Thank you XSEED Games for providing us with a review code!

Story of Seasons: Grand Bazaar begins with you creating your genderless character. Once your character is made, they’ll respond to a wanted ad for a farmer needed in Zephyr Town. The town is charming and the people are welcoming, but it’s a shadow of its former glory. To sweeten the deal, you get to live in a house free of charge. It doesn’t get any better than that, especially in this economy!

Felix the mayor can be a little rambunctious, but his heart is in the right place. For the first year, he’ll often show up at your door at 6am to let you know about upcoming events. Felix will also provide you with starting items so you won’t feel out of place at these shindigs. For example, for the tea party he’ll give you some tea to share. After the first year, the training wheels come off and you’ll have to rely on your calendar to plan accordingly.

Food items eventually spoil so you can’t store them indefinitely. I don’t know why, but there doesn’t seem to be a refrigerator or a freezer in your kitchen, there’s just a generic storage room which you can pay to upgrade its capacity several times throughout the game.

Every week Zephyr Town hosts a bazaar, but the numbers have been dwindling since their last farmer skipped town. The identity of this farmer and the reason why they left will be revealed later in the game. Spoilers aside, it’s up to you to restore Zephyr Town’s bazaars to their former glory.

To increase the bazaar’s ranking, you’ll have to meet sales thresholds and encourage more merchants to open up stalls to sell their wares. Some of the potential merchants are residents while others are drifters. The potential merchants will ask a favor of you or issue you a challenge to complete before committing to joining the bazaar. For example, there are multiple food stands, and you’ll have to source ingredients for them to get started.

Each season is only a month long, and you can only plant and raise crops during their proper seasons. Any leftover crops in the wrong season will die out. On days where it doesn’t rain, you’ll have to water them. Adding fertilizer will increase their quality. Quest items and harvest competitions will demand high-quality crops. Later in the game you can unlock a field in your cellar that can have a season of your choosing locked in as long as you have the corresponding sun stone. The ability to grow seasonal crops all year long is great.

Growing crops is just the beginning of your journey. You can process the crops and animal byproducts in various windmills throughout Zephyr Town. There is some overlap of items created, but most of the products processed in each of the windmills are unique. The red windmill closest to your house can convert cow’s milk to mayonnaise, butter, or cheese. It can also process wool into yarn. If you get higher quality versions of animal products, you can bring them to the yellow windmill to produce premium products. The blue windmill can convert seeds from presumably higher quality crops to save you some time and fertilizer to make better quality produce the next time around.

There are many animal and harvest competitions to partake in, and you’ll want to showcase your highest quality crops and most loved animals there. Participating will earn you favor with all of the townsfolk. You can also boost your relationships by handing gifts to people of interest. After a threshold is met a quest or cutscene will typically unlock and will have to be completing before more relationship points can be rewarded. The quests often involve finding a lost bag or bringing them items they enjoy.

While you can’t romantically pursue married folks, everyone else is fair game regardless of their gender. Having a child is also possible despite getting together with a spouse with the same “body type”. The only other moral issue worth mentioning is that later in the game, a fortune teller will want to set up a booth at the bazaar.

Story of Seasons: Grand Bazaar is aesthetically pleasing with vibrant colors and cute character and animal designs. The farm animals are adorable, even the stubborn ones. I like how each animal has a different temperament which gives them some personality. The villagers are likeable, though I find it odd that many think it’s okay to visit my house at 6am.

I love how every line is voice acted, and it’s very well done. The wife with a southern drawl always cracked me up since nobody else in the town had an accent. The background music is pleasant to listen to and did get stuck in my head on occasion. With over sixty hours clocked in, it was bound to happen right?

Story of Seasons: Grand Bazaar ran amazingly well on my Steam Deck, and a majority of my time playing it was on that device. I ran into an issue on my desktop where I had to disable Steam’s overlay to get the game to run. I experienced a soft lock while playing it on a laptop. Thankfully, not much progress was lost due to the morning and evening autosaves. Saving the game manually can only be done at home.

There’s never enough inventory space, and I experienced a glitch were identical items in type and quality were not automatically combining and I had to manually combine them to reclaim a precious item slot. Other than those annoyances, Story of Seasons: Grand Bazaar ran pretty well overall.

I enjoyed my time in Zephyr Town, and if I didn’t have hundreds of other games to review, I’d gladly play this game some more. It’s a shame that the genderless LGBTQ+ agenda had to be included into this series. Other than that, it’s a family-friendly game that can be enjoyed by many.