STORY OF SEASONS Friends of Mineral Town Free Download GAMESPACK.NET

STORY OF SEASONS Friends of Mineral Town Free Download GAMESPACK.NET Nearly two decades ago, the Nintendo fanbase was graced with Harvest Moon: Friends of Mineral Town, the first entry in the series for the Game Boy Advance. Offering up a low-key and easily accessible gateway into the farm sim genre, it quickly garnered a following and earned itself the reputation of being one of the better entries in the long-running franchise. Now, Marvelous has seen fit to re-release the game to a new generation (complete with the revised ‘Story of Seasons’ branding, as Marvelous stopped licensing the Bokujō Monogatari series to Natsume in 2012), redoing various gameplay and presentation features to bring this classic more in line with modern standards. Fortunately, Story of Seasons: Friends of Mineral Town proves to be quite compelling, and any fans of the farm sim genre will want to take note. The story is about as straightforward as possible, to the point that there’s scarcely any ‘plot’ to discuss at all. You simply assume the role of an ambitious young farmer who inherits a large and neglected piece of land, and your story consists solely of your daily toils in the fields and the interactions you have with various townsfolk.TOP/BEST ADULT VIDEO GAMES IN UNITED STATES OF AMERICA (USA)

STORY OF SEASONS Friends of Mineral Town Free Download GAMESPACK.NET

Characters are written in a satisfying, if unremarkable, style, as all of them fill various personality gaps in the broader social hierarchy. Brandon, for example, is a stoic ‘misunderstood genius’ with a stodgy personality. Marie, on the other hand, is a mousy intellectual who runs the library while she works on a novel she’s writing. Again, few of these characters really jump out at you as particularly memorable or engaging, but it’s the small, ‘daily’ interactions with them that prove to make each of them feel so endearing. For example, Zack comes by your farm every day at five o’clock to pick up any materials you put in the shipping bin, and he always casually greets you if you happen to be working in the field when he comes by. The interaction is small and insignificant, but it’s details like that which help to make the villagers feel that much more real. Along that same thought, there are also various emergent events between villagers that seem to trigger at random. For example, there was one moment where we exited the mine to find two villagers sitting by the river, discussing parental issues one of them was dealing with.

STORY OF SEASONS Friends of Mineral Town Sheep Costume.

This had never happened before and hasn’t happened since, but little dialogues like that often pop up when you least expect them, giving a strong sense of the relationships these people have apart from your character. How you interact with villagers has a light gameplay element to it, too, as you can slowly build up a relationship with each of them which gradually shifts the content of their dialogues with you. Most of the characters are simply there to add more variety to the population of the town, but a select few men and women are potential candidates who you can marry if you grow the relationship enough. If you talk to them once a day and give them a daily gift (such as a piece of fruit), they’ll inevitably fall in love with you and agree to marry you. Same-sex marriage is now fully supported, dropping the odd ‘Best Friends’ label that the initial release went with if you chose to go that route. Gameplay unfolds in a pleasingly predictable and relaxing style, in which you run your farm to the best of your ability. There’s no such thing as winning or losing here; just the satisfaction of watching your farm slowly grow in complexity and variety as the months and years roll by.Potionomics

STORY OF SEASONS Friends of Mineral Town Free Download GAMESPACK.NET

Your typical day consists of doing basic chores like watering the crops and milking the cows, interspersed with occasional trips into town for supplies or to greet certain villagers. Underlying all this, however, is a soft sort of resource management system that keeps each day from becoming too dull by applying a gentle sort of pressure to keep you working. For example, there’s a stamina system that governs your character’s ability to work, and each use of a tool will lower your stamina by a certain amount. Daily activities need to be planned around this, then, as overworking your character can cause them to collapse and pass the day whether you’re ready or not. Then, there’s the clock that you’re always working against. Stores have varying hours, so you need to be somewhat efficient in how you plan out your chores to make sure everything gets done by a reasonable hour. It’s easy to find yourself working late into the evening if you don’t plan properly, and this can then lead to you starting the next day with less stamina because you didn’t get as much sleep. Harvest Moon, and now Story of Seasons, have thrived on their personality above all else.

Stroll Down Memory Lane!.

With each entry in the series offering fresh story and minimal improvements to gameplay, replaying one of the older titles is asking for disappointment, even if it has a new coat of paint. Story of Seasons: Friends of Mineral Town brings the 2003 Game Boy Advance title into 2020 with enjoyable cutesy graphics and personality, but does little to add depth to the already outdated gameplay.. After choosing from an extremely limited set of character customization options, you set out to take over a farm left to you by your late grandfather, where you once spent the summer 20 years ago. It’s unclear why your character left whatever life they had behind, but you are quickly thrust into the day-to-day work of maintaining a farm, starting with crops. Growing crops is one of the main methods of making money, but progression is slow. You can’t improve your crop yields in any meaningful way until the option to buy better farm soil becomes available in the second year, which is 25 to 30 hours into the game. Upgrading the watering can allows you to tend to more crops at once, but the increased stamina usage makes for minimal improvement to your crop yield. Tiny Rails

STORY OF SEASONS Friends of Mineral Town Free Download GAMESPACK.NET

Upgrading tools improves your ability to farm slightly, but the best way to maximize crop output is through the Nature Sprites that live in the town. Tucked behind the church, seven Sprites live in a hut, waiting for you to make friends with them. You gain their trust by speaking with them and giving them gifts that they like, similar to befriending people in town. Once a certain level of friendship is reached, you can request they help with one of three farm chores: watering crops, picking crops, and caring for livestock. The catch here is that the Sprites aren’t very good at these chores to start with and need to be trained through playing minigames. Each chore has a corresponding minigame; the watering minigame and livestock minigame are both enjoyable, entailing tile memorization and frantic chicken feeding respectively, while the crop-picking minigame is a glorified button masher. But because you need to play the minigames dozens upon dozens of times to make meaningful progress, the novelty of them wears off quickly. And because all seven Sprites need to be leveled up individually, you could spend the majority of your playtime repeating these minigames with little in the way of a reward.

Fall in Love!.

There are no overall goals or quests for you to work towards, which leaves you lost as to exactly why you’re putting all this effort into the farm except for personal satisfaction and the promise of getting rich. Your actions and progression have little impact on Mineral Town and the Nature Sprites, lessening the sense of accomplishment you could get from turning the abandoned land into a thriving farm. Farming isn’t the only moneymaking avenue, as you can also spend your days mining and fishing. Unfortunately, neither activity pays very well nor are they actively enjoyable to do. Successful mining is based entirely on luck and an abundance of stamina recovery items. Every floor has a bunch of rocks you can break to try to find ore. The only way to progress further into the mine is by using a hoe on the dirt, and there’s no indication of where the ladder might be. Using the hoe drains your stamina, and if you aren’t lucky, you could easily waste the majority of your stamina bar searching for the way to descend, sending you out of the mine empty-handed and frustrated.

Upgrading your hammer and hoe doesn’t improve your mining skills, and there aren’t checkpoints in the mine, so you have to start from the first floor every run. The ore itself doesn’t sell for very much and you don’t need more than a handful of each to upgrade all of your tools. Gems are worth more but can only be found in the lake mine, which is only available during winter. You never improve at mining and the payout doesn’t make up for needing a ton of stamina items to get into the lower levels. In the same vein as mining, fishing is based mostly on luck. While upgrading the fishing rod does increase your chances of getting bigger and better fish, the entire mechanic is based on waiting for an exclamation point and pressing the action button, which isn’t engaging and quickly becomes dull. If done correctly, you might catch a fish. Or a branch. Or a can. Or the fish might get away. All of this is a roll of the dice, on top of a mechanic that is fairly mind-numbing to start with. There are different species of fish that you can catch, but their sell value is only dependent on their size–small, medium, or large–which defeats the purpose of any species variety.

STORY OF SEASONS Friends of Mineral Town Free Download GAMESPACK.NET

After playing through several Story of Seasons games with glacially slow openings, it’s nice to return to the more expeditious starts found in the earlier franchise entries. Friends of Mineral Town gives players a quick trip to their youth when they first came to the farm that would one day be theirs before handing over the reins. There’s no long introduction of the townsfolk, no elongated tutorial, no tour of the town you have to complete before you’re given the okay to start plowing the fields. You’re given some tools and a horse to raise, then are left to your own devices. If you’ve played Friends of Mineral Town before, know it’s a walk down memory lane. It does feature a completely new translation, but the layout of Mineral Town and its surrounding area keeps the familiarity of the original with some adjustments that make it a bit more connected. The mines and the shops and the sprites are exactly where you remember them. Some of the quirks of the original, such as having two beds side by side, are retained in the remake. If you’re coming to Mineral Town from a more modern farming sim, it can often feel underwhelming. Several of the seasonal events, such as the fireworks show, Moonlight Night, and Starlight Night, are disappointing in their execution. NICKELODEON KART RACERS 3: SLIME SPEEDWAY

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