Story of Seasons: Pioneers of Olive Town Review - DashGamer

Dan Rizzo says "An innocence that glows throughout the onset, and charm that cannot be overstated. Story of Seasons’ legacy continues to grow through its muddied Harvest Moon bedrock, right to foundations that deliver a contrast and loop that’s sorely underrated."

[Nerdmaster]

This game has so many game design problems that it baffles me when I see a review giving it a high score without even mentioning them. It took so many things that worked in Trio of Towns, threw them away, and replaced with things that don't work well, like the over-emphasis on makers - this is a farming game, but you'll have more space with makers than crops in your farm, for example.
There are 22 types of makers, most of which you'll want to have multiples of (like the seed maker, which for taking 23 hours and only making 2 seeds out of each crop, I have 20 in my farm), so you'll need chests to put all of those items. But chests have limited slots, so you'll craft many chests, and you need to have items in your bag to use the makers - they don't pull items from storage. So good luck sorting that out. Speaking of sorting, your bag and chests don't even have a sort function...

[chippychan]

100% agree. I'm honestly baffled at the high scores its getting.

All of the issues you mention are criticisms I also have, but to make the matters worse, the game starts to suffer from massive technical issues as you add more makers/paths/things to your farm. The game got *really* bad player reviews in Japan at launch (I also played the game in Japanese at launch). The reviews were so bad that the company publicly apologized and promised fixes. Why are North American reviewers so much more forgiving? Yes, some technical issues have been patched for NA release, but it's honestly not *that* much better, especially once you get further into the game and fill your farm area with all the makers you NEED to progress.

My game has areas where, if I walk from one side to the other, the frame rate drops to literally 0-5 FPS, and this is AFTER the first patch that was supposed to fix the problems. I actually had to stop playing the game for a couple weeks while waiting for the first Japanese patch, it was THAT unplayable before the current patch.