Lets face it - there are too many farming simulators! Between Story of Seasons, Harvest Moon and the forever-updating Stardew Valley (not to forget Rune Factory), there is a glut of slice of life farming sims. It feels like only a few months ago I was reviewing Story of Seasons: Friends of Mineral Town; it was a little longer, but still less than a year ago now. Can Story of Seasons: Pioneers of Olive Town breathe new life into the genre? Or is everyone still catching up with Stardew Valley? 

Olive Town is a small tourist town desperately in need of an upgrade to revitalise it and really bring in the tourists. You’ve inherited your Grandfather's rundown farm, and it’s up to you to restore it. Along the way, maybe you’ll be able to help make Olive Town the tourist destination to visit. If you’re familiar with Story of Seasons and Harvest Moon, you’ll be achieving all of this the usual ways; growing crops, looking after animals, mining for ore, fishing and a lot of farm yard maintenance. You are also maintaining relationships/friendships with the townsfolk as you talk to them, give them gifts, and participate in town events with everyone. It’s the same as it’s ever been, but with some additions inspired by the competition.

Raising your crops and tending to livestock isn’t the only way to earn money in Olive Town. In the town hall there is a Request board, here you can take on requests in return for money. Some requests are just asking for items for cash. The Mayor will also bring your attention to requests that help out the town and aid with its expansion. When you’re waiting for your crops to grow it’s a nice little earner, I kept a nice stream of cash coming in despite waiting on crops. You also earn rewards just for doing your usual tasks, like achievements to show you’ve been a busy farmer which is a nice bonus. 

While previous entries have started off too slowly, Pioneers gets things moving very quickly. Although this time it’s almost too quick. Instead of going into too much, it divulges too little. A lot of the early game is spent poking around the place and working it out for yourself. Over the seasons, the Mayor and other townsfolk will show up and introduce new elements as the game opens up more. 

Material makers help turn your raw resources into more refined materials - wood can be made into planks and ore made into ingots. If you want to make any repairs or upgrades you’re going to need to get into the Material Maker industry. For each maker you can process one item, if you need a lot for building then you can either really take your time with one or two machines, or set up to twelve per type of maker to really crank out the materials. I found these makers frustrating for a few reasons. Firstly, you can’t queue up multiple resources and come back later, they can only manage processing one item at a time. The makers also take up way too much space on the farm. While your land does get larger, they stick out like a sore thumb. There’s also just too many types. Instead of having a machine handle multiple duties, you need specific makers such as a mayonnaise or yoghurt maker (I know they use different resources) but it’s not realistic to have every type of maker on your farm as well as multiples for mass production.

If you have time from farming and socialising there is still always old reliable Mining. Accessible from the beginning, you unlock a few mines to delve into for precious ore and treasure. While you’re working your way down the levels, you also have to contend with moles that will sap your stamina if you touch them, but the hammer is enough to deal with them. If you want to help upgrade the town (and more importantly your farm), you’ll be spending plenty of time in the mines. It doesn’t take long for it to feel like a grind, in fact a lot of the daily tasks you’re expected to do if you want to get anywhere turn into a real grind early on. At first it feels like there was plenty of time to spare in the day to spend it how you want, this was replaced by an ever-increasing demand for materials. Not only is there the resource gathering, there’s also the long waits as you have to process it. It’s not a quick trip around town to talk to everyone either. 

The townspeople of Olive Town are a varied bunch, the majority of them run stores in the town or are family members of the store owners. After many years of the Harvest Moon/Story of Seasons games, a lot of the characters feel like they all fall into the usual types. although initially it is hard to tell, as the dialogue with most of them is incredibly dull. I was pleased to discover that as you increase your relationship levels with each person, you get to see a fair few events that flesh out everyone's connections and give them some much-needed personality. If you maintain your relationships with everyone, you’ll frequently cop a bunch of these events around the same time. It can actually get a little too much having to stop everything and wait it out. As usual you can romance several of the townspeople, even if it’s not always clear which ones are the romanceable options. In time, you can marry your chosen partner and have a baby together. Story of Seasons has actually included same sex dating this time around too! It’s something that should’ve been much sooner, but it is a great move in being more inclusive.

There is a town museum in Olive Town, and while Blathers the owl isn’t there, this museum will accept your fish too! Taking some inspiration from Animal Crossing, you can donate animals and treasures to the museum. While you won’t get the same enthusiastic spiel here, it is something extra to do and to help add to the town. 

When you take photos you can donate any animal-related pics to the museum and they’ll make a cute little model of the animal to put on display. You can take photos to capture other moments around town if you wish, and during loading screens you can be shown photos other players have taken if you’re connected online. Although I was surprised to find even with these cutesy wholesome character models, players have managed to take some kind of weird and creepy photos. For example, I was greeted with what appeared to be a chest shot of one of the love interests. Another was a picture of a lady's feet, and another of a woman sleeping in bed. While there is no content in the game that could get worse than some creepiness, it did suggest there could be no way to moderate if people do try to flood everyone's loading screens with weird photos, outside of just not connecting online within the game. 

There are some glaring issues currently with Pioneers of Olive Town. Three of the most notable to me were loading screens, lack of discernible feedback from townsfolk, and some really sparse dialogue. 

The loading screens happen every time you leave the farm and head into town, go into the mine or enter/exit any building. When you’re going around doing daily interactions with everyone in town, the regular loading screens have a real impact on the flow of the game. The loading times have improved a lot since a pre-release patch, which is great. Although, with the amount of going in and out of buildings there’s still room to improve.

If you want to court or build up your relationships with the townsfolk, it is important to talk to them daily. For the ones you want to get to know faster you can give them gifts. In previous games, characters would give you a rough indicator if you were gifting them something they loved, liked, tolerated or hated. In Pioneers, so far there’s been no indication on how well or poorly received my gifts were. It’s not helped by the fact that the majority of the love interests have no personality outside of the aforementioned event scenes. Even then, there’s no indicator on how you might go about impressing anyone with your gifts. 

Finally there’s the day-to-day conversations. If you want to build up all of your relationships you’re going to be doing lots of interacting with everyone every day. Only the townsfolk don’t have much to say most of the time. They still make comments related to special event days, but there’s plenty of days where it’s essentially ‘hello’. 

We’ve finally hit the period where the other farming sim developers are starting to incorporate more of what Stardew has been doing. It’s quite strange in the first place, given Stardew wouldn’t exist without Harvest Moon. Pioneers also draws on Animal Crossing with plenty of traditional Story of Seasons still intact. 

Developers Marvelous have announced incoming patches, with one landing before the game is properly out. While the pre-release/day one patch addresses more immediate issues, they are setting out to fix issues I have mentioned and more. In fact they have already fixed the amount of excessive loading times, but I am yet to find out if it’s fixed some of the game crashing. The game also has frame rate issues throughout, the 3DS games had this issues, I was hoping they’d be on top of that by now. On launch day Pioneers is still going to be a rough experience, in a less than ideal state given how much better this game would be with the slated improvements and fixes. I would recommend waiting for now so you can start off with an improved experience.

Story of Seasons: Pioneers of Olive Town is exactly what you’d expect; more Story of Seasons. It is nice to see that Marvelous is changing up the formula, slowly but surely, not afraid to be inspired by other games within the genre. Pioneers as it currently is still needs some more polishing, the developers are also working to fix this which is a good sign. It’s always unfortunate when you have to wait to get the game as it should be, it makes it hard to recommend at this point. At least Pioneers is a much safer purchase over Harvest Moon, although Rune Factory 5 looks like it will give both games a run for their money. For now, Pioneers is an alright way to spend your spare time farming.