Story of Seasons: A Wonderful Life Review – Live Your Best Life (PC)

Ready to take a deep dive into farm life? Want to raise a family, watch your farm expand, and your child grow up and head out into the world? If so, Story of Seasons: A Wonderful Life is the game for you. Originally released in 2003 for the Gamecube as Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life and featuring content from the PS2 special edition, this is a very faithful remaster with a variety of new quality of life improvements. It’s much more narrative-driven than other farming and life simulators, and features dedicated chapters as your character ages. 

Story of Seasons: A Wonderful Life is available on Switch, PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC for $49.99. 

Story: Your Life’s Story

It’s hard to compare Story of Seasons: A Wonderful Life to the farming games available now. A Wonderful Life is a product of its time, back when farming games were niche and didn’t feature the quality of life mechanics that you see in the endless deluge of farming/life sims available today. Just look at the recent Wholesome Direct, which featured probably a dozen or more farming games. Despite this, Story of Seasons: A Wonderful Life has the pedigree of Harvest Moon, the literal creator of the genre, and it isn’t hard to see the innovation on display in A Wonderful Life. 

Starting off as most of these games do, your character is a young and spritely farmer that moves into a tiny town called Forgotten Valley. After your father passes on, it’s up to you to return your father’s farm to its former glory. With a dilapidated house, barn, and a couple of fields, there is plenty to renovate and a lot to prove. Where will your life take you? Well, dear reader, that’s what we’re here to find out!

Working the fields is tough!

Chapters of your Life

A Wonderful Life is split into 6 chapters that represent different phases of your player’s life. In chapter 1, which lasts 1 year of game time, you’ll quickly get acquainted with the characters and village. The relationships you foster in the beginning last a lifetime… literally. There’s a surprising amount of depth and liveliness in the town despite it being so small – with just a handful of families you’ll see kids, adults, and the elderly walking about the town. 

Rather than the endless seasons and open ended nature of the farming/life sim genre as a whole, A Wonderful Life has a concrete beginning, middle, and end. Your character ages throughout the years, and you’ll watch your character, your farm, and Forgotten Valley change over the years. At the end of chapter 1, you’ll marry your chosen partner. By the time chapter 2 starts, a few years have passed and you now have a child. New families will move in and others will depart – it’s always a surprise to see how the town changes.

Each chapter will provide exciting events that effect your family, farm, and town.

By the end of chapter 6, which is aptly named “Twilight” due to your characters advanced age, the town has changed dramatically. Your child is now an adult and has career and romantic interests. People have passed on or moved away, and your farm is expanded. Seeing the town unfold and evolve is really interesting, and is an admirable attempt at keeping you, the player, invested. 

Talk of the Town

There’s a much stronger focus on building relationships compared to other Story of Seasons and Harvest Moon games. In other titles, being a social butterfly has its perks. In A Wonderful Life, it can save you many hours and loads of money. For example, befriending Daryl, the local mad scientist (because of course Forgotten Valley has one), will get you a machine called a Seed Maker for free. That might not sound impressive, but a Seed Maker costs 30,000G otherwise. For reference, a tomato from your field will only sell for about 100G, so yielding these friendships is quite beneficial.

There are so many scenarios like this, and they’re all built on the friendship with the other villagers. It’s so refreshing to see such great characters, and being able to foster these friendships while everyone grows old. Then again, with aging people also comes the harsh realities of death, something that may happen fairly early in the game. Due to this, I couldn’t help but try to befriend everyone around town because I didn’t know if they would end up dying or moving away in the upcoming chapters. 

Nami is brash and crude at times, but also a kind individual if you can befriend her.

Gameplay: Time Management

The days are long in Forgotten Valley, and you may even be stretched for time with all of the chores around your farm. Each day can take up to 30 minutes, believe it or not, so it makes sense that there are only 40 days in a year here. Sure, tending to your chickens, cows, and crops may not seem like much. However, Story of Seasons: A Wonderful Life is from a different era, where meticulous animations and delays are frequent. 

Between tending the farm up to twice a day, there’s definitely a strategic element here. I learned real quick that having a field full of water hungry crops will absolutely destroy your stamina, leaving you looking for consumables to recover your stamina so you can finish your daily tasks. Not only that, but your animals also require tending, and in some cases are an even better option if you’re concerned about profit. It doesn’t help that your walk speed can best be described as a leisurely stroll. Luckily, you can get a horse fairly early in the game which improves mobility significantly.

Cows need to be pampered too.

Digging in the Dirt

At the start of the game, you’ll already have a barn, coop, and several fields. Inside your barn, you’ll find an adult female cow who can provide milk. A Wonderful Life opts to favor realistic elements in some scenarios, such as cows only being able to provide milk after they have given birth. You’ll also need to brush them occasionally, milk them, snuggle them, and treat them if they’re sick. If you want to breed them, you’ll need to purchase a steer and a “Miracle Potion.” There are different breeds of cows as well, each providing a different type of milk for you to sell.

Of course, there are more than just cows available. You can buy chickens, goats, sheep, and even ducks if you have the correct amenities. All of the animals function in a similar way. Some will need shorn, others milked, and eggs will need to be collected. Some animals enjoy a nice brushing, and some can be picked up and snuggled. With the seasons only being 10 days long, I found it more satisfying to focus on animals rather than watering crops.

The horse improves your mobility drastically so you can get more done during the day.

Rather than having giant fields that you can do with as you please, your farm is rather static in each chapter. You start out with the large animal pen which takes up most of the available space, and on the edges you’ll find some fields. There are 2 fields at first, and one is not really suitable for crop because of its poor quality soil. The main thing to know about these fields is that they are small! There’s hardly any room to organize your crops, so don’t expect to become a crop baron – Like a decent financial manager, A Wonderful Life wants you to diversify your investments and time in game.

Not Much Going On

It’s a bit weird to experience the town because on one hand, you’re slammed with things that you need to do. Talking to people every day, taking care of your farm, maybe cooking some food… But at the same time, these are the things you’ll be doing every day. There are just a handful of festivals and side activities to distract you from the repetition of daily chores. Sure, you can go fishing, but it is so mind-numbing and hardly even qualifies as interactive. You can go forage for flowers, but they’re so plentiful that I was drowning in flowers by the end of the first Spring. You can visit the archaeological site to dig for treasures, but there’s nothing interesting you can find. There just isn’t a whole lot to fill your spare time because the town is so small. 

With such short seasons and years, there’s just not much happening on most days. On the 3rd and 8th day of every season, Van the merchant comes to town and sets up his shopping stall. He’s this comedically egg-shaped gentleman who will buy miscellaneous goods from you, like fish or flowers. You can also set up your own shop and sell your wares to people that walk by, but I personally didn’t have much luck selling anything. Aside from Van’s visits, there’s also one festival per season. Unfortunately, the festivals are not very interactive and mostly consist of dialogue. A Wonderful Life could really benefit from 1 or 2 more festivals because there are some stretches where it seems like there is nothing to look forward to.

I present to you, the Firework Festival… You don’t actually see any fireworks, though.

On the other hand, I found myself exploring and stumbling into random events with the other villagers fairly frequently. I really enjoyed these small cutscenes, no matter how insignificant, because they often expanded upon the personalities and motivations of the residents. In one cutscene, Nami, an introverted and standoffish young woman, has a confrontation with Gustafa, who I can only describe as a stereotypical hippie. Gustafa’s happy nature clashes with Nami in an event where, honestly, nothing really happens. I just though it was funny how I was able to witness this candid interaction as fly on the wall. There are a lot of these events and while some may think they are pointless, I enjoy seeing the characters interact with each other.

Updates Compared to the Original

If you’ve played the original Gamecube or PS2 release, you may be wondering what is new in the game. Aside from the brand new graphics and character customization, you may notice that some characters have new names. This is due to the brand new localization for the game that aims to make it read better for today’s audience. There are also new character events, crops, recipes, and even a new marriage candidate: Gordy, who previously named Cody. There’s also bulletin board that residents can make requests on, similar to the bulletin board in Stardew Valley.

The most impactful update, however, is the user interface including the map, inventory, and the menu screens. The ugly controller layout in the top right of the screen is gone, and the menu features loads of useful information. The map lets you see where each villager is, and you can see friendship with everyone as well. Honestly, just being able to easily switch between your inventory slots makes the game significantly more playable!

Cecilia is one of the bachelorettes you can woo. Here we are on a date in the forest!

Unfortunately, there are some aspects that haven’t been updates. For example, there is no analog movement and your character is limited to 8 directions. This makes the movement, if you’re playing with a joystick, feel awkward. 

Graphics/Audio: Fresh Coat of Paint

Overall, I found the graphics in Story of Seasons: A Wonderful Life to be lively, colorful, and pleasant to look at. There are dated elements for sure, but overall there is a fantastic aesthetic here for a game released in 2003 and remastered 20 years later.

When A Wonderful Life first released on the Gamecube, the visuals attempted to be much more practical. The textures were dark and realistic, and the characters and environments had much more muted colors. Perhaps it was due to hardware limitations, but the end result didn’t feel cohesive. Fast forward to 2023 and the remaster embraces the bright and colorful themes that the Story of Seasons franchise often contains. The character models are also updated – these look fantastic as well, and have a certain cartoon quality that meshes perfectly with everything.

The updates to the user interface make the game much more playable and less frustrating.

Unfortunately, the music doesn’t fare as well. Some of it is quite short and on a infinite loop. Other times the music will sudden switch to natural ambiance such as wind blowing, but it’s so loud that it’s distracting.

Does it run on the Steam Deck?

As of June 2023, Story of Seasons: A Wonderful Life is not officially supported for Steam Deck. Fortunately, the game ran flawlessly on the device with zero hiccups and exceptional battery life. Cloud saves worked as intended as well. With the days in A Wonderful Life being so long, being able to put the Deck in sleep mode and come back at another time was a huge convenience. I did have one small quirk with the text input and naming animals – it requires use of the keyboard shortcut (STEAM key + X) and then pressing return while on the keyboard to complete the entry. 

Sometimes the Wildlife will come out to gawk at you. “Get back to the fields!” They say.

This game was reviewed on PC via Steam with a key provided by Marvelous.