Two popular Japanese born IPs that I have no experience with were recently combined by the developers at Brownies: Doraemon and Story of Seasons, the spiritual successor to the Harvest Moon series. Doraemon is instantly likable — he’s a blue robot cat with a cute art design and positive personality. He and his four friends, including your playable character Noby, are transported to another world in another time. This happens after Noby and Doraemon find a strange seed and decide to plant it. A massive tree sprouts up, but a bizarre storm also happens, and suddenly the group of friends find themselves in an old time farming village, a typical of a Story of Seasons/Harvest Moon/Stardew Valley setting.
This town requires that everyone work, and if the team of friends have any hope of getting back home, they have to collect Doraemon’s strange futuristic devices that are lost in the town. Over the course of a full hour long opening sequence, in which the player does nothing but watch a few short cutscenes and tap through text after text, each character gets a job somewhere in the town. Noby has the biggest of these jobs in taking over an abandoned farm that needs a tremendous amount of work. This is where you come in — over the course of however long you want to play, through multiple seasons and virtual years, you are tasked with making your dilapidated farm the very best it can be. Every weed that needs to be plucked, seed that needs to be sown, rock that needs to be smashed, cows that needs food, whatever it may be, there’s always something to be doing, even if it’s taking a nap.
Doraemon: Story of Seasons is lighthearted; there is no threat, no rush, no game over scenario (at least that I encountered), and you know what?, sometimes that’s great, and I can enjoy that sort of gameplay, too. However, I found myself stuck in tedium early and often, and literally at times, falling asleep while playing Doraemon. I don’t say that to bash the game, I’m just saying that from the beautiful presentation to the soft, repetitive music, to the very nature of the gameplay (lackadaisical farming), I found it pretty easy to just tune out. Without much of a real goal or objective to strive for, and much more intriguing games and life matters to tend to, it became tough to stay interested in the gameplay loop of Dorameon after just the first few hours. This is a good game to play on the Switch on the go, taking short spurts at it in between longer play sessions if you’re into the gameplay enough to want to keep farming and building up friendships day after day.
Though I could extend this article with more information and thoughts, the bottomline is that this is the type of game you’re either into or you’re not. The genre is fairly niche and from the little I have played of it in the past and from what I have read this week, there’s nothing really new here other than the crossover with Doraemon. That’s cool and all, but is it enough to get players otherwise not enamored with the gameplay loop of these type of games to buy in? That’s something you’ll obviously have to answer for yourself, but for me, I found the game to be too boring and too tedious to spend a great deal of time with.
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