My perfect Harvest Moon/ Story of Season Game

Hello today I'll be discussing my perfect harvest Moon or Story of Seasons game. Even though I'm not the biggest fan of the more recent titles I was a big fan of A Wonderful Life, Tale of Two Towns, and Animal Parade as a kid*. As I'm trying to get back into farming games I wanted to picture what my perfect game would be.

1) The world changes with time

In most games it feels like the world is stagnant whilst the main character grows. For me the NPC's not having a 'life', not seeing your child grow to adulthood, and seeing the seasons change suddenly can be sad. Even if the seasons change automatically, I feel like having your kids grow up and the NPC's having a 'life' would make the games feel like an actual simulation. In addition to this, having rival marriages and kids adds something else to the farming.

2) Two+ distinct places with specialities/ aesthetics

AP and ToTT do this so perfectly, in my opinion. ToTT has one village for crops and the other for animal raising, Whereas in AP there's a section for general shops, a place for crops and animal buying, and a little mine/furniture area. For me, this adds so much to the game and what you could do aesthetically. An example is ToTT with the animal town being European inspired and the crop town being Asian inspired and the aesthetics work.

3) LGBTQ+ representation baby!!

Because I'm queer I would like to see more gay/bi/ace characters and other letters of the rainbow. From personal experience, having that representation would have allowed me to understand my own queerness earlier. In addition to this there's more options for marriage, NPC's, house/bedroom designs, and quests. This doesn't have to be in your face but the representation being there is a massive step forward.

4) Mixture of AWL and ToTT farm upgrades

ToTT has proper upgrades to your farms like beehives but it has to be once a month for some reason and have the material's. AWL has the opposite where it adds to the inside of the farm but whenever you have the money to upgrade. Being able to have it in the middle would be able to upgrade at will but have the materials and money. To me this makes the game have a little added fun as I like seeing how every upgrade interacts and being able to get them quicker is more fun for me.

5) Combo of graphics dependent on 3D/2D

The graphic combo would be AWL/AP for 3D and ToTT and SV for 2D. This would allow the different designs in all of them to shine because they're all so good. Preferably AWL graphics as more iconic to me as it was a big part of childhood but I wouldn't mind any of them.

Thank you for reading and I hope to hear about your opinions on your perfect farming game!

*AP = Animal Parade, ToTT = Tale of Two Towns, AWL = A Wonderful Life, SV= Stardew Valley