Story of Seasons: A Wonderful Life gives Stardew Valley fans an education in classic farming RPGs

Story of Seasons: A Wonderful Life
(Image credit: XSEED)

Story of Seasons: A Wonderful Life is a remake of the GameCube's most beloved Harvest Moon game, due out in summer 2023.

This is a new version of Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life, originally released for GameCube in 2003. 20 years later, it's getting a remake - though a big, complicated kerfuffle over the series' naming rights outside of Japan means it's now being released under the Story of Seasons name.

The trailer shows that the classic gameplay is largely intact, though the game's gotten a facelift with more colorful visuals on the Switch. The original game featured connectivity with Friends of Mineral Town on GBA, so some features will have to be different for this version.

A Wonderful Life takes place over the course of decades, which each segment of the game showing a handful of years in each stage of your character's life. While most games in this series' lineage feature marriage and children, A Wonderful Life allows you to see your children mature over the course of the game.

The game also features more complex farming mechanics than many games in the series, allowing you to breed hybrid crops and forcing you to keep your cattle breeding in order for your cows to keep producing milk.

While the original A Wonderful Life only allowed you to play as a male character, this trailer also shows a female playable character, suggesting that features introduced in Another Wonderful Life will also be a part of this remake. A press release also confirms that you'll be able to play as a non-binary character, and all romance options will still be available regardless of who you're playing.

Check out all the announcements from the Nintendo Direct for September 2022, including the long-awaited release date and title reveal for The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom and the official debut of Fire Emblem Engage.

Dustin Bailey
Staff Writer

Dustin Bailey joined the GamesRadar team as a Staff Writer in May 2022, and is currently based in Missouri. He's been covering games (with occasional dalliances in the worlds of anime and pro wrestling) since 2015, first as a freelancer, then as a news writer at PCGamesN for nearly five years. His love for games was sparked somewhere between Metal Gear Solid 2 and Knights of the Old Republic, and these days you can usually find him splitting his entertainment time between retro gaming, the latest big action-adventure title, or a long haul in American Truck Simulator.