With dreams of becoming a farmer like your grandfather, your character set's off to Olive Town. Building back up the farm from scratch, you seek to make your name as a farmer. In the case of Pioneers of Olive Town, there isn't much more to the start of the plot than that. You don't have an actual goal to reach in this game either, outside of helping the mayor make the town into a tourist attraction for reasons I'm not entirely sure of.
This is a bit of a sticking point for me because previous games gave you some pretty good motivation to want to build up your farm. Here I just can't bring myself to care about turning my new home into a tourist attraction. You don't even get new residents in town as you progress and I ended up finishing the 'main story' without even realizing it. Even character interactions as you build up relationships just kind of coast by with little impact. As with other games of its kind, you can get married. I went with Lihn, but her entire story arc feels almost pointless. She is afraid her friend from her old home is upset she's got a boyfriend now, turns out she was just late sending a letter and now all is well. That and you walk with her to the forest a few times. And now I'm married.
I wish I could talk more about the story and characters here, but the game just doesn't give me much to work with. Even the design of the town and the farm is pretty generic looking. It's not that any of it is bad, but in a few months, I'm going to struggle to remember what anything in this game looks like. I don't like to compare games to their predecessors unless there is a really good reason, and in the case of this game, it just falls so short of Trio of Towns in all the regards I've already mentioned.
The actual farming portion of the game is pretty standard for the series and handled pretty well. Go through all the steps of planting and growing crops, use your brain to figure out how to effectively use your space for regular crops, orchards, and your animal houses. Figure out how to divide your time between mining, farming, fishing, and socializing. These aspects of the game are as well done as ever and each activity can be fun (Except socializing, none of the characters I found all that interesting).
Mining is a game of time and Stamina. The best stuff is always lower in the mine, so you want to avoid moles (Or whack them to get items), pick and chose what material you're going to stop and mine, and trying to hurry down since the in-game clock is always ticking. Fishing is a simple little mini-game about patience and timing. These aspects of the game all keep you focused, but in a very relaxing way. The game still succeeds at what it has always done best, act as a calm and relaxing experience.
But then you get the makers, which seem to drag your progress to a crawl. Ore is put into makers to make ingots and take so much time to process. Each maker can handle one item at a time. Same with lumber, claw, condiments, and seasoning. The worst is threads. You need grass to put into the thread maker then you take the thread and put that into a cloth maker. It just starts to feel like so many extra minute steps you have to take the game feels like it moves forward at a crawl once you start that process. I know it's been a while since the last game, but I don't remember the Makers being this large of an aspect of it. It's possible I enjoyed the towns and story so much I didn't take much notice of it, but in the case of Pioneers of Olive Town it's such an uninteresting town that these things are all the more apparent.
Really if you're just looking for a new Story of Seasons/Harvest Moon type of experience, the game delivers well enough. It's far from the best work they've done, but at the same time, it's not easy to find a game that has the same kind of relaxing atmosphere and pace of a Story of Seasons. If you need a new one to play, go for it. If you've not played one before it'll do well enough, but I'd suggest grabbing the more interesting Trio of Towns if you're looking to get into these kinds of games for the first time.