Return to PoPoLoCrois: A Story of Seasons Fairytale

Besides a few odd choices that don't affect the overall quality, Return to PopoloCrois is a nice, simple, and short RPG.

Its world, plot and characters are vivid and a pleasure to discover with a background of lovely visuals and a very fairy tale-like environment. Not all is a success though, and several aspects had to be sacrificed, which means those expecting a more hardcore and orthodox RPG will be disappointed.

A standard fantasy quest that runs parallel to a just deep enough farming simulator. It takes it’s sweet time to get going, but both elements work in unison to make a reasonable game.

It plays like a nice home cooked meal and is fun even though clearly simplified as both an RPG and a farming simulator.

It has its shortcomings, but Return To PoPoLoCrois is worth checking out for anyone craving an old-school RPG adventure.

If you're willing to dig in, and I mean truly dig in, the two styles of play benefit Return to PoPoLoCrois: A Story of Seasons Fairytale. The core story is roughly 30 hours or so, but you can mess around with all of the side content and the farming aspect for far beyond that, which is a perfect excuse to spend weeks on end with a portable.

Innovative in some ways and a charming combination of farming simulation and JRPG. Not the classic adventure game that you may expect.

PopoloCrois follows in the footsteps of other hybrid genre JRPGs like the Atelier series, and instead of alchemy mixes in a heavy dose of a farming instead. While the farming aspect of this hybrid title is compelling enough, the dull combat and a snail’s pace holds it back from greatness.

It’s surprising that ambition isn’t Return to Popolocrois' biggest problem. Epics has a great cast of characters and an interesting premise that strain to hold everything together. But the game’s repetitive, tedious combat and lackluster farming present an awful lot of weeds to pull, and this Story of Seasons offshoot just isn’t up to the task.

The two halves of Return to Popolocrois aren't equal. By the twenty-hour mark, I was enraptured with being a bigwig farmer, but the JRPG side had lost its appeal. I was essentially grinding out the dungeons not to advance the narrative, but to find items that could be utilised or exploited on the farm. I have to wonder what the experience would have been like had the developer done away with the JRPG side altogether.

It sounds like I am being hard on Return to PopoloCrois, but that is because I am a little disappointed with Return to PopoloCrois and how it doesn’t blend the two things I enjoy (RPGs and Harvest Moon) in a way that sets a good example for both properties involved.

There are better farming simulations and JRPGs on the Nintendo 3DS. I generally enjoyed my time exploring, harvesting and killing things, but I could not escape the feeling that I had done this all before, and that there were better individual examples of each genre out there for the system.

Simplicity is great, but if there had been more variety and a challenge, I do think Return to PopoloCrois could have been a real winner.