Farming sims often blur together for me. The familiar gameplay loop of growing crops, forming bonds with locals, and making a profit along the way is fun but, if you are me, can get stale. Some of that comes from an endgame that often centers around maximizing efficiency (and money-making) rather than refocusing on the community you are taking part in. With Story of Seasons: Grand Bazaar, developer Marvelous is hoping to break that familiar cycle.
Releasing on August 27 for Nintendo Switch and PC, Grand Bazaar is a remake of a 2008 title for the Nintendo DS. While the familiar bones of the Story of Seasons (formerly Harvest Moon) franchise is here, likely to satisfy any farming sim fan, what makes this entry stand out is the titular bazaar. It’s a charming system that turns selling products into another pillar of the experience in a way that puts the community themes of the game first. After going hands on with the title for an hour and getting a taste of the bazaar, I was surprised just how well this feature makes Grand Bazaar feel like a breath of fresh air for the genre.
Setting up shop
Grand Bazaar will feel largely familiar to anybody who has played other Story of Seasons titles. The daily loop of attending to crops, cattle, and the community is still here. What is new is that bazaar. This is a weekly event that occurs on Saturdays. During morning and afternoon shifts, shopkeepers will open up stalls and sell their wares. The twist is that I have to do that too.
My first time running the stall I had one table and a handful of goods to sell. At the start of a shift, I fill the table with my most appealing goods and wait for customers to come up. The locals won’t just buy anything, each person has something in mind they are looking for and paying attention to little icons that pop up above their head is an important part of the bazaar as I don’t want to miss a possible sale. Only a handful of items can be on the table at a time, so I get in the habit of switching out things every few seconds to appeal to new customers. If someone wants to buy something they come up to the counter and I have to interact with them face to face. When business is slow I can also ring a bell to draw more attention to my stall.
A later save I played in the preview gave me more stall space. That meant I could sell more, but it also made things a little more hectic. With so many goods, and so many customers, it wasn’t uncommon for me to miss a sale here and there as people got tired of waiting for me to serve them. When things are busy, stocking the stall with new goods, attending customers, and ringing the bell to get even more traffic can become a stressful experience.
This might sound overly complicated. Most farming sims reduce selling to dropping items into a shipping bin at the end of the day and receiving money immediately. While that is practical, the cold efficiency of it leaves something to be desired. The bazaar reinforces the idea that the player is a part of a larger community by selling a complex gameplay system of its own. Goods aren’t disappearing into a void, they are going directly to customers. Series manager Hikaru Nakano tells Digital Trends the bazaar is all about, “taking pride in what you create and seeing that reaction in the people you deliver your products to.”
The windy city
While the bazaar is the main attraction here, there are plenty of other features Grand Bazaar has in store for players. That includes a weather system, as the idyllic setting of Zephyr Town is known also for its constant wind. During the day this comes in the form of constant gusts that I used during my preview to zip across the map using a glider. The gusts bring a unique atmosphere but also a purpose, as the gliding can make traversal much faster, which in turn gives me more time to attend to other tasks.
Hurricanes are another story. Unlike the average wind of Zephyr Town, these huge storms can wreak havoc. For farming, this can lead to destroyed fields if proper preparations aren’t made. After a storm warning was announced in the morning, I had to run around my field building and place windscreens. These would protect my crops overnight, but also require me to have the requisite resources to build.
While I only had one field to tend to in the preview, I can see how managing a larger farm ahead of hurricanes could be more tedious and require more resources to collect in advance. It’s a nice threat that aims to keep players on their toes and break up the comfortable farming loop.
The sound of love
Outside of selling goods and preparing for storms, there is also time for romance. Like past entries, there are a number of eligible bachelors and bachelorettes (including two new characters) in Zephyr Town to cozy up with through gift giving and individual questlines. Same-sex relationship and non-binary character creator options make a return in Grand Bazaar after both were introduced in 2023’s Story of Seasons: A Wonderful Life.
Grand Bazaar is also the first Story of Seasons game to include fully voice acted scenes. While this applies to the whole game, romance is where this improvement is likely to be felt the most. Each character now has another distinctive quality to them that might be the thing a player falls in love with. Who doesn’t want to finish farming and go home to your partner of choice who will whisper sweet nothings to you in a sultry voice?
In the two romance scenes that I saw during my preview the addition of voice acting did noticeably improve the experience. Hearing each actor bring their own flair to dialogue adds a level of depth to these encounters that would make me want to search them out throughout my playthrough.
While all the graphical upgrades, new features, and quality of life upgrades are great, I can’t stop thinking about the bazaar. Coming away from my hands on session, it strikes me as the type of mechanic more farming sims should be implementing. They have had the time — the original Grand Bazaar came out in 2008! At least now, fans of the genre can get a taste of something more unique thanks to this remake.
Story of Seasons: Grand Bazaar launches for Nintendo Switch and PC on August 27.
