YMMV / Story of Seasons: Pioneers of Olive Town

• Adorkable: Beth looks the part of someone working in a museum much more than Reina does, yet is also charming enough to be on the fandom's "too bad you can't marry her" list.
• Hype Backlash: The game being considered disappointing by part of the fandom comes partly from it being both the first Nintendo Switch original title and the 25th anniversary game on top of coming after two non-remake titles that qualified for Even Better Sequel, paired with the many things that were changed in the mechanics.
• Scrappy Mechanic: There are many, to the point that some patches were dedicated to outright changing some of them after launch. Some clash with or are made even worse by the inventory bag's maximum size being identical to that of Story of Seasons: Friends of Mineral Town, which has much fewer items to juggle. Others were coming on top of crowded farms causing lag issues at launch and for several weeks after it.
  • The tool bag space, while allowing the Player Character to have all their tools on their person at all times, only stores tools. Any tools the player wants to be able to use must be moved to the general bag for the duration, taking up at least one precious slot.
  • Farm facilities and decorations must be in the bag to be placed.
  • Only items in the bag, and not those kept in storage on the farm, are explicitly counted when it comes to telling the player if they have enough for crafting, repairing farm facilities, or fulfilling bulletin board requests. In particular, makers will only tell the player that a material can be processed in them if there is enough of the material to make one processed item in all storage spaces taken together, and at least one is in the bag.
  • The unidentified time-worn, heavy, and shiny objects don't stack.
  • Instead of putting the makers inside buildings, each maker takes up space on the farm. They are all overspecialized, to the point that there is a different one for cheese and yogurt, for making thread and making fabric (themselves split between plant and animal materials), for making ingots and cutting gems, etc. On top of this (before one of the later patches) only one item could be made in the standard makers at a time, which meant the makers working the fastest needed to be topped up with raw materials regularly to be of any real use, and it increased the number of each kind that needed to be present on the farm. Your farm could be full of nothing but various makers.
  • Storage of items not kept in the bag is done in boxes placed on the farmland, much like the makers, instead of an expandable space that is part of the farm house. On top of this, items don't stay inside them when they are moved, they're not connected to each other—so you have to go to the box it's stored in to get something out—and transferring them via the bag takes time and a fully upgraded bag emptied of everything else to do so for each box in one trip.
  • There is nothing in place to allow the player to rotate farm decorations or house furniture, which makes it impossible to use fences for their most obvious purpose and hard to find space for some pieces of furniture at all. This comes with rugs that don't allow anything to be put on top of them, which makes the largest one do nothing but exclude any other furniture from a large area.
  • The speed at which nature respawns, which results in it being very hard to maintain an obstruction-free open space for the cattle, and the fact that tool upgrades aren't taken into account for uses beyond their primary purpose; a tiny sapling tree takes multiple swings to demolish no matter how good your hammer is, even if it has otherwise reached a point where a single charged swing will take care of a gold stone.
• Signature Scene: The early cutscene showing the Player Character leaving the city on their motorcycle, more specifically the shot showing them from the front and focusing on their upper body, which is also an early shot from the trailer. It's a common thumbnail for the first episode of Let's Play series as it shows the Character Customization in detail, down to the color chosen for the motorcycle.
• They Copied It, So It Sucks!: Animal Crossing: New Horizons added mechanics that made it closer to a Farm Life Sim than previous installments. Pioneers of Olive Town, meanwhile, gained superficial similarities with Animal Crossing by having the Player Character start in a tent and adding a museum to donate fish and items to. In addition to this, the aquarium in both games is reliant on the Fishing Minigame to be filled, and both have a wing reliant on Unknown Item Identification. Pioneers of Olive Town, being the latest of the two to be released by about a year, inevitably got a few accusations of ripping off Animal Crossing: New Horizons.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!:
  • In games prior to this one, everyone had gifts they didn't like getting that would add character depth and show off personality with a range of likes and dislikes. Now everyone has a best, better, and okay gift—but everything else is neutral at a a flat 30FP for gifting. People will "like" junk like old twigs and sticks you give them just as much as anything else that's not at least okay.
  • There are only two festivals a season—one that is a potential romantic event, and one that's a town festival. There's no harvest or farm-related festivals at all—meaning that all the hard work you do on your farm can't be judged or even commented on. It makes the farm feel completely detached from the town nearby.
  • Every pairing gets a child the same way—they're gifted one by nature through the Nature Sprites, who found the child and are now giving it to you as a "gift" from nature, and you present it to your surprised spouse. There's no friendship points or deeper connection with the child other than watching them grow and having them interact with you and your spouse—and if you decide to go to the shrine and divorce your spouse, they'll just disappear from existence completely as if they were never there. The child is more like an add-on than a member of your family—and once you have enough points for it, you're going to have one.
• Underused Game Mechanic: The DLC initially was promoted—along with extra outfits and town quests—to include expanded areas where you have visitors from and could court and marry two candidates each from three older games—Harvest Moon: A New Beginning, Story of Seasons (2014), and Story of Seasons: Trio of Towns. This could have been a way to add expansions into the town and include older characters in the game, especially with this being the 25th anniversary game. However, the four characters that arrive from each game all stay in their separated area away from town, implied to be a distance away that you access from your farm. The DLC romantic candidates could initially not participate in any town events, even after you married them, not even the romantic ones they logically should have been able to go with you to. Instead they stay on their sectioned-off space and, after marriage, in and around your house around the clock. An updated patch had to be added to let them participate in the romantic town festivals—but will only do those after marriage and no others and they still can't walk around town freely. The others (and the guests that came with them) are all relegated to their sectioned off spaces, never to leave or interact with a town they left their homes to come to. They also come off as generically nice and unbothered as the other romantic options, including a complete lack of disliked gifts.