i truly loathe this game. it introduces a lot of characters and concepts i want to love, but the direction of the game feels so wrong? it retcons a lot of cool things introduced in aa4, and completely wipes the character development of a lot of key returning characters. they completely massacred apollo!!! many of the cases are boring and it was a brave decision to focus the emotional weight of the story on your new character that you gave zero development & meaningful screen time to. i bought the dlc cases for this game before i played anything and i couldn't even bring myself to play those.

not my style savvy game of choice but i did enjoy this!! the contests were more difficult than the original game (which i appreciated), and i liked all the new main cast. may have cried when certain guest characters popped up lol. there's a lot of extraneous content in this game though like furniture and fortunes that i couldn't be bothered with. and it felt so anticlimactic to win all the international contests, like we should celebrate that but it just goes to the next day!! also lots of repetitive dialogue...

my favorite of the bokumono 3ds games.
feel like it both improves and moves back from story of seasons in various ways. there were a lot of gameplay improvements, and i appreciated the reinclusion of tasks (similar to ANB) so gameplay didn't feel aimless (like SOS). also enjoyed the addition of friendship events, it adds more character to both marriage candidates & townspeople.
the character portraits are so fugly tho? esp bc the official art looks amazing and was what the portraits looked like in both ANB and SOS. and i really missed the feel of a cohesive town environment we got in the previous games. people between towns interact, but they feel so fundamentally separate that it became annoying trying to balance them all. grindy in parts, but a lot less grindy compared to the previous two entries (and the main story was a lot easier to complete compared to ANB). married hinata who stole my heart frfr