It’s been a while since I really got into a Story of Seasons game! I think the last time I really talked about it was back when I was obsessed with Pioneers of Olive Town, but it fell off a little for me once I started running into the frame rate issue it has with older Switches.
Lately, though, I’ve been obsessed with them all over again. I learned a little bit ago that Story of Seasons: Friends of Mineral Town got ported into the Xbox app for PC, so of course, I had to try it out!
I had originally started playing Friends of Mineral Town on the Switch when it came out, but I dropped it because even after my attempt at replacing the joysticks in my joycons, I didn’t manage to fix the joystick drift issue. I kept running into adventures doing things like trying to aim my watering can or race Zack to the shipping bin at the end of the day.
Spoiler alert, he won. Pretty much every time.
I did really like the game itself, though, so I was sad about not being able to play it—which is why I jumped at the chance when I realized I could play it on PC instead, no drifty joysticks involved.
So today, I figured I’d share how that adventure is going so far!
The controls aren’t super intuitive.
Though playing on my PC has solved the issue of joystick drift, it’s introduced a new issue: weird controls. I’m not sure how they landed on all of the buttons they did, but the controls for the PC version aren’t very obvious, nor are there many guides for it.
It did take me a while to figure out basics like opening my backpack, and I do still struggle with switching tools sometimes because I don’t understand why it’s Q and R instead of Q and E, but we’re getting there!
The days fly by.
I don’t know if it’s just me, but the time seems to move faster than I remember in Story of Seasons and Harvest Moon games! I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been wandering around town at 3:30 p.m. and still not made it back in time for my 5:00 p.m. shipping bin pickup.
Luckily, though, it does have my favourite feature of time stopping when you’re indoors, so that keeps things under control a little bit.
You’ve got access to more stuff early on…
One of the most annoying things from Sunshine Islands and Island of Happiness, for me at least, was the fact that you had to do specific things to unlock new crops.
So far, in Friends of Mineral Town, it doesn’t seem like there’s a ton of crop unlocking, which I honestly love. I don’t miss having to unlock things like pineapples by shipping a certain number of every other summer crop!
Instead, you get access to them pretty much as soon as you unlock Huang the merchant, and you can plant them your first season if you want to.
…but the game is still balanced.
While you do get earlier access to rather broken things, the game does well in gating you in terms of how much you get from them, so overally the game still feels balanced.
For example, I was fully expecting pineapples to be my cheese item for the first summer, breaking the bank and letting me unlock all kinds of things. But instead of the 100,000 or more G I used to pull every harvest, at the beginning of the game it sits around 10,000 to 15,000, and makes you wait 21 days for them to be ready—so you only get a couple of crops instead of getting them every three days after day 11.
I was frustrated by it at first because I just wanted my darn pineapples, but in hindsight, I’m glad they did it that way because there’s still some challenge to the game!
I did get myself an alpaca and a coffee calf, though, so I still feel like I got something out of it.
The animal heart increase is annoying, but well underway.
One of the things I wasn’t really sure about with this game at first was the idea that you only get five hearts from an animal you buy, and to unlock all 10 hearts, you have to breed your animals, getting an extra heart each time until you’ve got them all.
I won’t lie, I’m still intimidated by the idea of doing that for cows, but I’ve been hard at work with my chickens, and after two seasons, we’re almost there! I probably could have gotten it done if I’d focused and planned them out properly, but well, I didn’t, so here we are.
It’s been kind of fun doing it with the stream.
I started playing the game originally on my new stream just because it seemed like a really good way to start tackling my backlog of cozy games, and it’s evolved into a weekly tradition.
It’s been neat because people get involved in liking characters (or hating characters, especially the shopkeeper Jeff), and they’ve also gotten involved in helping name the critters on my farm, which honestly is nice because I suck at names and have named every chicken in every game either Penny, Paige, or another name that started with P.
Obviously, not all of it is very PG, because right now they’re all pretty much swear words with “cluck” instead of a certain word that starts with F, but that’s what makes it fun!
Now, with spring and summer of year one under my belt, I’m excited to start getting into some of the actual storylines and start building houses all over the map! I know there are four you can get, so I’m trying to get them. I know they’ll take a while, but it’s nice to know the long-game goals too!
2 thoughts on “My adventures in becoming a friend of Mineral Town”
I’ve tried streaming and it’s just not happening for me. I’ve also tried streaming with Winnie on my lap, that’s even worse. She just keeps trying to pull at the camera lol!
I’m finding I can not comfortably play Switch games anymore. Steam and PC gaming has ruined me!
I do have the Xbox app on my PC and I really want to try this game!
I also started posting on my gaming blog to keep track of my backlog lol
http://gamearella.com