There's a major difficulty when it comes to reviewing Story of Seasons games: they're slow. Moment-to-moment gameplay is repetitive (you're doing the same tasks daily over and over), the game can take a long time to throw new wrinkles in the formula at you, and even fervent playing means that it can still take hours for the entire cast or wealth of options to become available to you. Story of Seasons: Grand Bazaar further complicates things by being a remake of a Nintendo DS game. Longtime Story of Seasons fans might find a lot to enjoy in Grand Bazaar, but I'm still puzzling over how neophytes might take this one.

The key to the whole ordeal is the titular bazaar. Unlike other Story of Seasons titles, you don't just stuff your crops into a box on your farm and make your money during your daily routine. There is a weekly bazaar where you can sell your goods. There's a lot that goes into making the bazaar work: trending items can change month-to-month, there are decorations for your stall that can affect the values of your goods, and the Nature Sprites can help work up the crowd and move your merch once you've built up enough consecutive sales (complete with a cute little synchronized dance). But the catch is that the bazaar is weekly; you have to work towards accumulating goods all week to make your money in one day. This can be somewhat rough in the early game. What's worse, you're not the only person selling goods during the bazaar: your neighbors also have stalls. Rather than serving as competition, they sell vital upgrades like expansions to your warehouse, improvements to your plots of land, or cattle. And these vital upgrades are only available during the bazaar when you're also trying to sell your goods. Nothing feels worse than having to go an extra week without a much-needed upgrade because you were trying to make up the few thousand gold you were missing before the bazaar ended.

The upside is that the rest of the game fittingly works around the bazaar. Your crops and goods all have a quantified level of "quality" assigned to them, and through your efforts, you can improve your goods to earn more money from them. This can involve all sorts of twists to your daily routine, from fertilizing your crops (and properly earning seeds from your best crops) to nurturing your cattle to even making regular gifts to the Nature Spirits themselves. Even the local town festivals help out with this, with bigger wins at festivals earning your goods a brand that improves their sales value even further. This also helps give Grand Bazaar a proper end-goal, besides just restoring the bazaar (which is mostly done through your sales). Just don't expect to finish this particularly quickly.

You also have to worry about the local windmills. These can help you make all sorts of necessary goods, from turning your milk into cheese or processing ores and gemstones into jewelry. They also help you upgrade your farming equipment or turn your crops into seeds of corresponding value. But these take time, so you need to plan out what to do and when, especially since windmills can only process so much at a time. There's a fun mechanic where the daily weather can be a factor in production time (windier days speed things up), but you'll still be waiting. There's also a twist where you might have to deal with hurricanes, requiring you to have a good supply of windscreens (made at the windmill) to protect your plots of land or other edifices... but these are painfully infrequent. The wind also affects your getting around town; your farmer is a dexterous little fella, able to jump around. It's even possible to use a glider to ride the wind over town, which makes crossing the village a snap. However, the wind only ever blows towards the East, so getting back is usually an issue (and can make platforming in some areas challenging if the wind isn't strong enough).

The cast, at the very least, is a very strong selection. To wit: while you still have a wide selection of paramours, I struggled to choose a single person out of the pool. You've got the identical twins with opposite personalities, the ice queen, the klutzy maid, the no-nonsense businesswoman with the winning smile... moreover, the interactions with the townspeople are heartwarming and reveal touching depth from the cast. This might be my favorite supporting cast in a Story of Seasons game, and that's with some of the paramours not appearing well into the double-digit runtime! Special credit goes to the charming character designs, which longtime fans will be happy to know are largely unchanged from the Nintendo DS original. Any concerns that this game would look a bit bland as an updated handheld title are promptly left at the door; I would very willingly take a bullet for Madeline, the kindly grandmother who runs the town café. Similarly, character customization is as great as ever: you can choose your farmer's pronouns, there is a good variety of skin tones, and romantic interests are not restricted by gender. Getting new outfits takes a bit of work, though (as well as wool and hard-to-find dyes).

Farming simulators like Story of Seasons are hard to judge on the basic merits of "being a game" because of how repetitive and procedural they are by nature. On that merit, Grand Bazaar might be a bit too slow for the tastes of people looking for a fun game to play. But Grand Bazaar has a comfortable atmosphere, a loveable cast, and a fun (if slow) gameplay loop. I'd go so far as to say that if you've never played a farm sim before, Story of Seasons: Grand Bazaar might even be a great place to start.