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Happy Farm'n Friday! The first ripe tomato of the season was eaten by a bird, but that's okay. There's plenty of tomatoes still coming in. I don't mind sharing one or two, though I hope they don't eat all of the tomatoes! An unknown critter ate the foliage off of the two carrots that are growing, but left the root part still underground. Yea, I only have two carrot seeds that grew larger than sprouts. I may be good at video game crop farming, but I'm not that great when it comes to actual crops, at least with certain types! I've never had much luck with carrots. At least the carrots look as though they are trying to regrow their missing leaves. Stupid tree rats...
This week, Marvelous revealed the redesigns for four more marriage candidates in Story of Seasons: Friends of Mineral Town. Mary, Elli, Gray (now hat-free), and "Doctor" were added to the official website for bachelorettes and bachelors. That just leaves Ann, Kai, and the two new mystery candidates. There's no official confirmation yet that the special candidates from the original GBA game (Goddess, Won, Kappa, and Gourmet) will also be included in the Nintendo Switch remake, but I'm hoping they'll be in the game too.
The official website also introduced the redesigns for Basil, Anna, Saibara, Ellen, and Stu. That still leaves Zack, Won, Gotz, Duke, Manna, and Doug as normal villagers that have yet to be revealed. The game isn't out in Japan for six more weeks, so there's plenty of time left to tease us with more information!
One of the improvements being added to the Switch version is with the handling of chickens. In the original Gameboy Advance game, the chickens had to be moved out of the coop one at a time. If players wanted to keep them in an area close to the coop, a fenced enclosure of wood or stone lumber would need to be placed in the crop field. This fence also prevented the chickens from being spooked or attacked if a wild dog appeared on the farm at night. In the Switch version, there is now a herding bell on the outside of the coop, assumedly to move them all outside and inside as a group. The poultry coop is also surrounded by its own fence. No idea if this means that animals cannot stay outside overnight like in the past few releases of Story of Seasons. Also it appears that the cows will get their cute little bells when they're outside in the pasture area; the screen shots on the updated animal page shows the indoor cows without bells tied to their tails. The livestock barn also has an outdoor herding bell.
The site also shows off some of the villager's shops, for those whose redesign have been revealed, as well as some of the festivals at the bottom of the updated pages. The chicken sumo festival is confirmed to be returning along with dog disc toss during summer Beach Opening Day, the fall Harvest Festival, and the spring/fall horse race where you can bet on the winning horses to win medals that can be exchanged for festival prizes. While not pictured, the page also confirms the fall Music Festival and winter Starry Night.
There were also two additional videos released this week. The first is one of the farmer using the kitchen in the farmhouse to cook up some food.
自宅を増築すると、台所で料理ができるようになります。調理器具やレシピを集めて様々な料理に挑戦！https://t.co/oxGbwKXwVI #牧場物語 #再会のミネラルタウン pic.twitter.com/g6fovc6Wfw
— 『牧場物語』公式アカウント (@bokumono_PR) July 30, 2019
You can see that the protagonist's health (the face) and stamina (the berries) are a bit low, so she cooks up Udon; players will now be able to choose the quantity of dish to cook rather than one-at-a-time in the original version. As always in Mineral Town, players will need to own the appropriate cooking utensils before they can use them in the kitchen. She then moves onto making Spicy Stir Fry. While the recipe for Stir Fry is in the original game, the flavor of "spicy" is not in the original game. Players could improve the stamina and health recovery of their cooked recipes by adding extra ingredients to the base recipe, but the name of the resulting dish wouldn't change. After eating the Spicy Stir Fry, both the protagonists's health and stamina recovered.
The second video posted was a short clip of Popuri's purple heart event, with the remixed love theme playing in the background.
【結婚候補紹介】～ポプリ～カッコイイ男の子に出会うことを夢見る、養鶏場の女の子。いつか町を出て都会で暮らすことにあこがれている。喜怒哀楽が激しくて、ちょっぴり甘えんぼうなところも。https://t.co/oxGbwKXwVI #牧場物語 #再会のミネラルタウン pic.twitter.com/sp67URAYt5
— 『牧場物語』公式アカウント (@bokumono_PR) August 1, 2019
In this video, the honey tree by the farm house has dropped some grapes on the ground, and the farm mailbox is indicating there is a letter waiting inside of it for the protagonist to read. Also note that there is a toolbox by the front door of the house, on the outside - that's another improvement from the original, where the tool storage could only be accessed by going inside of the farm house.
The last bit of news is with the name-that-daisy contest, with Orange Venus being the winning name. Corobokuru Smile came in last place (drat!).
A new farming/dating simulator game, Pumpkin Days, was originally Kickstarted in 2014 by the small independent game developer Pumpkin Interactive. This week their work has finally become available on Steam via Early Access. The game has players taking over a farm in one of two towns: the tropical Wahoo Beach or quaint Pumpkinvale. Farmers can visit both towns and interact with the town residents, and even court them for potential future romance; players can court dateable characters regardless of gender. Likewise players don't define themselves to be male or female; they can customize the look of their non-binary character to be any visual shape. Besides growing crops and flowers, there's livestock care, cooking, fishing, mining, and even farmhouse customization.
If you're interested, you can check it out on their Steam store page or on their official website:
Future planned updates to the game include possible bug catching, animal breeding, and fossils/artifact hunting.
Now that Rune Factory 4 SE is out in Japan, we've two games we can track sales for via Famitsu's Weekly Rankings!
I'm assuming next week Doraemon will drop off the top-30 chart, as it is holding spot #29 of the chart. RF4SE came in on spot #4. Interesting, a fishing game also released last week, Fishing Spirits (a 4-player arcade game ported to Nintendo Switch), took the #2 spot with 47,700 week-1 sales. And of course, no game could come close to Fire Emblem: Three Houses's JP sales at 143,100 copies.
SWERTY's farmy mystery game, The Good Life, is now expected to be released in Spring 2020. The murder-mystery set in the English farming community of Rainy Woods was anticipated to be released at the end of this year, but White Owls needs more development time.
Until next time!
- Cher
(Fishing Spirits looks like so much fishing fun... Bandai Namco please localize!)
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