Hometown Story

Hometown Story is a spiritual successor to the Harvest Moon series, being developed by a studio founded by Harvest Moon creator, Yasuhiro Wada. The game is about a player coming to the countryside where he takes over his grandmother's shop.

Gameplay
The main game is running the shop to grow the shop and the nearby town. Most hours of the game's day, the player is operating the shop, arranging goods and stocking shelves. It isn't very complex as there is only a few goods at a time.

The game shares similarities with Harvest Moon in the life sim portion. The nearby town starts with ten people but with a large enough shop, the town can grow to 100 different NPCs. Also, like Harvest Moon, you can woo one of the original villagers of the opposite gender.

Reception
The game was received poorly. The game received a 49 from Metacritic and a 47.14% from GameRankings. Famitsu gave this game a 30 (7,8,8,7) out of 40. Critics criticized the lack of visible cues indicating progress. In sales, it did rather poorly as well selling only 5,513 units in its first week in Japan.