YMMV / Story of Seasons (2014)

• Accidental Innuendo: Angela grumbles about how busy she is, working as a nurse and caring for everyone "in a village with more hoes than people." She is, of course, referring to the farming tool... probably.
• Awesome Music: As usual with these games. In particular, each season has its own leitmotif:
  • Spring: Arguably the happiest music in the game, particularly in your very first spring.
  • Summer: A pleasant, relaxed theme, like a summer breeze. Has a bit of a country feel to it, and a little traditional Japanese.
  • Fall: A sprightly tune, to go along with the theme of fall harvest and celebration. Also feels a bit haunting.
  • Winter: The winter music is more melancholy than the other seasons, and again, this is particularly apparent in your first winter. There's a good reason for this.
  • Each seasonal theme also has a slower nighttime equivalent, all of which are either very soothing (like the spring and winter music), or moving and reflective (like summer and fall's nighttime music).
• Base-Breaking Character:
  • Elise. While many adore her, others find her haughty and rude attitude and the way she throws money around to be very unappealing. The fact that you have to go through all five of her rival events before even touching her flower events (and can't as a female player) means that a lot of people won't or can't even bother seeing her character development to the end.
  • Fritz is even worse, especially for those that have viewed his rival events. Either he's secretly a manipulative mooch hiding behind a goofy, ditzy facade, or he's The Woobie, genuinely sweet and friendly, and perpetually down-on-his-luck. The fact that his loved gifts are fairly expensive and that his favorite meal is a total pain to get doesn't help.
  • Klaus also gets this, especially for his purple heart event. He's either incredibly romantic, charming, and a sophisticated older man — or he's extremely condescending, stuffy, too obsessed with his age being higher than the player, and really creepy towards a young woman alone with him.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome: Once you unlock the Safari Park, you can mine for materials and make huge amounts of money every single day, greatly speeding up the process of unlocking merchants with minimal work.
• Difficulty Spike:
  • Unlike most of the other love interests, Licorice does not have a flower on her dialogue box to indicate your friendship level. Pushing the left shoulder button on your DS will provide a clue, however.
  • Similar to Licorice, Kamil does not have a flower on his dialogue box to indicate the friendship level. Pushing the left shoulder button on your DS again provides some clue.
  • Romancing Elise. She has five rivalry events that have to be done before she can be romanced, and then Elise also has an additional romance event beyond the four that the other love interests have.
  • Contests become increasingly harder as years pass, with the RNG tripping you up even at the best levels to cause you to lose.
• Dry Docked Ship: Many fans like to think that Iris and Klaus had a relationship in the past, given how often they're seen together chatting, Iris's Suspiciously Specific Denial about dating him, and them being relatively close in age and older than the player character (and that, should you woo Klaus as the female player, the pink flower event with him has you misinterpret them spending time together and get upset about it, even implying Iris would be a better match for him). But since you as the player can woo them and they don't really interfere, they're clearly not together anymore.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Klaus and Raeger are usually at the top of popularity polls or people's top choices for bachelors.
  • Reception for Marian has been overwhelmingly positive for his being exceptionally beautiful (despite being a man) and for being a canon gay character that's been handled tastefully. The fact that it's extremely common for someone to mistake him for female, and then be shocked to find out his real gender, certainly adds to his memorability.
  • Eda, the Cool Old Lady who helps train you into a farmer. Her cheekiness, grandmotherly nature, and Friendly Enemy status ^note She and three other farmers serve as your rivals for extra land have made her one of the most recognized characters in the game.
  • Lillie is one of the most popular bachelorettes for her Adorkable, Moe personality.
  • Elise is also well-liked for her Character Development, a rarity in Harvest Moon. Though others dislike how long it takes to actually see said development.
• Even Better Sequel:
  • This game took the mechanics introduced in Harvest Moon: A New Beginning and refined them. You also don't have to build the whole town from scratch and endure an incredibly Slow-Paced Beginning.
  • Many people were pleased with the smooth translation XSEED did with the text and characters, even their listening to feedback when the names for some characters didn't go over well initially.
• Fanfic Fuel:
  • Like most games in the series, the plot of "leaving your home in the city to become a farmer" paired with "various people to court and marry" opens itself up to original stories and Self-Insert Fic. But in this case the player character has no backstory at all — not even a grandfather that left them the farm — and can be freely customized to look any way they want to, meaning any backstory the author wants can be done.
  • Mistel and Iris are a two-person family with no parents mentioned; Iris is said to have raised Mistel herself from the time he was young. Many a fanfic can be written about just how they lost their parents. Same with what happened to Maurice's wife to make him a single parent raising two girls alone.
  • One episode of Oak Tree Times has a random man call Klaus "Boss" and talk about a time when he lived in a bad part of a town and formed a gang. Klaus steps in before the man can tell more and asks him to be silent on the matter, to which the man agrees — calling him "boss" again. Such a backstory leaves itself ripe for what Klaus did before he stopped being, in his words, an immature reckless kid with an outsized sense of justice.
  • Lots of fanfic stories play with the fact that Licorice and Kamil are both Continuity Cameos from the game Tale of Two Towns and so could have known each other before coming to Oak Tree Town, even living in separate towns there.
• Fan-Preferred Couple:
  • There's no canon couple — the player can marry any of the six options available to them. However, most fan works pair the female player character Annie/Midori with Klaus, owing to an older demographic that find him more plausible and stable than the other bachelors (and in no small part helped by his Trademark Favorite Food, bouillabaisse, being the easiest to get the recipe for and make). Raeger is also popularly paired up with her. Johnny/Ibuki, in contrast, is equally spread across the bachelorettes.
  • For male/male pairings, it's often Fritz/Raeger, due to Fritz saying "I love you, man!" to Raeger during his white flower event.
• Game-Breaker:
  • Flax, due to being able to be converted into gold or silver cloth that can easily be sold for plenty of cash. It can also be obtained early in the game, requiring you to ship only 150k worth of items to Silk Country, the first trader. Alternatively, you could (when online play was available) just go into multiplayer and trade with other players for five star seeds, since the overwhelming player generosity that was in A New Beginning moved over to this game. Unlocking flax cloth means, if done right, never losing a shipping challenge again.
  • Once you unlock the Safari Park, you can mine for materials and make huge amounts of money every single day, greatly speeding up the process of unlocking merchants with minimal work.
• Harsher in Hindsight: Fritz, during the Pet Promenade, gets curious about what's under Woofio's suit and wants to plan with you to take Woofio's head off to see what's in there — then suddenly gets a really bad feeling and gives up on it. In the very next game after this, Trio of Towns, Woofio's Love Events reveal that he's a cursed human who's been hexed and turned into the animal suit. There is nothing inside his costume — and he admits that in the past previous friends took the head off, got freaked out by him being nothing but an empty suit, and abandoned him.
• Hollywood Old: Veronica, Klaus, and Iris all make references to their ages and seem to consider themselves old; Klaus in particular calls himself an old man frequently, especially if the player dates and marries him. However Klaus and Iris both look like they might be in their 30s at the most, and Veronica can't possibly be more than around her mid-40s (given her daughter Angela).
• It's the Same, Now It Sucks!: The time in this game passes one in-game minute for every second in real life, just like in Harvest Moon: The Tale of Two Towns, Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life, Harvest Moon: A New Beginning and a few other games.
• It Was His Sled:
  • Eda dying at the start of the first winter, and bequeathing her farmland to you.
  • The "baby" you can have with your spouse being boy and girl twins.
• LGBT Fanbase:
  • Marian, the town doctor, was happily embraced by queer players as one of the first openly queer characters in the series, as a feminine doctor who adores pink and smoothly mentions his boyfriend.
  • Since your character can wear anything and have any hairstyle with Character Customization, many players who wished to woo the same gender would pick the opposite and then, as soon as possible, pick an appearance that presented the player character as any gender. Outside of the wedding outfits and the pronouns used in-game occasionally, your character can appear any gender. The Queerness of Story of Seasons by Kori Michele Handwerker discusses how they explored gender and created a queer narrative in-game by having their character present as a trans male.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • "Kamil is Cam's brother!" For people who find his appearance in this game too radically different from his original appearance, a running joke about them being related or half-brothers developed.
  • Painting Iris to be a man-stealing strumpet. Iris is well-liked, but people have been jokingly making her out to be a rival love interest bent on stealing Klaus away from the player, due to how close they are and her oddly specific denial about not dating him.
• Moe:
  • Agate, especially when she smiles.
  • Dessie, who looks like a 10-year-old Harvest Goddess. Squee ensues.
• Replacement Scrappy: Dessie has many detractors due to being a kid version of the Harvest Goddess.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • You can't unlock animals early in the game — you have to wait for them to become purchasable through the vendors to have them. You can't even, say get Silkie or Araucana chicken eggs to hatch through the wi-fi trade option; the game won't let you gift them.
  • The shipping system. The shipping bin doesn't exist at all; items are now sold to merchants who come to town on certain days, and there's no other way to sell products or buy certain ones. In the first few seasons of the game, you're guaranteed to go several days without a merchant in town until you have enough to ensure overlaps, which makes inventory management and purchase troublesome.
  • Customization. It's miles simpler than it was in previous games, but you still need to buy and raise dozens of different animals or purchase/make cloth and components outright to even get half the material for clothing, forcing you to devote much of your playstyle to taking care of multiple animals to have what you need.
  • The farm being as far away as possible from the town. Coupled with the lack of a shipping bin, you can spend (in-game) hours going back and forth from your farm to the town just so you can get rid of things, even with a horse.
• Squick: Some fans are a little uncomfortable with the tone of the relationship between Iris and Mistel, including how they're in each other's special post-wedding cards.
• Suspiciously Similar Song: If you've played Fire Emblem Fates, the Fall theme sounds suspiciously familiar. You are the ocean's grey waves... Indeed, the tune in Fall is very similar to "Lost in Thoughts, All Alone". However, this game came out on February 27, 2015, while Fates came out on June 25 of the same year. The similarity between the themes is merely a coincidence.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!:
  • The lack of a shipping bin. This one can be particularly frustrating because the merchants you can sell things to don't appear every day until you unlock enough of them, meaning you'll probably end up with a full inventory often during the first few seasons.
  • A weird blend of this and It's the Same, Now It Sucks!: XSEED Games changing Reina and Cam's English names and using their original Japanese names, Licorice and Kamil. This was initially met with overwhelmingly negative responses from the Western fanbase for messing with established canon and for the names sounding Narmy. (Generally, "Licorice" seems to be the more heavily-maligned of the two, while "Kamil" is at least considered close enough to be acceptable.) As the years have passed, people have been less harsh towards the name changes.
  • The change of the Multiplayer function of the game now being region-locked, thus making it almost impossible to even use it in certain countries with barely active players. Especially bad considering this was not an issue with the previous game's multiplayer function.
• Values Dissonance:
  • A major one when it came to Klaus's Purple Heart event, "A Cautious Proposal". If you do the dialogue tree right (for the most FP) by waiting on him to finish working, and then say you came over to just see him? He'll taunt that you shouldn't say the kinds of things you did to just anyone — because it gives men ideas, and if you say those things to the wrong man, you might get caught up by a big bad wolf someday. All the while he's stepping closer and closer to you. He then laughs it off—saying you're still too naive to get it — and claims working all day got his tongue loose and it was merely some advice, since some people have less scruples than he does. Eventually you run off in embarrassment, and he gets very flustered thinking about your smile complete with Crush Blush. The whole exchange comes off as creepy, especially since it happens while your female character is alone in the house with him, with no one else around. Before the game was released in the EU, the wording was changed so he instead compliments your youthful exuberance and says he's used to taking the lead — but then he says to rein yourself in, as his blood pressure is rising and compares the way he feels from your actions to a fly drawn to a spider or a moth to a flame and says it might just be part of your nature. And then when you run off, he says he needs to sit down for a few minutes afterwards. Which honestly isn't much better, as he still comes off creepy and lecherous towards a young woman who was alone with him. No wonder he's a Base-Breaking Character.
  • Veronica and Angela have a one-time event you can see with the two of them (once you've gotten enough friendship, and as long as you're not in a relationship with Angela), called "Guildmaster and Daughter." You come upon the two of them at home in the evening, and Angela is fussing with her mother, who says she doesn't have the time to do...something. That something is a physical checkup. They fight and Angela storms off to her quarters. You can either sit down with Veronica or go speak to Angela, and there's no wrong choice there as it's all on who you want more Relationship Values with. But the issue isn't either of them. Veronica instead explains that she'd rather not let the Camp Gay male town doctor, Marian, examine her — and it's because she's not sure she agrees with some of his "lifestyle choices." She quickly adds that he's not a bad person, she just can't explain her discomfort to Angela. And if you follow Angela instead, you'll still learn that Marian is the issue and Angela says that she can understand why her mother might feel that way. The "solution" they decide on is to let Angela do the exam instead, and pass the results to Marian to analyze — and they together agree that it's best to simply lie to Marian and say that Sundays, his one day off, are the only day Veronica can go to the clinic, rather than either of them admit to Marian he makes Veronica uncomfortable. Then Angela confesses that, just between the three of you, her mother's not the only one who's uncomfortable around the doctor. This is all played for mild interpersonal drama and a demonstration of Veronica's stubbornness and workaholic tendencies, and ends with everyone making the "joyful" or laughing emote. But the wording and solution make Veronica appear quite homophobic and Angela, who works directly with Marian, as willing to cover her mother's feelings up and also agreeing with her mother on some level about Marian. Given that practically no one else in the village has a problem with Marian whatsoever, it's not a very pleasant scene at all. Especially with the line from Veronica about "lifestyle choices" — an anti-gay dog whistle phrase used by homophobes that implies being queer is a choice. This, like Klaus's event, is also redone in the EU version so that instead Veronica states she's afraid of doctors and blames their white coats, and Angela's agreement is just discomfort around doctors. So it comes off much better.
• Viewer Gender Confusion:
  • It can take some players quite a while to figure out that the town doctor Marian is a man.
  • Mistel also. Until he or someone else mentions it, you can go a very long time thinking he's a girl.
• Woolseyism: Unsurprisingly, considering XSEED Games's past work, this game has a very good translation.
  • A small, but noticeable example: in previous games, tree scraps were called "small branches." In this game, they're called "Twigs," which sounds much more natural to an English speaker.
  • "Small rocks" are called "Pebbles" now, which is also an improvement.