A quarter of a century of virtual farming is now behind us, so let’s take a moment to appreciate how we managed to get here. Since the very first installment, Story of Seasons (formerly known as Harvest Moon) as a series has drawn people together with its portrayal of an idyllic rural life over the course of over 40 releases. So how did it all begin and how is the series going now?
A lot of iconic, genre defining series came from big, famous names. Nintendo’s Metroid, Capcom’s Street Fighter, SEGA’s Phantasy Star Online… but Bokujou Monogatari’s humble beginning would be with a publisher called “Pack-In-Video.” While not the most recognizable name nowadays as it has since been absorbed twice over to become a part of Marvelous, they would be the publisher to support a company called Radical Plan Corp’s interesting new simulation game, produced by Yasuhiro Wada and a small team who had mostly worked together before on another game called Metal Angel 2.
A lot of what we know about the genesis of the series is from Wada’s own GDC 2012 presentation, which we’ll link below. Wada’s key inspirations were his own memories of growing up in the countryside before moving to Tokyo. Though perfectly happy with his new life, he had grown to appreciate some aspects of the country life he had took for granted before. Though this wasn’t the first simulation game out there, SimCity would serve as a starting point for that, it would take some effort to establish what the core pillars of what would make this rural life/farm simulation game fun and engaging: Interaction, farming, and cows.
Simply figuring out what made a good game wasn’t the only hurdle though. Radical Plan Corp would begin to go under, and the company president would even go missing, leaving Wada and his team seemingly facing no means to complete the project due to problems beyond their control. Thankfully, right as Wada was willing to give up, Tomomi Yamatate, and Setsuko Miyakoshi, two of the remaining staff members pictured alongside Wada above, stepped up to help make the project happen. What’s more, Pack-In-Video gave them an additional six months to work with.
The trio would move into the studio and work day and night to get the project finished, rewriting code, discarding unnecessary assets, playtesting, and revising character dialog. Before long, the game would be finished and, while the game wouldn’t be an immediate success, word of mouth would slowly spread, and a GameBoy version’s own major success would establish the root of the series, and genre, as we know it today.
Soon after, Bokujou Monogatari 2 (Harvest Moon 64) would enter its year and a half-long production. The game would introduce further refinements, introduce features that weren’t possible before, bring together a fan-favorite cast that would go on to have around a dozen appearances across different iterations, and even the current director of the series, Hikaru Nakano, would join the team. Future games would provide a playable heroine in response to a high player base of women becoming interested in the series, wild events would occur like having an unmonitored staff create a whole new game by re-using the Nintendo 64 assets instead of simply porting the 64 game to PlayStation, and by a decade later, Wada would make his exit from Marvelous, having managed to create a beloved series selling over 10 million copies by 2012.
Flash forward to 2021 and nearly everything about Story of Seasons’s humble beginnings are now synonymous with the farming and lifesim genres. Dozens of games have taken direct inspiration with everything from mechanics, aesthetics, festivals, philosophy, characters, and everything in between being referenced, borrowed, and paid homage. From popular browser games like Farmville to upcoming indie titles like Ova Magica, many games owe their legacy to the series with some particularly notable creators like Eric Barone of Stardew Valley even having the opportunity to appear alongside Wada himself and talk about the influence the series had.
There are still challenges the series has to face however. With the previous director, Yoshifumi Hashimoto, leaving Marvelous mid-development of Pioneers of Olive Town and taking key staff with him, the series former localization studio making lower quality knockoffs that compete using the former western brand name, and the task of developing multiple games at once with remakes now entering the release cycle for the series, Story of Seasons has been facing challenge after challenge. Despite all of these hurdles, the fact remains that Story of Seasons continues to prove itself as a steadfast flagship IP. Just last year, Marvelous secured a working relationship with Chinese gaming mogul Tencent, and the two companies have furthered the expansion of the series with an in-development mobile title – Story of Seasons Online. In addition, the most recent titles (Story of Seasons: Friends of Mineral Town, and Story of Seasons: Pioneers of Olive Town) have shown strong fiscal profit margins for the series. Indeed, we can expect the series to remain a household name for many years to come. While it’s difficult to imagine what direction the series will take from here in the coming years, much less the next 25, it will surely be exciting to see.
(Source: gdcvault.com)
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