It’s fitting that as Summer continues to blaze its way towards Autumn, we’re being treated to another entry in the Story of Seasons franchise. While the influence of early Harvest Moon and Story of Seasons games have been felt through the cosy gaming genre for decades, the farming and relationship-focused series has continued to plough its own furrow. This time, it’s a remaster of the classic DS outing, Harvest Moon: Grand Bazaar, sprucing it up for the modern day, while bringing it to Nintendo’s brand-new Switch 2 platform, with a flurry of exclusive improvements in tow.
While the series is best known for its farming action, and a plot of farmland remains the foundation of your experience here, this is actually a game about business. Zephyr Town’s success and its populace’s well-being revolve around the Grand Bazaar, and your time, effort and focus have shifted to selling your produce and goods at the titular market.
Here, the Bazaar takes place at the end of every week, and you build your produce and wares accordingly, ready to sell them for the most profit. You’re handed a stall and a bell, and you have to attract people’s attention before making sure they’re served as quickly as possible. It’s not exactly frantic, at least not in this early portion of the game, but it’s a fun and welcome change of pace from the daily tasks you’re normally embroiled in. As you grow and expand your offering, so too does the market around you come back to life, bringing more visitors to the area, and increasing your standing with the local community.
Ready to begin your new life in Zephyr Town, there’s a very limited character creator here, that only really lifts itself into modernity by getting you to choose your birthday and offering you different pronouns. Still, you can unlock new outfits as you progress, and alter your appearance as you see fit, so there’s still fun to be had making the character your own.
You’ll likely want to make them as charming as possible, because relationships are an integral part of Grand Bazaar. Speaking to characters daily – or greeting them with a quick hello – will improve your standing with them, and you can build up a friendship, and even propose marriage, with your digital soulmate.
Special moments will appear on the map from time to time – with a helpful icon to show that they’re available – and these deepen your understanding of that character, learning about their love of cooking or grabbing a good cup of coffee from the cafe. Here in the preview a lot of time was spent talking to Sophie and Freya, both of whom seemed drawn to my hardworking farmer. We’ll see where it goes!
To be honest though, the highlight of the character roster has to be the mayor, Felix. He is uproariously upbeat and driven, wanting you and your farm to bring trade and prosperity back to Zephyr Town. I had to talk with him every day, just to see if I could make him say something brilliant in his booming voice, and he’s already an icon in my eyes. Interactions are definitely lifted by extensive voice acting, whether in whole during cutscenes or in part alongside written dialogue, and the entire town feels alive and real to you as you explore and chat with the locals.
As a remake of a DS game, Grand Bazaar’s art design and visual quality have seen a stratospheric jump. Now fully 3D, Grand Bazaar looks every bit the 2025 cozy farming sim, with an art style that lends it a Pokemon-esque feel, albeit one with a stable framerate. It goes to show just how good a game can look with a clean and charming aesthetic, and it serves to show up how rough the Switch version of the recent Tales of the Shire looks in comparison.
The Switch 2 edition uses all that extra processing power to pump everything out at a higher resolution, and there’s a sharpness and vibrancy to the visuals that definitely add an extra level of class. Besides that, there’s enhanced frame rates – seemingly taking them up to 60fps – but otherwise this is, to all intents and purposes, the same game you’re getting on the original Switch.
Where the new hardware adds something extra, is in the addition of mouse controls. However, I have to say that I’m pretty disappointed in how they’ve been implemented. I was hoping for a time-saving point and click option for your farming, much like we saw in Rune Factory: Guardians of Azuma, but instead this is a tool for menu management more than anything else. I really hope that someone rethinks this, because it would massively improve players’ quality of life. All it has to do is make farming easier – hopefully that’s not too much to ask.
Grand Bazaar’s positioning as a remake, rather than an all-new entry in the series, is an interesting choice. In terms of quality, the original game sits somewhere in the middle of the series; the fundamentals of farming and trading form a solid foundation, while some of the design choices – such as the way that crafting was handled utilising the windmills – proved to be needlessly finicky. Through our hands on though, it feels like smart updates have been made to make the game more appealing, and I found myself easily drawn into the easy-going action.
Story of Season: Grand Bazaar is clearly familiar, embracing the tick of farming alongside the tock of building relationships, but the addition of the weekly Grand Bazaar gives you something more concrete to work towards. Everything is very focused, Zephyr Town, your farm and the Bazaar only taking a few minutes to walk around, but within that there’s a life to build which feels full of possibilities.