fulfill specific conditions to get them to spawn.
The relics were also fun. But to get one of them, you need to keep dealing with the loading screen and go to the land of the creepy egg. People this got so irritating that i just couldn't deal with it anymore and i've kind of given up on the relic side of my museum.
The fish just take a generic shape as well which was kind of took the wind out of my sails. So to sum up my thoughts, there's a lot more i could say about this game and i'm sad to admit that most of those would be on the negative side of things story of season's pioneers of olive town.
Feels like a game where they change things for the sake of changing them not to take a chance and improve upon an established formula. But to throw out everything that the fans expect in the game. It's built up over the 25 years the series has been running and adding a bunch of stuff that didn't add anything the relationships feel empty the farming, feels unfulfilling and the makers are just a nightmare.
I can't lie and say that i didn't have fun playing it. Because i have played this game so much since i got it even with the amount of content they left out. There's still a lot to do. So long as you try and judge it in a box you will enjoy it.
But if you've been a fan of the game for a long time or you've played the more recent games on the 3ds, you may well find yourself disappointed even with the promised updates.
There's only so much that they can add or fix in order to bring this game up to the same standards of the predecessors. So these are my honest thoughts on pioneers of all of town.
I'd be very interested to know what anyone else is thinking about this and whether or not you're still going to buy it. Despite the uproar and the negative comments from japanese fans and other fans who have played it yet already.
