Harvest Moon: Grand Bazaar on the 3DS wasn't one of my favorites. I love the franchise, but Grand Bazaar felt like a weaker entry. Zephyr Town was a nice little place, but the game always felt oddly small and subdued. That is why I've been pleasantly surprised by Story of Seasons: Grand Bazaar thus far. What I've been able to play feels like a brand-new game. Sure, it has the same characters and the same basic mechanics, but things have been polished and improved enough that I really enjoyed the time I was spending in the game.

At its heart, Story of Seasons: Grand Bazaar is a very comfortably familiar Story of Seasons title. You play as a new farmer who's coming to a new town, and you have to take a small, run-down farm and build it up to be a success while becoming friends (and more than friends) with some of the townsfolk. If you've ever played a Story of Seasons title, the basic gameplay mechanics are going to feel very familiar. If you want to, Grand Bazaar lets you hop right into the action, gives you a brief tutorial for the bazaar mechanic, and then allows you to hop into farming without further instructions. It's a nice feature that makes the earlier bits of the game feel less handholdy, but the first week still introduces mechanics slowly.

The big difference between Grand Bazaar and most of the other games in the series is the titular Grand Bazaar. You don't just put your items in a shipping container and get money at the end of the day. Instead, every week, there's a Grand Bazaar where you have to hawk your items to various people passing by. You can display multiple items at once and have to balance drawing people to your stall while being quick on the draw to sell to customers before they get annoyed and leave. Likewise, you need to make sure you're bringing items people want. There are different trends every season, and plotting your farming to maximize what is popular and trendy means you'll make more money at the bazaar. As the game progresses, you'll unlock more slots and more features. You're even able to take a break mid-bazaar to peruse the other stalls, which is where a lot of the game's major features are, such as upgrades.

One of the coolest things about Grand Bazaar is your mobility. Most games in the franchise tend to leave you puttering along on the ground, but Grand Bazaar gives you a potent jump from the outset and lets you upgrade to double-jumps and gliders. This means that when traveling, you can take shortcuts and clamber over rooftops. It makes it notably more engaging to move from point A to point B. There are even spring-loaded barrels dotted around town that can launch you high into the air, so you have more chances to figure out shortcuts and ways to travel more efficiently.

This mobility also applies to your farming. From the start, you can amplify the power of various tools by jumping first, which causes them to cover more than one square at once. It's similar to how upgraded tools work in older games. By purchasing upgraded techniques from the bazaar, you can amplify this and cover more space. You can even harvest multiple crops at once, which is bizarrely satisfying. Doing a Mario-style Ground Pound and watching all your hard-grown turnips teleport into your bag just feels good.

I mentioned gliding before, and that's because wind plays a major factor in Grand Bazaar. As the game progresses, you'll be able to fix Zephyr Town's windmills. Once fixed, these windmills can be used to process items, such as turning weeds into fertilizer or eggs into mayonnaise. The speed at which this happens depends on a number of factors, including how windy it is on a specific day. On windy days, the extra power of the windmill means things craft faster, so it's often worth waiting for one if you have a huge amount of processing to do. Thankfully, the annoying mechanic from the 3DS version is gone, so you no longer have to blow on your microphone to speed up the windmills.

The Switch 2 version of Grand Bazaar also runs as smooth as butter, which is absolutely welcome compared to how some other Story of Seasons games ran on the system. The graphics are simplistic but bright, colorful, and charming, and they do a fantastic job of capturing the handheld style of the Story of Seasons games. There's full voice acting for all of the main characters; it's a very nice boon and gives some of the blander characters more personality. As far as upgrades go, Grand Bazaar shines without losing the franchise's charm.

Overall, Story of Seasons: Grand Bazaar is shaping up to be a remake that's been done right. While we only played about the first month of the game, everything we experienced felt fantastic. The gameplay has been smoothed out and made more fun, the bazaar mechanic really lends itself well to changing the tried-and-true mechanics of Story of Seasons, and the upgraded graphics are cute as a button. I'm really looking forward to getting my hands on the full version when it comes out for both Switches and the PC on Aug. 27, 2025.