Doraemon, Noby, Sneech, Sue, and Big G are back with a new farming adventure! That’s right, Doraemon Story of Seasons (check out our review here), the game that no one expected in the first place, has actually gotten a sequel! Developer Marvelous definitely knows their audience because the combination of vintage anime/manga and farming sim was quite fun the first time around and a sequel is definitely a welcome surprise from publisher Bandai Namco!
This time, things aren’t going so good for Noby. He’s having trouble at home and arguing with his parents, the perennial struggle of children worldwide. It turns out the entire gang are having similar problems so they all get together to get away from their parents. Unlike other kids however, they’ve got Doraemon around and he takes them on an interstellar journey to get away and decompress! Unfortunately, things go awry and they crash land on an alien planet that looks remarkably like a rural farming village at the foot of a mountain!
This unlikely turn of events is the beginning of Doraemon Story of Seasons: Friends of the Great Kingdom, one of the longest titles around and an interesting blend of anime sensibilities and vintage Story of Seasons gameplay. Unfortunately for Noby and the gang, things aren’t going their way and the Queen of the kingdom takes away their spaceship, leaving them stranded with no way to get home. The one way to win her trust and get back home? You guessed it…farming!
For the most part, this is a massive farming simulator that allows a wide degree of latitude in your approach to gameplay. There’s an interesting vibe to the Seasons franchise and Friends of the Great Kingdom is no different. You can farm, get to know townsfolk, clear land, go fishing, mine for resources, and solve people’s problems for them. As you perform all of the available tasks, time is rapidly ticking by at a proportionate speed so you’ll have to sleep to regain stamina, eat, and water and fertilize your crops over and over. Eventually, you’ll get your friends to help you out as the farm becomes the backbone of the town, but in the beginning especially, you’re in for some hard work!
Friends of the Great Kingdom isn’t a short game either. Unless you’re exhausting yourself, running around and doing everything efficiently, and then going right to sleep, you’ll end up spending a good half hour or so per day of game time playing. That means that the weeks and months it takes to cultivate crops and upgrade your equipment are going to take a while. During that time there are tons of things to do however and you’ll never run out of people to help and requests to fulfill as you’re slowly upgrading the farm infrastructure. Eventually, you’ll have your farm running like a finely tuned machine and you’ll earn the respect of everyone up to and including the queen so you can go home.
The gameplay loop of Friends of the Great Kingdom will be noticeably familiar to anyone who’s played Doraemon Story of Seasons. Hoe your patch of land, plant seeds, water them, fertilize them, harvest the crops, ship them out. In between you’ll head to town to make friends with the people there, fulfill requests on the bulletin board system, and buy the supplies you need. You can also wander around the different areas of the game (almost nothing is inaccessible) and even go mining in the cave in the mountains. There’s really no significant change in structure or even art style from the first Doraemon Story of Seasons and it seems like Marvelous took an ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ approach to the sequel.
That’s a bit of a double-edged sword however because if there’s one thing that pulls down farming games, it’s the similarity to previous offerings. A complete lack of changes means that a game can get somewhat stale and that’s definitely not something you’ll want to happen here! Fortunately, as mentioned earlier, in Friends of the Great Kingdom, you can eventually ask your friends to help out with all the tedious chores like watering and mining. This is a welcome change from the first game as the tedium of menial tasks can easily catch up in any farming sim. Friends of the Great Town also has a two player mode where a second person can jump in and help out, but that’s not really the primary intent of the game. It’s hard to imagine a circumstance where you’re going to want to farm with a friend or manage to con them into helping you water plants and such, but if you’re a digital Tom Sawyer, maybe that’s your thing!
Either way as your farming, mining, and other implements improve, you’ll have more time to work on your relationships and fulfill requests that the villagers make, turning a quiet town into a lively, almost familial experience. But all of that takes time. Hours and hours of time and if you’re not into a relaxing, chill experience with slow relationship-building, Friends of the Great Kingdom drags a bit. If there’s a place where some work could have been done here, it’s definitely the pacing. Maybe it could have been as simple as a handy dandy Doraemon-style gardening implement or two which allows you to water rapidly or something. If Doraemon can give you a camera to change clothes with after his gadgets were taken away, that shouldn’t have been a stretch. But if you’re already tired, Friends of the Great Kingdom is like a relaxing sedative, so don’t get too comfortable!
Naturally, the game is absolutely gorgeous as we’ve come to expect from Marvelous. The cut scenes are pure classic anime style with head shots and reactions and the cinemas are beautiful. The landscapes legitimately look almost painted as well and the locations and viewpoints are incredibly well-done. There is no slowdown in the game, everything is crisp, clear, and easy to make out, and the overall design is noticeably similar to the first game. Without a closer analysis between the two, it’s hard to say whether some visuals are lifted directly but it wouldn’t be a surprise if they were. Regardless, Friends of the Kingdom is a treat for the eyes, right down to the menu design.
Audio for the game is equally enjoyable with a number of excellent tracks and some great sound effects as well. While there’s no spoken dialogue (that would have been amazing), there are a number of pleasant, uplifting tracks that blend seamlessly into each other and the bits of Japanese dialogue interspersed with the gameplay and baked into the in-game story elements make the experience more lively overall. This is a quintessentially Japanese experience after all and having an English dub would not only be weird but unnecessary as the full dialogue isn’t spoken to begin with.
There are a handful of definite faults in Friends of the Great Kingdom however. Chief among these is navigation. You’re given a map that shows you where every villager and friend is at a given time and red dots to show things that you can do. Utilizing that map is ridiculously difficult however because for some reason, the way the land on the map is shown doesn’t correspond to the actual pathways you need to take to get to individual areas. In other words, you might want to travel east from Sunfall Way to Mingle Creek and then north to the mine entrance but the actual way to get there is to go east by northeast up Mingle Creek and across Hissfizzle Pass which makes no sense at all when looking at the map. It’s incredibly frustrating to get from place to place and you’ll end up having to memorize the pathways you use most. On top of that, the actual travelling part of the game is incredibly slow and there’s nothing to really do along the way. Sure, you can stop to catch bugs, fish, or pick plants, but these all slow you down immensely. Spending half your time simply walking from place to place isn’t fun and there’s no run button to expedite things. Noby is a pretty slow guy and that’s not the best when you’d rather be doing something than walking down the same path for the fiftieth or hundredth time. Naturally, this contributes to the pacing issues as well, making Friends of the Great Kingdom drag on a bit here and there.
At the end of the day however, Doraemon Story of Seasons: Friends of the Great Kingdom is a solid game. It doesn’t reinvent the wheel and only slightly tweaks the formula from the last game in the series, but it is fun to play and as comprehensive as you want to make it. For a chill farming game with some fun light-hearted story elements thrown in, this is a great experience that’s only slightly marred by a few gameplay design choices. You’re still getting one of the best farming sims out there with a wide mix of activities, better writing than most other games of similar style, and absolutely outstanding visuals. At $50 for the core game and $60 for the special edition (DLC plot, furniture, clothing and seed packs which are definitely useful and fun, especially the added mini-stories), it’s not the cheapest game out there, but the quality and polish here is undeniable. This is a premium title and if you’re a farming fan or a Doraemon fan (or both like some of us), it’s definitely worth the price of admission. If this is a new genre for you or you are unfamiliar with Doraemon, don’t worry either, just sit back, relax, and start digging! You won’t regret it!
This review is based on a digital copy of Doraemon Story of Seasons: Friends of the Great Kingdom Special Edition provided by the publisher. It was played on a Nintendo Switch in both docked and undocked modes and was equally awesome on both. Doraemon Story of Seasons: Friends of the Great Kingdom is also available on PC and PS5.