You’ve previously talked about focusing on the visual side of things with the next Story of Seasons game. Do Zephyr Town and the larger environments allow for a lot more experimentation, and how have you implemented those visual upgrades in Grand Bazaar?
There are two big points I want to talk about with regards to the graphic improvements we focused on. The first is the visual expression of wind. Wind is a big factor in Zephyr Town and it affects the farmer’s life in a lot of ways, so we wanted to be able to beautifully represent it in a way that’s not too glaring or too loud but still very apparent and beautiful to the player.
For example, there are many grassy areas in the game, like pastures, and you can see the grass below in the rain, and almost like sparkle in. And there are other ways that the wind is expressed as well.
In addition to wanting to feel like there’s this beautiful wind expression, that combines with the way that the animals are milling about your farm, we want to create a feeling for the player that they are happy about having built this farm, so these satisfying results.
The second big visual improvement [is] the expressions and animations of the animals, the way that they react to you. So there are a lot of ways that you can interact with them. It’s not just the cows and the sheep, like the livestock, but it’s also the pets, like the cats and the dogs; the pets will even play with each other. So, there’s are a lot of effort put into the way that the animals are expressed.
So, with Zephyr Town, what do you hope people will fall in love with most of all about the new location?
Zephyr Town is located in a valley in the mountains, so there are a lot of things about it that I think are good [laughs]. One thing in particular I want to mention is the way that you move through the town in your everyday life.
You can actually jump from rooftop to rooftop as you make your way and explore the town. So there are many different paths that you can take on your day-to-day, or perhaps even if it’s a windy day, you can take your glider down into town and move about that way. So the various ways that you can explore and make your path through the town is one thing that I would like players to enjoy.
Another is the way that you experience, the way the player experiences the other townsfolk living in the town. On certain days, certain characters may be talking in the town with each other, or sometimes they might go and get tea together. They each have their own lives with their own things they like to do, and they’re doing their own things in their own houses as well. So these are all things that I would love for the player to fall in love with.
The bazaar is the big draw of this entry and it was brand new in the original DS game — there still aren’t many equivalents in other Story of Seasons games, really! Can you explain to those who’ve never played the original how it works and maybe what’s new for the remake?
The biggest point that is interesting about the bazaar is the way that the player is able to sell their products they have created on the farm. In most Story of Seasons games, there’s a shipment box, so you prepare all of your crops, you put them in the shipping box, and then before you know it, they just turn into money. In this game, the player is able to take their goods and actually bring them to market and directly interact with customers as they sell their products. And you can sell whatever you would like at the bazaar.
If you’re a player that has been working on their crops a lot, let’s say you have lots of vegetables like tomatoes and other things, you can say, “Okay, I’m going to focus on veggies and bring those to the bazaar and become a vegetable seller.” Or if you’re a player that likes animals more, let’s say you put a lot of effort into your cows and you have a bunch of really high-quality milk, you can bring that milk to the bazaar. So in that way I hope that the player is able to think about what it is that they want to bring to the bazaar each week and then plan their farmer lifestyle.
One aspect that is new is the addition of sprites. Nature sprites weren’t in the original. There are five sprites each with their own unique appearance and style, and they have a few ways that they interact with the bazaar. One, they actually have their own little secret shop that you can go interact with at the bazaar, and they sell weird things like their own strange food and stuff like that. It’s very cute.
They also help out with the player’s stall at the bazaar as well. There is a system where you build up to something called Cheer Time and when Cheer Time happens then the sprites basically help you sell your goods to the customers in a like exciting and fun way and from like a game mechanics perspective, it increases the rate and there are like other benefits. So it’s really good for sales in that way.
From the more aesthetic perspective, sprites will do dances and stuff and cheer on the customers. So it creates a much more lively experience when the player is selling to the customers. I hope that players are able to enjoy the addition of nature sprites to the bazaar.
What has it been like revisiting all of the older games and remaking them, and how has it helped shape the future of the Story of Seasons franchise?
So if we’re talking about where we want to take Story of Seasons in the future, especially with the influence of these recent past titles that we’ve been putting out, I want to revisit something that we spoke about earlier, which was, ‘How does the farmer spend life?’ and various aspects of that. For example, as we said, with A Wonderful Life, it’s about spending a full life from start to finish. With Grand Bazaar, it’s ‘How does a farmer make money?’
We want to continue to explore and bring out the enjoyable aspects of a farmer’s life, so we’re continuing to research and think about that. We’re taking the experiences that we’ve gained working on these past titles, as well as feedback from our players, and we want to make sure that we can use that in all of our titles going forward in order to create a fun farming or fun farm life experience for players.
This interview has been edited for clarity.
Thank you to Nakano-san and interpreter Scott Parks for speaking to us, and to Sonia Im for arranging this meeting.
Story of Seasons: Grand Bazaar launches on Switch on 27th August 2025. Have you played the original DS game? Will you be picking up the remake? Let us know down below!
