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World Hobby Fair and Friendship Levels in SoS:FoMT | Posted at 04:29 PM 17 January 2020

Happy Farm'n Friday! The lotus seed that was planted in the old fish cube last week is doing really well!

The first leaf has opened up, and I would guess that the second leaf will be open when I return to the office on Monday. There's even a third leaf that started to emerging from the gravel yesterday. The fish cube sits in the window and gets plenty of sun (when it's not raining outside). Looks like we've a happy lotus! Even the decorative fish is enjoying the company.

Another week of not much news, sorry. Marvelous of Europe has been promoting pre-orders of the upcoming Rune Factory 4 SE for Nintendo Switch in PAL and AU regions. The Standard edition is just the game and available at select retailers on Marv EU's list, while the Archival edition for pre-order at Marvelous' website includes the Switch game, art book, CD soundtrack, swimsuit DLC, and collector's box. The Archival edition is also available in North America directly from XSeed Games' website. The game doesn't have an official release date outside of Japan yet. Likewise, Story of Seasons: Friends of Mineral Town still doesn't have an official English release date.

Natsume's probably up to something too, though it is probably NOT a romance visual novel featuring the wondrous Doc. Oh wouldn't that be fun!

World Hobby Fair

This week Namco Bandai announced that Doraemon: Story of Seasons will be available to play for visitors to the Next-Generation World Hobby Fair. Those who do play through the demo at the fair will receive a Doraemon sticker sheet (while supplies last).

The Next-Generation World Hobby Fair is a traveling show that takes place this month in various locations in Japan:

FoMT Friendship

Since there's not much to report on this week, let's go over the friendship system in Story of Seasons: Friends of Mineral Town, which has had a few changes from the original Gameboy Advanced game.

In the original game the villagers have a friendship degree, while the marriage candidates have a love degree as well. Players could see the candidates' love degree via a colored heart marker on the candidates' character portrait, but couldn't see anyone's friendship degree. Both values exist in the Switch edition too, but now you can see how much friendship you have with each person in town.

In the main menu there's an option to see your current friendship values with the villagers. Each music note on a villager's entry represents about 25 points of friendship, with a maximum of 10 music notes (255 points). Now you can tell how far you are towards reaching 8 music notes (200 FP) with Ellen so you'll receive a Stocking when you gift her a ball of yarn between Winter 1 and Winter 23.

The normal candidate's love degree values are here too, displayed as heart containers. The same levels carry over from the GBA game:

There is an option in the game's configuration menu to turn off the heart containers on villager conversation portraits, so if you do happen to enable that feature this friendship menu still allows for you to track love levels with candidates. At the start of game you'll only have heart containers for the normal candidates that are the opposite gender of your farmer. As you proceed through the game, you can make the same-gender normal candidates heart marker appear by giving them a Pressed Flower.

Just like in the GBA game, you give gifts to increase friendship points and love points. In the GBA game you could give more than one gift per day; the first gift you gave counted for its full point value towards raising friendship/love, and additional gifts were worth far less. In the Switch version the limit is now one gift per day. No more tossing Chocolate at Ann all day long!

The friendship menu is also sortable. Just press the Plus button on the right Joycon to sort the villagers by a default order, by highest friendship, or by highest affection. With the love-based sort, the marriage candidates will appear at the top of the list because only they have love levels.

Until next time!



- Cher
(Huzzah, the snow stayed away! Should be snow-free for the rest of the year!)

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