You can find this review in full at GBAtemp.net:
https://gbatemp.net/review/story-of-seasons-a-wonderful-life.2298/

Having written reviews for the past six years on GBAtemp, I’ve garnered a small reputation for myself amongst regular members. To some I might be the person who covers visual novels and otome games. To others I might be the person obsessed with weird tech and won’t stop talking about it on the front page. To a choice few however, those who scour the holy thread of recently purchased items, I’m known for one thing above all: as a fine collector of the game Harvest Moon DS. Sitting with more than 40 copies in my collection at this point, I have an undying adoration for the game and its setting, and I’ll take any chance I can to tell people about it. Set 100 years after the events of A Wonderful Life, it shares the same cast of characters (don’t ask how) in the same, if somewhat scaled up valley. With hundreds of hours played on what I consider to be the pinnacle of the series, I became intangibly excited when I saw its predecessor receiving the same remake treatment as Mineral Town before it. Having never played the original game when it launched on GameCube and PS2, can the remake captivate me as it’s captivated so many others though?

The setting of A Wonderful Life is one that’s going to be fairly familiar to fans of the genre. Your father recently passed away, and you’re headed out to the countryside to build the farm they never could. It’s not quite the usual hand-me-down farm from grandpa, but it’s close enough. With that bit of exposition out of the way you’re thrown straight into a character creation screen, and it’s really quite impressive out of the gate. You pick your skin tone, face, eye colour, hair colour, hair style, and outfit. If you’ve played Pioneers of Olive Town, much of this will sound familiar, and I really do think it’s great to have this degree of customisation in a game like this that expects you to relate with your player character. Adding to this as what I believe to be a series first, the game lets you pick the pronouns townsfolk will address you with, notably including a they/them option. It might sound like a minor addition, but it just goes that one step further in allowing the player to feel a part of the world. It’s the kind of thing that will really mean a lot to some people.

With your character made, you arrive at the farm in Forgotten Valley (formerly Forget-Me-Not Valley) to a few text tutorials from your neighbour Takakura and an optional trip around the valley to meet everybody. After that, you’re pretty much free to live your life. And that’s the thing about A Wonderful Life, you really do live a life.

Most farming games that I would call traditional like the aforementioned Harvest Moon DS, or the more modern Stardew Valley, see you taking each day at a leisurely pace with no real limits. You can take a year or you can take 20 years to figure things out depending on what you prefer. A Wonderful Life sets out a different idea, and while it’s not one that’ll be to the taste of everybody playing it, I do think it’s interesting. The game is split between chapters, with each chapter being a set number of years. Between each chapter you’ll see a leap forward in time, with the environment and the characters within it changing and aging. The whole experience is entirely unique, and it’s one I came to enjoy more than I initially thought.

On paper I would call time limits a bad thing in what is otherwise an incredibly casual game. It could lead to you rushing through tasks and feeling like you’ve not got enough time to get to everything you want to. That just isn’t the case though. Despite each chapter being on a time limit and each season being an incredibly short ten days, the days themselves go by at a rate of a minute per second, starting as early as 5am. Add to this a more interesting day cycle with weather changes happening throughout and you have a much more interactive and interesting day by day experience.

It can be a bit of a culture shock going back to what is ultimately feels like a faithful remake though. While you do get some modern touch ups in terms of UI design, which is great by the way, and general signposting, there’s a lot of that 2003 “charm” preserved. It’s a similar fault that I pointed out in my Mineral Town review, but it really is just a great remake in terms of keeping the original spirit of the game alive. Despite seasons being some of the shortest in the series, years end up feeling incredibly long, especially as you’re starting out. It did manage to strike a reasonable balance for me, with there being enough to do between wooing potential partners and making some initial capital to get off the ground. From the second chapter, things start to pick up a bit and your attachment to the player character only grows as they do.

There are certain time-sensitive events, with the important one being the necessity of marriage before the end of the first year. I do appreciate how the game guides you to this fact naturally by having Takakura bring it up in his dialogues that you should find a partner quickly. It’s never explicit that you need to marry in the first year, but playing what I would consider normally, it’s not difficult to hit at all. Focusing my effort on Lumina, I had proposed to her by the end of Spring. Even splitting your focus between the eight available marriage candidates, you’ll have time to spare to make your ultimate choice.

It’s here I also want to celebrate that there are eight marriage candidates regardless of your gender. Following on from the changes made in Mineral Town, this change isn’t necessarily unexpected, but a joy to see all the same. Having my female protagonist go from wooing the charming Matthew to her eventual wife Lumina had me smiling throughout. Much like the addition of the they/them pronouns, this kind of change just goes that one step further in allowing people to feel a part of the world and identify with the characters as they see fit.

Farming here is a fairly standard affair, if slightly stuck in the past as mentioned earlier. The key change between this and other games in the series is the fact that many crops will be able to grow through a number of seasons, in oppose to being stuck in just one. This makes a lot of sense given the shorter seasons, and I do appreciate this added bit of versatility. I don’t know how I feel about turnips growing in summer and autumn though. As a Harvest Moon DS aficionado, these were always the first things to be planted. Having to wait a season for them just didn’t sit right with me. Back on a serious note though, the farming matches the larger tone of the game. It’s slow, but it never felt frustratingly so. Animations feel fluid and fast enough that ultimately end up feeling like a bit of a theraputic routine. If you go a little too hard on the crops, you have easy access to top up your stamina too via the local bar. The valley all slots together nicely to have you moving between different areas and, in turn, talking to different people as you progress.

Forgotten Valley itself is absolutely stunning, and after exploring it in 2D on the DS for the past 17 years it brought a tear to my eye to see everything so seamlessly connected without loading zones in a gloriously-styled 3D environment. The area is smaller than on the DS, and it makes a lot of sense with A Wonderful Life obviously releasing several years before the version I’m familiar with. Even so, there’s plenty I recognised and I had a blast running around. For fans of the original game, I can imagine this touch up being just as magical as it was for me.

Throughout the valley you’ll also find a number of small minigames, and something I really wasn’t expecting was the ability to setup a stall to sell your goods in the middle of town. You can still put your crops into the shipping bin, but this stall will serve as your only means of selling other items like the flowers you might spot growing in the wild. It can be a little frustrating that you can only sell items one at a time, but I did find myself enjoying the interactions with townsfolk as they wandered past. If nothing else it has me wanting to set up shop and play Grand Bazaar again.

I’ve had an absolute blast playing through A Wonderful Life on PC, and this being my first experience with the title has made it feel all that much more special. This is a game like no other in the series, and if you’re happy with a slow and finite narrative, it’s one I cannot recommend enough. A part of me still wishes it was Harvest Moon DS that got its time in the Sun, but after the experience I’ve had, I really can’t bring myself to question the decision. It’s truly a wonderful game.