Story of Seasons: Grand Bazaar PS5 Review. Stardew Valley truly opened the farming sim door for me. After playing that legendary sim over 10 years ago, I have since jumped into several franchises that I would have never thought about playing. Of those franchises, a couple I would have never batted an eye at are Harvest Moon or Story of Seasons – or even games like Animal Crossing, for that matter.
After several years of playing different farming sim games, I now look to new ones to both scratch that itch and also give me something new to jazz up the formula. That’s where Story of Seasons: Grand Bazaar comes in. As a franchise I have only tried once before, I’m interested to see how Grand Bazaar differentiates itself from the rest of the genre.
Story of Seasons: Grand Bazaar Review (PS5) – A Solid Entry Point Into Farm Sims
Zephyr Town once thrived due to the success of its Grand Bazaar, a weekly open-air market where people from all over once flocked to buy anything their hearts desired. The success of the Grand Bazaar has dwindled since the departure of the farmer who previously owned the farm you now occupy. Not long after you step foot in town, the Mayor greets you with pressure and expectation to meet the same excellence that your predecessor provided.
As mentioned above, the focal point of this game is the titular Grand Bazaar. Every in-game Saturday, everyone gathers to buy and sell wares. This is where you make your income to buy more resources for your farm. With the farm you inherited, you get free reign to plant crops, tend animals, and make produce to sell at the Grand Bazaar. In a very generalized top-down view, this is the gameplay loop: generate fungible goods and sell them every Saturday.
This gameplay loop naturally includes crafting, which stands as my favorite aspect of the game. You handle all processing and crafting in the three windmills around Zephyr Town. Utilizing the power of wind, you craft your goods. This stands as my favorite aspect of the game simply because the wind speed changes each day, which affects your yields. If the wind is faster, the windmills generate more goods faster. If the wind is slower, then your goods take longer to process.
Prepping for The Grand Bazaar
With other games in this genre, the daily formula is quite routine and paced. While that’s still the case in Grand Bazaar, waking up to a strong wind instantly makes you reconsider your routine to maximize your outputs. This response is kind of like when it rains in Stardew Valley, except there you get to skip watering. With stronger winds, you face a changing element that makes you rethink how your day goes. It’s a very welcome feature that jazzes up the formula without taking away from the gameplay loop.
The Grand Bazaar stands as a mini-game where you move back and forth along your storefront and sell products to patrons. To prepare, you place items in fixed areas and then approach that area when a customer approaches it. With a simple button press, you then make the sale. Then, you move to the next person and so on. When you run out of stock, you naturally place something in the vacant spot to maximize your chances for a sale. The game even gives you a friendly greeting button, which brings people over to buy things from you. My spouse does vending in real life, and I can’t help but think about how nice it would be if making a sale were that easy in real life.
Like most games in this genre, you also get the opportunity to romance one of twelve eligible bachelors and bachelorettes. There are no restrictions based on gender for whomever you choose to pursue, which allows every player a solid chance to find happiness. To complement relationships, most of the dialogue in Grand Bazaar is written like it comes from a 20th Century young adult novel. Honestly, I love it because it places a certain sense of culture and era in the game without outright placing the game’s setting in a real life timeline.
Planning Your Day
A pro as well as a con to Grand Bazaar is just how small the game map is. Everything you need and everyone you need to talk to are readily accessible. In fact, you can reach anything on the map from the farthest point in 30 seconds or so. Since the windmills are set in different parts of town, this is essential to your success, especially when you want to truly take advantage of wind speeds.
However, the potential down side is that this game does not include extras like dungeons or combat. This game is named Grand Bazaar for a reason: Everything you do revolves around it, and things like dungeon crawling don’t make sense in this setting. This means that the gameplay loop doesn’t have as many options as other titles in the genre have. Not all games need to break up the gameplay like that, but it might change some player’s minds when choosing to play Grand Bazaar.
The other significant thing about Grand Bazaar that stands out is that there isn’t any way to expand or enhance your farm. From beginning to end, the amount of tilled land you start with is all you get. Plus, there are no options to expand your house or barn, and you can’t increase your storage or how much you can carry. Since the map is so small, running back and forth isn’t as big of a chore in this game. Still, you don’t get that satisfaction of growth that you get with other games like it.
Just like with the smaller map, Grand Bazaar counters the game’s lack of growth by providing you with ways to optimize your experience right away without needing to buy upgrades that you would need in other games. For instance, other games limit you at the beginning to only interacting with one square at a time when planting, watering, and cultivating. In Grand Bazaar, you can simply jump and then interact. This allows you to water or plant three squares in a line at the same time without needing to invest.
It just costs extra stamina to perform these super moves. To compensate, you can take a bath every day and regenerate a lot of your stamina. In contrast, this also means that you will only have the ability to water, plant, and cultivate three squares at once. Again, the game compromises with this by limiting just how much tillable land you get. Grand Bazaar is all about efficiency and managing your resources instead of building an empire. Just keep that in mind.
A Little Something for Everyone
Story of Seasons: Grand Bazaar makes efforts to condense the farming sim formula down to something simpler and more manageable. The game map is small, which keeps everything you need just a few seconds away at all times. On the other hand, the game doesn’t allow you to upgrade anything, which forces you to focus on what you have and not what you can build.
It’s the windmills and the Grand Bazaar itself that sell this game. The windmills keep you thinking about how to maximize your yields, and the Grand Bazaar serves as that ultimate goal each week while also providing a nice change of pace in gameplay without feeling out of place. In fact, both the windmills and the Grand Bazaar keep you motivated to find ways around the limitations the game places on you. In some ways, this formula benefits newcomers by streamlining the process. In other ways, it challenges genre fans to juggle the limitations. It may not be for everyone, but Grand Bazaar does make for a nice entry point into this genre.
Review code kindly provided by publisher.