Now, it costs 150,000G, and it took us almost two in-game years to make that much. The Processing Room, which turns milk into butter and cheese – the main way to get money in the game – used to cost 30,000G, which you could earn within the first year if you were smart. ![]() Sadly, inflation has also struck Forgotten Valley, and it's quite a lot harder to buy big-ticket items. Galen, the old man whose story gets very sad in Chapter 2, is now called Gary, which is just a worse old-man name by any metric, but otherwise everything just feels very nice. The misanthropic Marlin is now a much younger man called Matthew, whose updated form makes him come across as more of a whiny incel than a grump. Some changes remove the bite that the original had. The town and farm are no longer sludgy shades of brown half the characters you remember are now called something entirely different to bring them more in line with the Japanese names (Muffy becomes Molly, Cody becomes Gordy, Celia becomes Cecelia, Tim and Ruby become Tei and Lou) a few of the more insensitive or odd features have been smoothed over even the UI is vastly improved. It feels, at first, like this remake of A Wonderful Life is all-new, especially if you've played the original GameCube game. There's never really been another farming game quite like this. The townsfolk will age and grow with you, and the town itself may change, too. Over the course of several decades, split into six chapters, you will go from a young upstart working on your dead dad's farm to an elderly, married farmer, with a child who can grow up to take over the farm, or choose an entirely different career path. The thing that sets A Wonderful Life apart from other farming sims is that it's one long story. You'll be trying to make money to buy things like tool upgrades, new facilities, and animals, which in turn will hopefully make more money. There's a town full of people, all with interesting stories and unique houses, and some of them (eight in the remake) can be married. You can raise cows, sheep, chickens, ducks, and goats, and you can plant crops and trees in your fields to make money and cook recipes in your cute little kitchen. Story of Seasons: A Wonderful Life has a lot of the things you might expect from a farming sim. Do we want it to be dramatically overhauled, or presented in its imperfect state? We didn't know. ![]() We've been cautiously looking forward to and dreading this remake for a while, because while we're excited for the complete graphical overhaul, the new localisation, and the option to play as a male, female, or non-binary farmer, we also have a deep and sacred fondness for the original, and enough experience and wisdom from the past 20 years of gaming to know that it does not match up to our current standards of "fun". Should a remake of a game bring it up to today's standards, with modern additions like improved UI, extra features, and generally just more content? Should it be faithful to the original, and simply ported over to new platforms as-is? Or should it be an attempt to recreate the feeling of playing that game for the first time as a child? What is the value of a remake? That's something we found ourselves asking as we played Story of Seasons: A Wonderful Life, a remake of the 2003 Harvest Moon game on GameCube, and a surprising addition to Marvelous/XSEED's catalogue of games.
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