The Return of Classic Gameplay Mechanics for the 25th Anniversary
As a longtime fan of the Story of Seasons series, I continue to be impressed by the previews of Story of Seasons: Pioneers of Olive Town. One of the most exciting things is how many features, often only ever appearing once, have finally returned after (in some cases) nearly two decades!
Back in 1999, GBC2 featured a system at the local library to catalog all the fish, bugs, and flowers/herbs you would encounter in the wilderness or, in the case of plants, growing them on your farm. Not to be completely out-done in the follow-up game the next year, an aquarium was added as a location you could donate caught fish to when you visit the mainland!
This kind of collection feature would go on to become a popular mainstay of the lifesim genre, but, for some reason, Story of Seasons never quite committed to making it a regular feature in future games. Now, two decades have passed and Story of Seasons: Pioneers of Olive Town has a museum to donate to!
One of the features a lot of folks noticed immediately was the sprinklers! The idea of being able to automatically water crops so you can easily handle a large amount of them all at once… How has that feature not been done before? Sure, there were hand-held sprinklers in games like SNES, but was there ever an automatic one?
There sure was! In GBC3, for 50,000G you can buy a sprinkler that waters a large 9x9 area automatically every morning, helping you maintain a large amount of crops at once with ease. Of course, it wasn’t only expensive… you had to get water to where you wanted your sprinkler to flow too!
Yep, you had to use a shovel in order to modify your farm land to support your network of sprinkler systems. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? All this on the Gameboy Color back in 2000! That wasn’t all the shovel was for either, as you could also construct a hot spring and set up irrigation for rice. Irrigation hasn’t been confirmed yet for Pioneers of Olive Town, but the tools are present for it already, so maybe we’ll see it in an update soon?
In Animal Parade, upon first meeting Simon, you’ll get yourself a nice camera that you can use to take photos with. You can use these to decorate your home or just keep memories. There was also a photo studio where you could have pictures taken of your family! You could also send photos and messages to your friends on other Wii systems.
The camera system in Pioneers of Olive Town hasn’t had too much confirmed yet, but it looks to be tied in with the compendium feature, allowing you to take photos of critters in nature. You can also share photos online!
This is admittedly a very minor returning feature in the grand scheme of things, but it was fun to spot nevertheless. One of the recent videos on the Bokumono_PR Twitter account showed a little bit of customizing the look of your farm with decorations. After setting an object down, the video shows the player coloring it with one broad stroke of the brush.
Nowadays, a feature like this is a given when it comes to games focusing on customization and decorating your personal space I suppose. Still, it’s nice to see how far we’ve come since ‘96 when there was but one thing to paint and one color to paint it with.
This one is a little different as, while it was present in a previous game, you never actually got to use it. The lasso (or “reigns”) tool first appeared in the demo files for Tree of Tranquility. Supposedly the original intent was to use it to round up and lead your livestock around. With Pioneers of Olive Town focusing largely on exploration, including taming wild animals to use as livestock, it looks like it may be taking on an all-new life as one of the most important tools in the upcoming game.
The Life Sim genre owes a lot to Story of Seasons and its many iterations. It’s truly exciting to see Pioneers of Olive Town striving to bring back as many features as possible from its history and I can only hope it makes a long-standing impression on both old and new fans alike when it releases early next year.
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