Can Harvest Moon and Story of Seasons Coexist in the Same Launch Window?

Once both Harvest Moon: One World and Story of Seasons: Pioneers of Olive Town launch in March 2021, the next few months are going to be very interesting for both franchises. In my opinion, as someone who has invested dozens upon dozens of hours into these types of games, it’s pretty difficult to have multiple different games on the go, and when you do, one will always take precedents. So the real question becomes – can Harvest Moon and Story of Seasons coexist in the same launch window?

I previously wrote posing the question of whether or not Harvest Moon as a franchise could survive another game launch bust. Many of you have commented on that article to let me know that yes, it is possible for the game to bust and the franchise to continue. Natsume has seemingly deep pockets and a desire to continue rolling out the franchise, so giving it more thought, I do doubt anything will be going away.

In the pandemic world, I actually feel a bit bad for Harvest Moon. The majority of folks with money to spend in March on a single game are going to default to Story of Seasons because of the better track record of that franchise, and because that’s the franchise who retained the original development team of the ‘good’ Harvest Moon titles. When asking around, I bet the pre-order (or desire to buy) ratio for Harvest Moon and Story of Seasons favours the latter by a margin of 5 or 6 to 1.

The biggest advantage Harvest Moon has in this launch window is releasing to the public first, a solid 3 weeks before Story of Seasons. That is three weeks to score a few solid review scores, perhaps sway the masses, and find a few people to lure away from a Story of Seasons purchase into a Harvest Moon purchase instead.

This will be one of the more interesting launches in a long time for both franchises, and the stories will write themselves because of their close release proximity to each other. We at GamesReviews will be looking at both, so no worries there. What will you be picking up, if you could only buy one?