After an hour-long tutorial, Doraemon Story of Seasons has me running out of battery faster than my Switch. It’s been 62 minutes, and I’ve barely touched a thumbstick. Soon, this licensed farm life spin-off will have me familiarly watering crops, collecting bugs, and rearing livestock in a farming sim that borrows from both Animal Crossing and Stardew Valley. But first, I have to get through the boring part.
Doraemon, one of the best-selling manga in the world, has come together with Marvelous, the original developer behind the Harvest Moon farming series. The crossover is as unusual as it sounds. What do a sleepy 10-year-old and a robot cat from the 22nd century have to do with farming? As it turns out, not much! The characters are lost in an alternate dimension, and the only way they can get home is to befriend the townsfolk. There’s just one problem: this town puts its children to work, and I’m not talking about mowing the lawn.
Your tiresome gang of heroes is immediately thrust into child labor and sent to sleep in strangers’ homes. It’s a horrifyingly concerning premise, one your idiot children accept with jolly mirth. After a cringe-filled opening hour of pure dialogue in which the children are just begging for unpaid work, the main character, Noby, is finally provided a farm to look after. One of the townsfolk had an extra one just sitting around, apparently.
That’s about the full extent of how Doraemon is incorporated into this crossover, which probably would have been much better game without it altogether. Whether through inadequate translation or just plain shoddy writing, dialogue in Doraemon Story of Seasons is time-consuming, meandering, and weird – and the best thing I can say about the cutscenes is that they’re mercifully skippable.
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The shrill, grating dialogue comes in sharp contrast to the lovely world around it. Every tree, pond, and house is doused in gorgeous watercolors. Each location looks like a page ripped from a child’s storybook, and it’s all backed by plucky, orchestral music that lends whimsy to your mostly enjoyable chores.
And there are a lot of chores. To make money and upgrade your farm, you need to befriend townsfolk, work in the mines, milk cows, shear sheep, catch beetles, fish, cut down trees, and plant so, so many crops. You know, normal ten-year-old stuff. There’s a decent variety of tasks, but it’s not uncommon to do a little of all of them each day. That’s in part because the days are overly long.
Every in-game minute is one real-life second – you wake up at 6 am and can stay out all the way until 6 am the next morning. Provided you have enough food to replenish your limited stamina, there’s technically very little reason to sleep before daybreak. If you’re looking to maximize profits, your time is better spent fishing all night, which requires zero energy. That meant most days usually took me somewhere around 17 to 23 minutes to complete. Each “Season” has 30 days, which means getting through a single, four-season year took a whopping 40 hours of playing – a length that felt extremely slow considering how much is locked away per season.
If you want to be a completionist, you’ll need to stick around for at least another year after that. Festivals are a mainstay in farming sims, serving as a sort of welcome commercial break to the monotony of farm work, and each season has a handful to attend. You can always check the calendar or event board in the town square, but on the day of the festival you’re given little to no warning as to when they start. I missed at least one every month as I went about my usual business, and some – like the summer horse race – are just plain unwinnable in the first year.
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Attending the festivals themselves can be amusing though, ranging from things like cattle judging to watermelon smashing. The best of the bunch is the Cork Rifle competition, in which you shoot targets with a shooting mechanic (and gun) used nowhere else during the year. In each festival, villagers recycle the same corny dialogue – a Stepford Wives-style grab bag of generic, boring phrases like “There’s a festival today,” “Hey. I hear there’s a festival today,” and “It’s finally festival day.”
But festivals aren’t the only carrot Story of Seasons dangles in front of you. As you play, you’ll continue unlocking little secrets, ranging from characters to entirely new mechanics. You eventually reclaim many of Doraemon’s tools from the future, which range from useful to superfluous. One helps you find your way to NPCs while another lets you change the weather. There are also enticing secrets to uncover, like a mysterious box locked in a cave waiting for you to befriend the right person. But these additions and distractions never fundamentally change Doraemon Story of Seasons’ flow, and quite a few of them are locked away until much later.
Thankfully, there are a few smart features in Story of Seasons that do make day-to-day tasks easier. Checking the map also shows you the general location of villagers. That might seem like a small thing, but it removes a ton of guesswork when you’re looking for a specific person. Pressing back on the right thumbstick lets you helpfully zoom the camera way, way out, giving you an eagle-eye view of your setting.
As you progress through the seasons, you can use the money you earn to upgrade your farm in extremely useful ways. Whether you opt for renovating your house to build a kitchen or buying a better fishing pole, chasing the next improvement is an irresistible hook. By upgrading your possessions, you’ll gain access to even more ways to make money, and then you rinse and repeat with a familiar loop that remains captivating even when the chores themselves can be hit and miss.
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And a lot of its fundamental farming mechanics feel antiquated by Stardew Valley’s many, many genre refinements. I no longer want to spend hours every day watering my crops and feeding my animals, but there are no upgrades to alleviate this scut work. Tiny actions like mining, planting seeds, or smashing rocks take far too long and nearly all of them wreak havoc on your stamina bar. For instance, it takes 16 swings of the axe to cut down a single tree early on, which uses up 16 of your 100 total stamina. Those 16 chops garner you just four pieces of wood, and even small upgrades to your farm can cost hundreds. I often found my stamina bar completely drained within the first three hours of a day. When that happens, there’s little else you can do but burn daylight by taking a nap, which I had to do nearly every day. At 10 stamina gained an hour, this can usually garner you just enough strength to finish menial tasks. Like it or not, you’ll be chopping wood for hours.
Oh, and to make that chore of a task even worse, every single time you swing an axe, hammer, or pickaxe, your character Noby screams with exertion. It’s horrible. Thankfully, you can turn off voice audio, which I couldn’t do fast enough.
You can upgrade your axe to chop wood faster, but it takes far too long before doing so has a sizable impact on your stamina bar, and many upgrades seem functionally useless. For instance, by buying pickaxe upgrades, you can cut through tougher and tougher ground, letting you progress deeper into the mines. But there are perplexing inconsistencies with what these upgrades promise compared to what they deliver that make them feel properly bugged. For example, the iron pickaxe can’t actually cut the black tiles its text says it can, and the costly stew pot boasts it comes with ingredients and recipes, but actually comes with neither. As is, I’m convinced there is no reason to upgrade your fishing pole, hammer, or sickle more than once, which is probably for the best, given how expensive upgrades are.
And so, with the deck stacked against you, you’d be forgiven if you started exploiting its systems, as there are certainly plenty of ways to do so. Mythical fish appear in specific places each season, and once you find that spot, you can farm them for hours on end to gain tens of thousands of gold each day.
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Mining is one of the best parts of every farming sim I’ve played, and Doraemon is no exception. As you cut through the ground, you’ll find paths deeper and deeper into the mine. The lower you go, the more valuable the items you’ll find. There’s gems, fossils, and even amber that can be sold or traded-in as late-game upgraded materials. And there’s a nice surprise if you reach the bottom at floor 10.
However, you can start save scumming the mines to get to those lower floors every day – a crooked approach that works like a charm. Save your game, hoe tiles until you find the ladder down to the next floor, then reload the save and only hit that tile to save you loads of stamina. This helps you easily reach the real treasures on the 10th floor, which is otherwise tedious to get to.
Sure, it’s essentially cheating, but upgrades are so costly and collecting resources is so exhausting that it almost feels like you’re pushed toward these approaches to make any sort of tangible progress. Building a simple greenhouse, for example, costs more than 1,100 wood and 70,000 gold, meaning you’ll either need to take your advantages where you can or spend a dozen daunting hours collecting the required resources.
And this is the way I spent my days on the farm. There is still more to chase in the second year – I still haven’t befriended the Goddess, found a sprite, or finished that absurdly expensive greenhouse – but nothing about the first year makes me want to keep playing. There could be more fun ahead, but first, I have to get through the boring part.