Zephyr Town’s bazaar was once a grand gathering of merchants that enticed tourists from far and wide, and it can return to that magnificent state with some hard work. Your day-to-day life in Story of Seasons: Grand Bazaar, a remake of the Nintendo DS title Harvest Moon DS: Grand Bazaar, runs a rhythm similar to other games in the series, with some syncopation created by the weekly bazaar. In conjunction with a welcoming cast and surprisingly in-depth story, Grand Bazaar is a symphony of a delightful farming sim life, with its minor hiccups mostly drowned out.
You start your day in Grand Bazaar by tending to your farm and animals. To those familiar with farming sims, nothing feels out of the ordinary here. You plant seeds, fertilize them to improve their quality, and water them each day until they’re ready to harvest. As you get further along, you unlock more fields until you have a total of four: three outside and one in your cellar. These are in set locations, as is your barn, with no option to move them around or customize your farm in any way. It’s becoming more common for farming sims to offer fully customizable farms or even towns, like in Rune Factory: Guardians of Azuma. Yet there’s a homely appeal to Grand Bazaar’s choice in keeping the farm layout straightforward, like in the days of the original game.
After finishing up on your farm, you can head out into Zephyr Town and spend some time with the townsfolk while you finish up other errands. Here is where Grand Bazaar’s forte lies: its characters and overarching story are among the strongest in the series’s oeuvre. Zephyr Town has its fair share of adorably designed characters you can romance, as well as those you can befriend, as is the genre standard. Tons of story scenes and full voice acting help this group stand out from the series’s crowds.
Each love interest has a collection of story scenes that help you get to know them better. They cover the entire suite of emotions, from silly, such as Maple going overboard with cleaning the hotel, to serious, such as a fight between brothers Jules and Derek. These scenes go into far more depth than the events in the original Grand Bazaar, and are more extensive than even some more recent Story of Seasons titles. There’s an appropriate sense of conflict and character growth while maintaining the “cozy” feeling many players enjoy about farming sims.
The scenes contribute to even greater feelings of comfort thanks to their emphasis on community. Townsfolk will get involved in many scenes, even those centered around a love interest, giving them more opportunities to leave a lasting impression on the player. Non-romanceable characters also have their own dedicated scenes that enhance their personalities and enrich the community of Zephyr Town. There’s an incredible number of these scenes, and they’re all fully voiced, further bringing this charming cast to life.
It’s easy to get swept up trying to follow each character’s storyline, but don’t forget, you still have work to do. As you slip away from your social obligations, you head to the windmills where you use your crops and foraged goods to produce other items. The faster the wind blows, the quicker each item gets crafted. There are three windmills to unlock, but traveling between them can be awkward due to their positions across Zephyr Town. The most notable example is the blue windmill, the one furthest away from your farm, all the way on the east side of Zephyr Town. This is where you can make your own seeds, which is how you can maintain and increase your crops’ quality. Although you can warp back home once you’ve unlocked the storage box’s teleporting ability at this mill, it still feels like clunky staccato that breaks up your farming routine.
If you choose to run back home rather than teleport—perhaps for the opportunity to say hello to someone you fancy—you may find yourself running against the town’s tailwind. While moving, you can whip out a glider and get carried by the wind. If the wind is strong and you leap from a high elevation, you travel quickly and far. But if the wind is weak, it’s faster to walk. Appropriate to its name, the wind only blows from west to east in Zephyr Town, so you can only use your glider to travel from your home eastward. Even when it feels like the intensity of the wind is in your favor, you won’t always be able to utilize it for movement.
When you return home after a long day of farming and socializing, you come face-to-face with a remnant of Grand Bazaar’s past: you can only save your game in the comfort of your home. There may be a charm to the simplicity of not being able to customize your farm, but of all the gameplay upgrades not to make, the inability to save anywhere is the most baffling. If you ever want to take a break, you must stop whatever task you’re doing and hustle back home, eating up precious in-game minutes that could have been spent on other tasks.
Every Saturday, the game’s main distinguishing feature, the bazaar, halts your daily farming routine temporarily. Here, you sell items at your stall and make major purchases from others. This is a departure from the typical Story of Seasons moneymaking method of placing items into a shipping container daily. Making money once a week directs players to be more careful than usual with their spending. There is an option to sell to stores around Zephyr Town during the week, but those profits are paltry at best. To maximize your income, you must sell at the bazaar, where your stall’s decorations can increase your profits, and certain items will sell more easily if they’re “trending” that in-game month.
Many important items are bazaar stall exclusives, including farm animals and farm expansion. This weekly system is an appealing unique feature in Grand Bazaar, but it also has its drawbacks that make it less forgiving than many other Story of Seasons games. If you don’t make enough money during the bazaar to afford a big-investment purchase, you have to wait an entire week for another chance, preventing you from starting on your next goals.
This drawback is worst when you fail to upgrade your storage space. Grand Bazaar’s inventory system allows the same item to stack up to 99 times, and only if the items are all the same quality. This isn’t as problematic at the beginning of the week, after selling off your excess items at the bazaar, but it can get unpleasant as the week goes on and you receive items at wildly varying quality levels.
It’s tempting to craft your items as your storage space dwindles away, and sometimes that’s your only option. But the bazaar’s randomized monthly trends paradoxically encourage stockpiling items until they’re at peak popularity. Sometimes evergreen items like jewelry are popular, and other times, crops and recipes that aren’t in season are “in.” If you didn’t save enough ingredients from previous seasons to utilize, this can be a painful blow. The biggest example of this is how all the seasonal tea blends use fruits from their associated season, but not the tea leaves of that season—instead, they all use Autumn Tea Leaves.
After enough busy bazaar days, you hit the appropriate milestones to reach the next bazaar rank. With each rank-up, you learn more about Zephyr Town and what happened to cause the bazaar to lose its luster. Narratives like these are almost unheard of in Story of Seasons, but Grand Bazaar implements it wonderfully. Not only is the world more interesting, it also compels you to push forward with your farming. And push forward you shall, as the day ends and another begins.
There are some minor elements of Story of Seasons: Grand Bazaar that feel like remnants from its outdated DS counterpart. But there’s so much more that is lovingly updated, elevating the experience to one that stands out among its predecessors. Grand Bazaar is a grand remake that’s easy to recommend to fans of the series and fans of farming sims in general. Just like the winds of change brought it richer character stories, an emphasized overarching narrative, and voice acting, hopefully Grand Bazaar’s eastward winds carry these new features and concepts into future Story of Seasons games.
