Return to PopoloCrois: More Farming Now

My early impressions of Return to PopoloCrois: A STORY OF SEASONS Fairytale were great, although I mentioned that in the first number of hours there was a heavy reliance on RPG elements and minimal farming time. Things have begun to balance out as I cross the 10 hour mark. However, fair warning: this is still an RPG game with farming elements, not the other way around.

The reality is, you can spend more time farming than questing if you so desire. However, the farming here is not as deep as Story of Seasons was. This is in no ways a knock on the game. The truth here is that Marvelous and XSeed were building a hybrid game, in the vein of the Rune Factory franchise. However, if you WANT to spend the majority of your time farming, then by all means, spend time farming. There are many economic benefits from doing so.

For myself, any full scale review of this title will have to base itself on managing expectations. This isn’t a fulls scale RPG, and it’s not a full scale farming simulation game. It really does take the best of both genres and melds them together in a near perfect way. But don’t expect both to be full scale, comparable to, say, Fire Emblem and Harvest Moon / Story of Seasons. You will get both, just not 100% of both.

This has caused a lot of confusion, and via social media I have recieved a number of questions regarding this: what is this: an RPG or a farming game? Well it’s both, and neither, all at the same time. It’s a grow genre, one could argue, that has been dominated until now by the Rune Factory series. But just as Story of Seasons is a response to Harvest Moon, Return to PopoloCrois: A STORY OF SEASONS Fairytale is a response to Rune Factory.

I noted during my Story of Seasons reviews and articles that I thought this was the superior farming simulation game on the market. I will also argue that Return to PopoloCrois: A STORY OF SEASONS Fairytale is the superior melding of two, great genres.