Topic: Story of Seasons: Pioneers of Olive Town

@k8sMum I have to agree, I thought there would be more to do if you bought the season pass. The only thing I've gotten out of it so far is the Mineral Town overalls. But admittedly, I haven't played it much since Windswept Falls was added. I'll probably be fooling around with it some more this weekend.

@k8sMum
I was thinking to consider indie farming sim games from Indie direct as they looked have more potential than current Bokumono games.

That’s cuz it is! And I haven’t been that vocal...playSakunaplaySakuna have I? Honestly after haven beaten (I’m still playing) it I feel like Sakuna got dragged in the review here. The farming is so forgiving that even if you don’t like it you can fumble your way to a good crop.

Anyway, I do agree that the new areas are a bit barren. Especially since they seem to be far away from Olive Town and thus should have their own shops and the like. (OTOH, unless they offer unique crops there is no reason to shop from these places anyway so it’s a waste of time to make window dressing more robust. ) Ah well, the point of them really was the marriage candidates but Marvelous may add more to it considering how much they have been willing to fix/update.

@Ryu_Niiyama I'm glad you championed Sakuna. The NLife review made it sound like a training program for actual rice farmers. The review was positive if I remember right, but it came with a whole bunch of caveats. That was one of the reasons I didn't buy it months ago. In fact it is a very fun game.

Getting back to Olive Town, I still think it's a decent specimen of the genre, just not a must-play recommendation considering the price of the game and DLC. It is, however, very encouraging that they are still adding improvements. I'm sure I'll have some more thoughts after I've spent some time with the next patch.

IT'S HERE IT'S HERE IT'S HERE I'm downloading it now PLEASE MAKE MAKERS BETTER AT MAKING THINGS I'll report back soon

@JasmineDragon
Was the makers working fine and didn't cause some laggy performances ?

@Anti-Matter Yes, the makers are working great. Build queues are a MAJOR improvement all by themselves, and everything seems to run a touch smoother, but I couldn't swear to that. Note that I never encountered any serious chugging before the patch, either.

I'm going to play a bit more later today and will share my thoughts. Unrelated to this patch, I also just discovered a completely random thing about SOS which gives me all kinds of euphoria, and it exists in POOT, too, but I haven't found it yet, and I need to do that before I update. Later!

My brother was particularly happy with the fact you don’t need to press A to move between areas of the map anymore.

My lag was pretty nonexistent before but things do feel a little smoother. I am going to rearrange my maker set up a bit and possibly work on getting a few more giant makers. It’s not life changing (mostly because my dairy products are all over the place in quality so a queue doesn’t really benefit me) but it means I can work down the stockpile of materials I have and start decorating my farm. With the season locked lands I have no need for a lot of farm land anyway.

Currently focused in getting my fishing to level 9 and breeding my milk producing livestock to produce level 10 goods.

I may start a new save to marry Iris (and benefit from the makers more) but I find myself less interested. Laura is the bee’s knees honestly. Earnest, intelligent, hard working, family oriented, a little nerdy, trendy, funny, beautiful (in context of the game) and athletic. So Iris has dropped to a distant second for courting (I still wanna be her friend).

Gotta say I am super happy about the marriage outfit choices. Not only can you wear a tux or a dress but the have a nice pantsuit which honestly I prefer. I only like female tailored tuxedos (tailoring to body type is everything) and hate the current trend to just stick women in men’s clothes rather than making women’s clothes inspired by male centric fashion (which was the fashion in the 90s before male and not male clothing became the 00s+ on trend), so it is lovely that there were options.

Well, I'm having a ball. The luxury liner just docked at Olive Town, my people are mostly happy, I'm actively wooing Laura, Linh and Bridget (and maybe Iris...) and living with three cats in a big old farmhouse. What's not to like?

Performance-wise, I'm not seeing any slowdowns, and really have nothing to complain about. Maker queues have made it much easier to run my farm since I don't have to have be dashing around all day long feeding one maker after another. In short, the patches have fixed just about everything I didn't like about the game at first.

And since today is the last day of Pride, I'm going to talk about Pride-ish stuff now. I was browsing the Story of Seasons subreddit the other day and discovered something that blew my mind - there is an actual gay couple in SOS, with one of them being genderqueer/nonbinary (his exact gender identity is not discussed here, but apparently he still IDs as male and uses he/him pronouns). Yes, yes, everyone else knew this five years ago, everybody laugh at Jasmine now. But although I've played a handful of bokumono games, I never played the game Story of Seasons, and somehow never heard about this until now even though I'm in multiple "gaymer" and enby gaming groups and most of my gaming friends are LGBTQ+. So this is hot news to me. And it makes me simply ecstatic. And of course, Marian and Giorgio are now in Olive Town!! Yay diversity!! So when is Pride?

I've no doubt that a lot of people will react differently to Marian. Some will say so what, there's gay people in SOS, big deal. Some will say Marian is actually bad because he's very much a gay stereotype, or because Marvelous weren't quite bold enough to make them a married couple. (And some will say "boo, we don't need your kind here", but we're just going to ignore them. We're here, we're queer, get used to it!)

The thing is, to me it IS a big deal, because I am your nonbinary auntie and I hardly ever see myself in games. If you're a plucky teenage girl, you see yourself in games all the time. If you're a broody young man, everything the light touches is your domain. But if you're a middle-aged nonbinary person, you pretty much don't exist as far as video game makers are concerned. I'm hesitant to say characters like Marian aren't found at all in games, because clearly I don't play ALL the games, but they are definitely a rarity to be treasured.

And while Marian truly is a bit of a queer stereotype, people like him actually exist - in great numbers. Like, if you know more than three gay people of a certain age, you probably know a Marian. And a Giorgio.

So anyway, I'm glad I shelled out for the DLC now, because while it's still kind of empty, the characters included are - wait for it - FABULOUS! 🏳️‍🌈

I still wish they were a bit more integrated into events in Olive Town, though. There's nothing to do in Terracotta Oasis except talk to your new besties, and they don't appear in Olive Town at all. But hey, at least they exist.

@JasmineDragon Jasmine! I saw your comment on the LGBTQ+ games list, and I thought I'd reply in here because... well, you've seen the comments over there. It's not great. But!

Given that the list is "Best" LGBTQ+ Games, I tried to include games that we actually enjoyed, and I didn't have a great time with POOT... however, I love the Friends of Mineral Town remake, so I'll consider adding it! The LGBTQ+ representation in those games is... varied, let's say, but if I can include Stardew (which lets you marry same-sex candidates, but you'll be the only gay couple in town) then I can include SOS, too

Thank you for talking about Marian and Giorgio, too — I didn't know about them!

@KateGray
Psst...
Friends of Mineral Town will get PS4 version too.

@JasmineDragon
Well, for me I will play as Boy character and getting the husbands Ralph, Jack and Emilio.

@KateGray Fair point about PooT, I am enjoying but I can understand it not being "Best of..." material. I could totally accept FOMT representing the series as that game truly is my favorite bokumono.

I am disheartened by the number of hurtful and phobic comments I'm seeing recently. I really thought the NLife community was better than that. I'm still not 100% sure removing all negative comments is the way to handle that, but I'm also not sure how it could be handled better (without changing NL's comment system top to bottom).

LOL bro, I'm pretty sure you have to pick one.

@JasmineDragon
(Saw multiple Save slots from YouTube)
I will marry those guys and save the game on different slots. 😁

Slot 1 = Before married
Slot 2 = Getting married with Ralph
Slot 3 = Getting married with Jack
Slot 4 = Getting married with Emilio

I did same thing for Magical Melody. (Multiple Save slots)

@JasmineDragon Representation in media is always tricky because almost all of it is exaggerated stereotypes that people then emulate and the Ouroboros feeds itself.

I’ve still not really found my representation in gaming although part of that is due to other aspects of my person also being maligned by so called “majority” ( which for the county I live in is a false monolith) but I take my little wins where I can get them.

That being said I am always impressed when Japanese devs have diversity in their games because unlike many western countries where the population is actually diverse (and biased heavily in a way that doesn’t actually reflect the population) because they really don’t have to. If they made all Japanese games all the time they could get away with it. I know some of it is other cultures seem “exotic “ to them but even still they at least make the attempt.

Finally proposed to Laura!!!!

@Anti-Matter Just kidding, I get it, but that's going to be a lot of playtime! I'm 75 hours in and not even officially dating anyone yet. Mind you, I've never been super social in these games, I'm generally more into farming. So you could probably do it a lot faster if romance is your focus.

Hey everyone This is just a rando but: Eel was really nice to me when I signed up. I was putting my account together in a frenzy, and had no clue how to navigate any of systems here, or about the etiquette. I reached out, and nobody was mean or derogatory to me! They got back to me several times on a Friday, right before the weekend, within hours of me even having an account. If you aren't sure what to do, or have a misunderstanding, they are really cool, so just reach out! /end rant forever

Anybody have a child? How old do they get? Mine is crawling around now (toddler I guess?)

Also the baby cemented that I am not doing a second play through to romance Iris. I am content with the current set up. I guess that means I wasted money on the DLC. Lol