I hardly ever write a long detailed impression post like this, but I'm almost 30 hours in and I just can't stand it anymore...
Despite being the brainchild of Harvest Moon creator Yasuhiro Wada, Hometown Story is much more the amateur product of developer Tox Box. This was apparently their first solo game effort and it shows.
The camera is awful, swinging about at wild angles but never giving you a good look at your surroundings, and there is no way to control or change it, so prepare to get really lost in your first several outings outside your shop. The fact that some maps seem designed to be maze like or take extra time to traverse does not help.
Not that there's much of a reason to do so, because there's very little interaction to be had with the NPCs. There are random sub-events you can trgger, either by entering the map they are in or having them enter your store, but in order to complete these events, you must buy key items from the vendor who sells stuff to you daily. Oh, and his selection is utterly random. And the game doesn't keep track of which subevents you've triggered, so you might need to take notes.
I haven't found anything likable about the gathering / selling aspect, as I've only found two spots in town to gather items to sell from, and only one of them is remotely reliable. The majority of goods you sell you'll be buying from a vendor who comes to your shop once a day. You can also buy items to sell from the stores it town, but there seems to be no rhyme nor reason as to when they are open or closed, so you're better off not doing so at all.
There seems to be no way to decorate your own room, and the only options for decorating the store are a clunky method of laying shelves down, and one piece of wallpaper my vendor had in stock about two weeks in. And the days are slow going, as you cannot leave your house until you open your store, and it remains open no matter what you do until midnight that evening, around which time everyone else has gone to bed.
Of course, leaving your shop open unattended for hours at a time is actually a legitamate strategy, as you get bonuses to the money you receive based on how many customers you ring up at a time, and most customers will patiently wait in line for hours.
I'll add here that you can only put one item on table, even if you have 20 of the same kind, and you have to set each price individually, per item, so it's a huge time sink to sell anything for more than the default price.
Also, the game seems to have some bugs, as twice in a row I have received 0 gold for serving multiple customers. It's not even that the x2 bonus didn't show up, it just showed my total sales as 0 and added no gold to my purse.
Lastly, I think the avatar customization is pretty poor, if only for the fact that they give you a limited number of clothes, hair, but especially hair colors to choose from, and you can only get more by buying Fashion Magazines randomly stocked by the vendor. And each magazine you get adds only one color / style.
...It's not that the game is completely devoid of fun. It's fairly playable, even with it's bugs and poor controls. It's just not particularly engaging. Almost like Toy Box took a look at Harvest Moon: A New Beginning and, without understanding it, tried to emulate it.
I'm assuming any bugs will be fixed for the Japanese release in December, and maybe they will even add features, but that doesn't do this release good...
